Pat is one of those ultra-neat people. When we were in Reading her room was always unimagineably tidy, & in the office her locker is always spick & span, books nicely arranged, not a thing out of place. She is always careful & meticulous in her work, and I have never seen her lose her temper.

She was posted to our climatology section recently, where our archives are kept & which is in charge of met. equipment. Part of her work involves providing weather data required for insurance claims, and also for court cases. Once, she SMSed me and said she was at court. She had been waiting there for 6 hours for her turn - it was a murder case, and she was needed as witness to confirm whether rain could have washed out the evidence. She was whiling her time away by listening to the CID officers tell police stories. When her turn finally came, it only lasted 6 minutes.

On another occasion, a client requested that a weather station be set up on Jurong Island, so she had to drive all around the Island to find a suitable place to locate it. I thought it interesting because not everyone can enter the Island, you need a pass to gain entry.

Singapore is hosting the IMF-World Bank meeting in a few weeks' time & the organisers have requested we set up a weather station in case there's a terrorist toxic gas attack (in which case they'd want to know the wind direction and speed to determine how the gas is being dispersed). So that's going to be Pat's next project. (When I told D this he commented that such a weather station would be useless because the technician manning it would probably have been knocked out by the gas anyway).

Some of our forecasters give courses on Aviation Meteorology at the Singapore Aviation Academy, and I SMSed Pat last week to ask for a softcopy of her lecture notes in case I have to do it in the future. I didn't want to bug her too much so I said D could come over to her office & get the files from her. She SMSed back, "The files are huge." Then she said she would burn them onto a CD for me & leave it in either D's or my locker.

That's her, considerate. D brought the CD back on Saturday. I didn't have time to look at it at once because we were rushing off for mass.

(On an unrelated note, on the way to church we passed the Japanese School and to my delight I saw a lot of cute little Japanese children hurrying along the pavement in their colourful kimonos. D said oh yes, the School was celebrating some festival that day, they'd asked us for a forecast and to monitor the weather for them. I really regretted not bringing my camera!).

When I got home later, I had a look at the CD.

She'd even made a label with an aeroplane & some text & stuck it on.

Man. So typical of her.