22.-24.3.

Hi,

The first week here is ending and at this point we’ve been to work for four days. Me and Henna after all didn’t switch tasks but ended up doing the same ones, due to Ariana going off for holiday. So from Tuesday we’ve been working together with Laviana or Kim in the office.

On Tuesday me and Lavinia continued with submitting termination and engagement files on the computer, printing them and filing them in the employees files. She also taught me how to fill in contracts and where to find them. Henna continued with the work time calculations. When she finished, she came to work with me and Lavinia. I taught Henna the same things about contracts that Lavinia had showed me. Later Lavinia gave us the task to update the paper versions of past terminations and engagements. We started that on the afternoon and finished it off on Wednesday morning. What enriches this and all the other tasks including personnel management, is that alphabetical doesn’t mean actually alphabetical, it means somewhat alphabetical. Also, there are a lot of people by the same name, sometimes exactly by the same name and you can’t always figure out directly which is the surname and which is the forename.

On Wednesday, after the engagements and terminations, we worked with Kim because Lavinia was of the office. We performed all sorts of little tasks, mostly having something to do with personnel management. We fetched files, printed contracts and updated employee database based on the papers they had sent for the office.

Today (Thursday) we filed employee files to put away –files and past engagements and terminations files. We also continued what we did yesterday with the database, updating. In the morning we also got to go to upstairs to observe what the employee managers (if I remember their title right) David and Joseph do. David explained us how they schedule which guards they put in what places and when. He also showed us the computer programme which they use to do it. If I’m being completely honest, I didn’t catch half of what he explained. But on the other hand, I didn’t really have to because it was just a brief introduction to what they do. And David said we won’t operate those systems on this work placement.

Some things are done quite differently here. For example, the sights don’t have particular guards who would work there most of their shifts. They also use a six-week periods, when in Finland it’s mandatory to use three-week periods. The periodical hours are still the same, in Malta 240 hours per period, in Finland 120 hours per period.  The nature of the job still seems to be the same: Hurry hurry hurry!

The tasks we’ve been given are alright, not too heavy at least. We haven’t even got full hours from any day because they haven’t had enough things for us to do (because we don’t know how to do those things that need to be done yet). But I’m sure we’ll be taught how to do more things and we’ll get to see more of the range of things Signal 8 does, besides the paper stapling. Time goes quite quickly and I’m sure this will be over way too soon. This weekend it’s Easter and we have tomorrow off. We’re probaly going to go see Valletta. I'm trying to get some pictures here as well, but I've always been quite lazy with that sort of things. 

-Mirja