Touring started today. I hoped that it would start better than yesterday did when I woke my roommate, Macleay, at 6:30 am because I thought we were rostered to work in the morning shift. He grunted at me and told me to read the announcements in the team WhatsApp group and proceeded to go back to sleep. It turns out we weren’t rostered and we both slept until 10 am.

However, today I went the other way and had to be woken up so we could leave on time to make the official team photos, which were before the opening ceremony. After the ceremony we would begin touring. It is a shame that we don’t tour the public beneath the house, because I’ve spent a lot of time there and I’m pretty familiar with it. I’m part of the group of decathletes affectionately known as ‘The Cable Nerds’. As in, we work extensively with electrical cables. As a part of this, I’ve had to work under the house a lot to run electrical cables between the different sections of the house. I have bruises in some interesting places from the gravel under the Desert Rose.

I was hesitant beginning my first stint as a tour guide today. It has been a long time since I last performed this role, 115 days ago and 12,000 kilometres away at Innovation Campus. But when I began, it turns out I remembered and learned more about the house than I had expected. I even managed to tour some decathletes from the Dutch team, Virtue, and the Romanian team, EFdeN. I was eager to impress these students as they have much experience with the things that you are talking about. I like to think that that they left the Desert Rose impressed with the effort that the team has put in. I certainly was when I left their houses.

– Tyler Leggett, Building Services Team