Manila · since 2019
Arnel Gatdula
At sea you check the same gauges every watch, and you learn that the boring check is the one that matters. Nobody told me that was a qualification. Here it is.
- Role
- Quality reviewer
- Centre
- Manila
- Joined
- 2019
- Works on
- Agricultural and retail imagery, review
Arnel Gatdula spent eleven years as an engine oiler on bulk carriers, nine months on and three at home in San Mateo, Rizal. When a back injury ended his contracts in 2018 he was 38, with a daughter about to start nursing school and no idea what a man who knew diesel engines was supposed to do on land.
A parish livelihood program in San Mateo told him about the Manila centre’s third cohort. He nearly did not go. “I thought it was for young people who are good with computers. I was neither.” He passed the reading and attention test with the highest score in his intake.
He labelled crop and weed imagery for two years, then retail shelves, and became a quality reviewer in 2022. He reviews a sample of every batch his team delivers before it goes to the client, and is known on the eighth floor for the notebook in which he writes down every mistake he finds, so that he can explain it at the next calibration round without naming who made it.
His daughter qualified as a nurse in 2024. He brought his seafarer’s record book as his object, and the reading glasses he bought with his first Rungwell pay, “because the screen was closer than the gauges”.