JOURNALS OF A FILIPINO SEAMAN

Yet another Tedious and boring drill, Seriously this is just a big <YAWN>  Finally it's about damn time, that I saw something wrong here on board this ship, as expected on my theory of "observing people for two months" to check for anything wrong really paid off. My "buffer period" yielded to discovering some people here actually think of me as "inferior" and "lacking intellectually" . It may not be much compared to what I had experienced in Cape Tallin or Stolt Strength, but only proves my theory (and rule) of the "two month buffer period" in checking out the environment for any threats. For now my observations include that people here have so far "benign" ego problems, - I'd continue my observations further to see any more threats. Anyway aside from proving that theory, on the bigger picture. I could assume that at least two thirds of the entire Filipino sailors have behavioural issues - as in serious anti-soci...

Upon opening up my email on the ship's computer , I finally read some news about what's happening back home at the house. It's a good thing that the email here works and as an extra feature it even receives pictures. A few days ago I was puzzled on why my emails were not sent and a message appearing "MB limit exceeded" , making me think earlier that this email service isn't free.   Anyway the email sent by my sister contains a mostly bad news, and a picture of her dogs. She informs me that Bhut Bhut (my Siamese cat) can be set loose outside the cage from time to time without supervision, and for some reason my cat doesn't go outside the fence and just roams around the house front yard. Personally I don't think it's a bright idea having my pet run around without any supervision, My neighbourhood isn't exactly the safe one and cat friendly, and on top of that there's a cat killer person here running loose. I had already learned from time and...

Got a memo this morning, specifically addressed to me at the crew mess. It says that I would have salary deduction of 300 U.S.D. for this month. Apparently based on the memo , it says that I had been overpaid by CSM last January 2014 during my time in CAPE Tallin and that I need to return the "Overpaid" salary back to them. Obviously I wasn?t happy to hear the news , not on the fact about being overpaid but by the fact that I wasn?t given any knowledge about this issue during my time in CAPE TALLIN and it took CSM / Career Ship management nearly half a year to inform me. I was still working in CAPE TALLIN in January up until my departure on that ship in March 2014 and nobody even bothered to inform me , and to add at I had a whole lot of time (and a bagful of money to pay it back) on that nearly 10 month stay on that ship. Really frustrating (not sure on the exact word here) that it took them a very long time in settling my accounts and I'm already working here on board C...

As expected there was a little difficulty in handling ropes and wires on the aft mooring area , to make it worse the weather was about 35 degrees Celsius in Greece. ? After mooring , I did my usual routine on work putting SOPEP equipment, fire fighting Equipment, Etc. and helped out in securing the gangway. On my work starts at 12 pm to 6pm (12midnight till 6 am in the morning) every time this ship is on port, didn't had any problems for me during my time as the gangway watchman. A.B. Marlon Layos showed me on how to use the UTI, not that I don?t have an exact idea on how to operate that device but I had to relearn and catch up on how to use some devices. ? In my coffee break during gangway watch, I saw a small memo from NSB posted in the crew mess telling that " No overtime beyond 103 hours will be paid without any explanation" . In other words NSB is getting stiff in paying its employee's about the overtime issue and it?s a big deal to them if an employee exceeds ...