Ariki Tamou

7.00 AM

After smashing the snooze button on my alarm, I peel myself out from beneath my dogs and get showered up and ready for the day. The beauty of living in Palmerston North is that you can get almost anywhere within 20 minutes.

8.00 AM

Powerco is accommodating me to finish the last papers of my NZ Diploma in Electrical Engineering, so my first stop is morning class at UCOL. Today we are building a single-phase squirrel cage induction motor.

10.15 AM

Class is over and I have arrived at work. After a round of “good mornings” to the team, I unpack my bag and setup my computer at my desk. But first things first - to the coffee machine!

10.30 AM

Back to my desk, coffee in hand, I check my emails and calendar, see if I have any messages on Teams and take a quick glance at our intranet home page – The Source – to see what’s happening around the organization.

11.00 AM

One of the local Project Managers is heading out to a job site today. I always try to make the most of these opportunities to check out our network, and the Project Managers are usually more than happen to take graduates along with them. We are heading out to Feilding Substation to check out some pole replacements and reconductoring in preparation for the substation upgrade.

12.15 PM

Back at the office just in time for lunch. Well, breakfast for lunch. I have cheap and boring Weetbix but we get free fruit at Powerco so I spice it up with a banana. Most of the team try to take their break around 12pm so it’s a great opportunity to have a chinwag with the colleagues.

12.45 PM

I am the investment owner for several local transformer and switchgear replacements, so I need to confirm some scopes of works and iron out some design details before requesting for funds to be released. I have learned a lot in this space as every investment has different challenges including asset ownership and locations, environmental, safety, and making sure there is adherence to standards and regulations.

3.00 PM

Quiz time! We started doing the online daily quiz last year and it has become a regular thing that most of the office looks forward to. A perfect score is 15. I think we average around 12 or so. It’s a good opportunity to relax, have a laugh, and maybe learn a few random facts.

3.20 PM

The afternoon is usually a good time to knuckle down into some more focused individual work. Today I am doing some site risk assessments for our Community Resilience initiatives. This involves going through a list of community assembly sites and assessing the level of risk exposure during an adverse environmental event. We use our geographical mapping systems in conjunction with models and other resources from councils and various agencies to assign priority rankings and try to come up with strategies to improve our network reliability to these sites.

4.45 PM

It’s a sunny day and I still have time to duck across to the field and practice some drone flying for half an hour.

5.30 PM

That’s me, finished work for the day. Once I get home, I quickly get changed and head straight to the gym before the motivation wears off. I meet up with a couple work mates there and we pump some tin for an hour or so.

7.30 PM

I get home from the gym and my dogs are super excited to see me, so I give them a feed, knock back a protein shake, have a shower and whip something up for dinner.

9.30 PM 

Time to sneak in an episode (or 2) of whatever series I am watching. I will probably stay up way later than I should before stumbling of to bed with my dogs following right behind me.

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