Who's Ross Brawn?

‎"No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth." - Robert Southey

It has been a month now I am on this foreign land. As much as I enjoy my stay here, to think that I am leaving so many persons behind me at this period, sometimes, at one particular instant, I just miss the beloved ones back in Malaysia.

Anyway, I guess it is about time to share a little bit about my work place. As I have mentioned previously or most of my friends know, I am interning at Mercedes GP. I only get to know that Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg are their drivers. Lol, I don't really catch up much with F1 anyway but since I am here, I have to know. Pretty shameful that I am not familiar with a famous figure named Ross Brawn and yet I usually see him passing by our office like any other ordinary human being. Hey, his office is just opposite of mine. He will be away if there is race during the weekend. To think that I never meet Tony Fernandes, a profound Malaysian businessman, the team principal of Team Lotus, at some points, I do feel a little overwhelmed. *wake myself up*

I am working under Reliability Engineering department. I would say it is mostly about quality control; to ensure the parts of racing cars are in good conditions and for this purpose, the parts need to pass through inspection before being used. I have been doing inspection on gears which is one of my routines every week. There are lots of steps but it is part of learning process. If the gears aren't in good conditions, if something happens to the car during the race, whoever is in-charge for inspection will be responsible, that includes me. Lol. Another routine will be laser etching. Parts of the cars should be labelled with part numbers so that we can trace where does the part originate. This is done by laser etching. We are taught to use the laser machine to perform this job. It is not comparable to the equipment that we have in our campus, our UG lab at least. We aren't supposed to take photos inside our work places, mostly. You know, this whole thing is a competition.

Well, somehow, this shot with our supervisor (middle) was taken. His name is David Probyn but we usually call him Dave. He is the head of my department.

Assigned with three projects to accomplish throughout my seven-month stay here, I don't really have other daily tasks to do. The fact that everyone seems to be always so busy with their work, especially my office which is the designer office, I can't really proceed much with my tasks without their help. I always see them glue their eyes on their desktop doing designing job using CATIA, the software that they used. Mine; other than Ms Words and Excel, Adobe Reader, what else can I do? I guess the coolest project that was given to me is to investigate the faulty seal of Nico's car which fails during Japanese GP. Perhaps it is no big deal for the company but this project gives me the exposure of using my chemical background to conduct the investigation. The only drawback is that I barely have the knowledge to use the equipment such as Scanning Electron Microscope, Differential Scanning Calorimeter.. bla bla. There is just so much to learn. Everything starts from zero! Most important thing is, here, you gotta take your own initiatives, you can't wait for others. If not, you will lose in the game. Working until 5.30pm or sometimes stay late, I am sort of worn out during the weekdays. When I reach home, I will really push the job away from my mind to have time for myself. Not to mention our every weekend getaway!

Talking about English people here, well, I am not sure if British did colonise us last time because the culture is really, really different from ours. Opening the door for others to go first, drivers letting the pedestrians to cross the road first, employees greeting you every morning although we are not of the same departments (or we never meet one another before), the consistent use of the word "please" etc. We just have so many to catch up here. Oh ya, the "eff" word is pretty common if you hear curses, once in a while. Haha.

It's getting colder as winter is approaching. Despite of the daylight saving time (DST), the sun sets at 4.30pm in this period. Meaning, it gets dark sooner than usual. They save the day time making the night time seems to be prolonged. Lol.

It's the month of November, remaining 2 months of year 2011. Hoping for special closure for this year. Looking forward for white christmas! :)

Have a lovely day!