A new year, a new hope, an OLD resolution

It's been three days since my last post and three days since my last major disaster on the job. Ever since then things have been going (*fingers crossed!!!*) relatively smoothly. There was a glitch or two along the way -- incorrectly configured cables made downloading the data from our tool a challenge -- our surveys were being incorrectly calculated so there was a hunt deep in the bowels of the computer data to solve the mystery -- but nothing so heart-stoppingly hectic as before.

Dare I hope that things have turned a corner for the better? All jobs have their hiccups in the beginning; ours were more like full body seizures. It's a nice feeling to be entering the new year with a few less worries on one's shoulders. Let's hope it stays that way.

We finished drilling the previous section two days ago. I've caught up on all my reports in the meantime, but seeing as how I'm the only one on the crew without any family in Louisiana (the day directional driller has two grandkids, the night directional driller has a pregnant wife, and my night hand has two pre-school aged boys himself) I volunteered to be the one person to stay on the rig while they run casing and act as the "company liaison" to schedule tool shipments and crew transport for everyone when the rig is ready to start drilling again.

So I've got until Monday (by current estimates) to just hang out here and watch movies on my laptop. They might change their minds and send me in anyway, but I'm not opposed to making another holiday bonus for merely staving off the boredom on New Year's Day. After all, I've worked hard enough these past two weeks to deserve a little "easy money".

Oh, and can anyone guess what my New Year's Resolution this year will be?

May you live in interesting times

Heaven forgive me if I ever complained of boredom on the rig. I had one calm day on the day after Christmas, and then WHAM! another failure yesterday causing us to make the rig stop drilling. I solved the problem relatively quickly, but the sheer volume of failures is starting to wear on everybody's nerves -- most especially my own.

Is my job cursed? Specifically, is this job cursed with the above phrase; the classic Chinese ill-wish? I have been rather lucky in my past jobs. Whatever troubleshooting has been required has been minimal and infrequent compared to many jobs. I suppose I might be paying my karmic due for such a string of good fortune.

Of course I'm more worried that management is going to see another side of this: that the one constant in all of these failures is me.

In other news, we'll be done drilling this section late tonight. That means I might get sent home while they run casing tomorrow. It will only be 2-3 days off, with an unfortunate amount of travel time to further foreshorten it (4 hr drive each way to the heliport and a night spent at a nearby hotel prior to departure), but with any luck I might be in town to celebrate New Year's -- with whomever happens to be in town as well.

Merry Christmas!

I was enjoying the crazy tinsel garlands so much that I decided to grab a few more.



This red garland had sparkly green holly leaves coming off of it, so I was very happy about that!


The directional driller called his daughter to wish her a Merry Christmas.
It was a very blue Christmas! (My company's color is blue).


A blue view.

A few thoughts on Christmas Eve

At four o'clock in the morning on the day I came to this rig I entered a 24-hour CVS to grab some snacks for the four-hour ride to the heliport. While there I made an impulse buy in purchasing a strand of plastic tinsel-ated garland with foil snowflakes to decorate my offshore workspace with, for I knew with a gloomy sort of certainty that I would be working on Christmas, so goshdarnitall if I wasn't going to celebrate.

That strand of silver tinsel snowflakes now sits hangs off the bottom edge of our supply cabinets, just at the top of my range of vision when I stare at my laptop screen to type this. It has been added to by a pair of red and green tinsel garlands we gleaned from the shipment of Christmas decorations sent to the rig along with the regular grocery delivery.

So we are beset on all sides by lengths of mercilessly garish plastic. The most heinous of all petroleum products, these tinsel garlands are a fitting celebration for a Christmas on an oil rig. The silver one I purchased is small and dainty, barely offensive if given no more than a cursory glance, but the red and green garlands absconded from the rig supplies are wrist-thick swags of fake pine needles; a raccoon's tail drapery of hideousness.

And yet these glaring shades give me a sense of joy, a pure feeling resonating from whatever sense memories recall my happiest holiday moments -- which are alas too few and far between the times when I spent Christmas a whining and moping brat-- giving me a giddiness one might not expect for someone which such a dreary holiday prospect.

This is a good thing to offset the difficulties of the past week. I finally got enough sleep last night, but woke up just in time to spend the next four hours outside in the rain (and wind so hard it was blowing the rain straight down my ear canals) preparing for our next bit run. After all the equipment failures we had (two computers, one peripheral device, and a danged tape measure!) I'm working with the bare minimum to run my job and the weather is too rough (again, the wind) for the helicopter carrying the replacements to make it out here.

But writing this is putting Christmas carols in my head. So God rest ye, merry gentlemen, for I have some oil to drill for and some tunes to sing.

I'm too tired to think of a title for this one

I reached a new milestone in my career advancement. Unfortunately it's the kind of milestone that makes one want to jump overboard.

This job can be stressful at times, most especially so upon the person in charge. I have seen my cell managers go nearly cross-eyed from the stress and the sleep deprivation required by a troublesome assignment, and I always wondered if I would have the kind of commitment to take responsibility for the job that way.

Well last night it turns out I did, and now I just want to cry.

I left to take a brief nap before we picked up our tools and put them in the hole to start drilling. When I returned from my nap my night hand informed me that the entire network we had set up in our unit was down. We spent the next four hours troubleshooting it, and by the end of the night a second of our three computers had bitten the dust. Once we had the bare minimum of data processing programs running on our third and "last vestige of hope" computer, I went to bed with instructions to my night hand to wake me up when I was needed to help pick up BHA. A mere 70 minutes later at the friendly hour of 2:15am, I got the knock on my bedroom door and the next round of work began.

I've been riding waves of energy, and at my low ebbs I've snuck in a couple of cat naps in my ever-increasingly uncomfortable office chair. Pretty soon my night hand will wake up from his few hours of sleep and come out to give me relief.

The directional driller commented on my lack of sleep and as an afterthought said, "Well, this is the most critical part of the well." Right. Thanks for the reminder. Looks like I won't be leaving my post anytime soon today.

A Few Gray Hairs

Oh the shame, the shame! It's been over a month since my last post. I have been shockingly remiss in keeping you abreast on oilfield news, and for that you have my apologies.

I returned to the Gulf of Mexico a mere five days ago, and I have quickly transitioned through all my major reasons for not posting. From the previous "not on a rig and therefore not posting" to the ever-disappointing "mired in boredom from lack of work on the rig and therefore feel like I have nothing interesting to post", after which the "far and above too busy with work to have time to post".

I arrived here with the directive to rig up all of the equipment and prepare for the first drilling run. At first I was mostly prevented from accomplishing this goal due to the fact that only one third of our equipment was actually on the rig. The rest was floating on the boats it had come out on, unable to be offloaded due to the high winds making crane activity dangerous.

So we did what we could with what we had, which mainly entailed running dozens of cables all over the surface of the rig and installing the few sensors we could. When the rest of our equipment did show up I soon regretted I had ever hoped for such a day.

There were so many problems I did not know where to start. I was overwhelmed, under-rested, and completely at a loss as to how to solve them all. Worse yet, I was in charge. I have the responsibility for this job. I have my name next to the title of "Cell Manager" in the daily reports. I am the one who has to answer for any mistakes. It was nearly enough to send me off the side of the rig and swimming the hundred miles or more to shore. I was a wreck.

But as of this morning I have somehow reached a state of equilibrium, if not success. The equipment having problems that could be solved was fixed, and the equipment with problems that could not be solved will soon be replaced. There are many things that could go wrong between now and when we begin drilling, but I can't solve problems that haven't occurred yet -- or so I tell myself. I am in the eye of the (figurative) hurricane. Once we do start drilling it will be a non-stop race to the end of this projected 40-day well. It's going to be a fast-paced frantic train-wreck of a job and I'm sure to have a few more gray hairs by the end of it. Maybe it's the rarely-seen pessimist in me, but I'm girding my loins for the worst.

Wish me luck!

Whoopee!

Oh my goodness. After almost 24 straight hours of some pretty heavy-duty work, I got to go home early! No one else was ready, so I got to take the helicopter allllll by myself. I felt like I was a celebrity being escorted someplace super secret.

But this marks the beginning of my days off. I need them. I am sooooo tired of working right now that I am perfectly happy here, watching a Project Runway marathon on a friend's tivo.

So while you wait for my next post, here's a picture of the drill bit that we pulled out of the hole this morning. Enjoy!

A related question

Recently I received a question from my friend Samantha, who was on my study abroad program in Cyprus and now works as a Study Abroad Adviser at SUNY:

Do you work with many other young people on the rigs? What is social life like?

As for people my age, there are a number of them. The lowest positions on the totem pole, "roustabouts", generally hire recent high school graduates or drop-outs. The less ambitious of these will get promoted to "roughneck" eventually and remain there for decades. The more advanced positions of drillers, directional drillers, and company men tend to be held by older and older men as they go higher and higher (yes, men. I have only ever met one female directional driller, but that was socially and not through work). But overall on the rig there is a great variety of ages, from 16 to 70 and everywhere in between.

Regarding the social life, for me it kind of "is and it isn't". I don't have the sort of schedule that lends well to making friends normally or dating, especially. But there are about 150 other field engineers in my office in Louisiana who are mostly my age group and are in the same predicament, so there's always someone in town to hang out with and commiserate on the craziness of the job when I do get home.

Sometimes I do make new friends when I'm in Lafayette during my days off. I did some volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity back in August when I was waiting around for this job to start. It would have been a good way to get acquainted with non-oilfield people (a first!), but then I spent the next four weeks offshore, my two weeks away from the rig mostly in Boston, the next five weeks offshore again, and I'm intending to spend the next week up in Boston for Thanksgiving, so any potential friends I could have made would barely remember me by the time I was in Lafayette again for more than 36 hours.

Does it get lonely? Occasionally. Does it bother me? Rarely. I know it's not a permanent situation, and I have the internet to keep me in contact with all the friendships I'd like to maintain. What more could a girl ask for?

Question on Bonding

Today Hanna asked:

So being confined with a bunch of people for a few weeks can be seen as a bonding experience in some situations. Is that the case for working on an oil rig? - do you make friends and hang out and feel close to the people you're with? Or do you just interact purely on a professional level, then hide away in your room on your own at nights to relax, and then after a few weeks you go off to the next rig and forget about the people at the previous one?

By nature I'm rather aloof when in a professional setting, so I tend towards the latter. My usual routine involves waking up, heading to the gym for 30 minutes or so (depending on how late I sleep), attending the evening meeting at 5:30 , eating dinner, starting my shift at 6pm, working till 6am, giving notes to my day hand and chatting about stuff until 6:30, then eating breakfast and going to bed right away. Unless they're doing noisy construction in the living quarters, it's shockingly easy to sleep for 10 hours or more a day.

I eat alone more often than not, but when I do eat with other people our conversation tends towards the job. I'm friendly around the rig, and I'm always quick with a "Hi!" or "Good morning!" (it works both when I wake up and go to bed!), but I rarely get into a personal conversation with a rig hand that goes deeper than "where I'm from" and "what the heck I'm doing in Louisiana".

All exceptions to this generality are with my fellow MWD/LWD Engineers. We're all crammed together in our little steel box which predicates just such an idea, although with me it's still rare. I've hammered out a couple of pretty solid friendships over the stresses of a job, but in most cases I'll merely develop a slightly deeper understanding of my coworker, thus making it easier to converse with them at office parties, but not compelling me to invite them over to my house for a beer. We'll get a small sort of "comrade in arms" bond, but nothing particularly strong.

There is of course the other extreme, which hasn't happened to me (yet) since I try to keep the peace. But I have known countless occasions when a pair of engineers, after spending one or two volatile weeks on the same rig, will never want to see each other again -- it's a hazard of the close quarters.

There was one occasion when I thought a job might actually ruin a good friendship between myself and a girl named Margarita. Margarita is a really friendly, upbeat person, and we got along well whenever I saw her in social situations from the start. She chose me to be a part of her cell back in April, and we worked on the same rig off-and-on for a period of about 6 weeks.

While working together, I was dismayed when it seemed that she was extra-critical of my work and would blow up at the smallest misstep I made. I was inwardly seething at this treatment, and was having a difficult time maintaining my civility with her. Then one day I couldn't take it any more, and when I brought up my concerns we both burst into a very teary reconciliation, embraced each other strongly, and sniffled our way back into perfect friendship. All in front of the very male, and very uncomfortable, directional drillers.

I hope that answers your question! So who's next?

Act NOW before it's too late!!!

I WANT YOU!

I want you, my dear readers, to submit your questions about oilfield life, oilfield work, and my life in general in response to this post. I have 5 days left before I leave the rig for my self-determined Thanksgiving break, and I will do my best to answer any and all questions as thoroughly as possible between now and then.

You see, I came to a small sort of epiphany during my last break. I was up in Boston, visiting friends and family, but I was unable to completely relax. I still felt the weight of my job pushing me down, even though I was on "official" vacation, and should have been able to release those feelings. But they kept pressing on me, and I eventually realized it was because everyone was so curious about what I was doing, I kept fielding questions and going into long, detailed descriptions about all the facets of my life and work. After four straight weeks on the rig, this was like reliving a traumatic episode again, and again, and again (although far less serious than actual trauma -- my job isn't that bad).

But I was unable to let go of the constant weight of my work, and was therefore unable to fully enjoy my vacation. So during this upcoming holiday, I am going to do my best to promote my own peace of mind by saying "NO!". I am NOT going to answer any questions about my job, I am NOT going to go into drawn-out explanations of what it's like for a woman to live on a floating steel island with 150 men, and I am not going to discuss the technologies I utilize to help oil companies find their prize. So apologies in advance to everyone who might want to pepper me with questions over turkey and cranberry sauce, but I'm not gonna do it this time.

To make it up to you, however, I will devote this next week to answering all of your questions through this blog so that you may satisfy your curiosity in advance. Whoever feels so inclined may either post a comment to this post or email me in person to submit their query. I am scheduled to leave the rig on Tuesday morning, so hurry up and start asking away!

And remember: once I step off that helicopter, I will pretend I no longer work in the oilfield. If you ask me to my face how my job is going, you just might receive a confused look and "what job?" for an answer. Any questions posed online will then be put aside until I've had time to decompress.

A lot of money.... for what, really?

Good news: we finished drilling today! Just as I was waking up at 4:15pm, the rig reached their revised Target Depth (of 300 ft past yesterday's depth, just past a total of 31,500 feet of hole.

And guess what we found? Nothing! Unfortunately for the oil company, there was no pay zone found in this well. The poor guys were quite disappointed since they were expecting a nice big oil reservoir.

But this billion dollar+ operation won't be for naught. They will run some wireline logging tools into the freshly drilled hole to better develop their models for what kind of stuff is actually down there, and specifically, where the oil is. This should make their next well in this area much more efficient and hopefully more successful.

For those curious, Wireline logging is the technological predecessor to Logging While Drilling. We use the same sorts of techniques, but their tools are smaller and are simply dropped down the hole at the end of a wire instead of attached to the entire drilling assembly like ours are. Pluses of Wireline: the conditions that the tools are run in mean that there's more flexibility in tool design, so they are able to perform much more complex measurements than we can. Minuses: the rig must shut down and have nothing else in the hole while running Wireline, and you can't get the data simultaneously while drilling like you can with us.

My company was founded by Wireline loggers, however (since Logging While Drilling didn't exist back then), so it's the "darling" segment of our corporate executives.

So now I wait. I sit at my laptop, alternately updating paperwork and watching movies until my tools are out of the hole and I can start doing real work. I've spent the past 3 hours doing some particularly befuddling paperwork, so I think it's time to sit back and finish the "Die Hard" marathon I started yesterday. I was most of the way through #3 (Die Hard With a Vengeance) when they just had to go back to drilling again. How frustrating!

Short on Tea and Patience

Today marks week four of my current hitch.

I am three days away from setting a personal record in number of consecutive days offshore. I am two days away from reaching 150 offshore days this year. I am a week away from my scheduled departure date.

A few days ago I had no scheduled departure date. When people asked me how long I was out here for, I'd blithely reply "When we're done drilling!". But now the problem is that nobody seems to know when or where that will be. Various estimates include: 2500 feet deeper, 1000 feet deeper, 300 feet deeper, and yesterday. In the meantime we're "Waiting on Weather" due to rough seas, and not drilling.

After a bunch of back-and-forth on prospective plans -- one possibility is to fill the last 15000 feet we drilled and kick off at an earlier point to do a sidetrack well -- I decided that enough was enough and I was going to go home at the five week mark. I've already got my relief lined up and I'm making plans to be home for Thanksgiving.

I had planned on using this hitch to learn as much as possible about nuclear operations. As it turned out, I learned some (not quite enough), and now I'm running out of energy to process all of this into retrievable memory in my brain. I have been on two jobs before where I got to see all the preparation in running a nuclear tool: programming the tool, loading the source, starting data acquisition at surface, but both times I was sent home before we got very far. I've never seen a complete nuclear run. And I'm never going to get my next promotion until I do.

But there's only so much that a person can take.

My longest hitch ever was 6 weeks in Wyoming. Just under a year ago, I spent Thanksgiving on a rig in the middle of some sandy mountains. But while there I was able to take a couple day trips to the tiny little towns that were within a reasonable driving distance, so it never really felt like a full 6 weeks of work. Comparing the length of a hitch on land to the length of a hitch offshore is like comparing apples to oranges. There is no comparison.

My cell manager's longest hitch offshore was 75 days. He was hired about 5 years ago when things seemed a lot less pleasant for people in our job. His first year alone he had more than 260 rig days. I can't even fathom that.

But now I cannot help keeping a running countdown till my estimated departure date. No matter how I try to avoid thinking about it, my brain is always tracking the days now that it's set. Depending on the drilling plans, we might even leave earlier due to finishing the well -- but I can't depend on that so I'm trying not to even consider it. Regardless, I'm leaving no later than Tuesday. For now I'm running out of tea, so it's going to be enough of a hardship to have to ration my supplies.

Until then...

New Feature! Yay!

Look! Over there! Do you see it?

Here's a hint: look left (and if you're reading this post a long time from now, look waaayyyy up and left).

It's a new feature! I've added a little text box wherein I will keep track of my vegetable intake on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Now you can all know exactly how poorly I'm doing at sticking to my resolution.

I'll try to make sure I update it at the end of each day, but alas I'm sure I won't always pull through. But I will faithfully tally my veggies, so you can be assured of no false reporting regardless of how infrequent I may be.

But I have a few caveats:

• Tomatoes count (just like how Pluto will always be a planet to me, tomatoes remain a vegetable).
• Olives count (sooooo not fruity, but I don't eat them that often anyway)
• Please don't get too worried if my counts are low. Some days I get so time-confused, I eat breakfast twice. And I DON'T eat vegetables with breakfast, sorry.

There you have it. Enjoy!

Keep on Truckin'

Shortly after deciding not to evacuate for Hurricane Ida, the higher-ups made another gutsy decision. They decided we were going to drill during Ida as well!!

When we first reached the bottom of the hole (it took a while, being >25,000 ft deep) we made our first attempt to drill. After about thirty minutes of bouncing up and down and twisting the drill string back and forth in the rough seas they called "pause" for to wait on better weather.

Six hours later they were back on bottom, drilling ahead, and having such ridiculous fluctuations because of the still-raging seas that I was stressing out to no end over my data. When training to become a Measurements/Logging While Drilling Engineer, there is one phrase that they hammer into as if it's our religious doctrine.

"What is our most important measurement?" says the instructor

"Depth!" reply the dozens of students in perfect unison.

Without a good depth measurement, all our other measurements (surveys, formation information) are virtually meaningless. Hey, it's great if you see a pay zone on the logs, but what's the point of logging it if you don't know where it is?

Due to the rig heave we were had to keep manually changing our depth to the point where I practically abandoned any further attempts to stay accurate. Who knew where we were? Our logs were a mess, since we'd drill a couple feet normally and then shoot ahead almost ten feet so fast our sensors didn't record any info in the interval.

But eventually we got ourselves on track. And then, eventually the weather calmed down. In retrospect it seems like they definitely made the right decision by not evacuating, since they saved a few million dollars and drilled a good 1500 feet that we otherwise wouldn't have.

We've got a long way to go as yet. Of all our previous drilling runs, we made no more than 5000 feet of new hole in one go, and they're attempting to finish the last 7000 feet in one shot this time. This is an ambitious move. The hole is deep, the formation is tight, and there's a lot that could go wrong. We got stuck already once today for a brief moment, but they were able to jar the drilling assembly out of it quickly to everyone's relief.

With a nuclear source in the hole, nobody wants to get stuck. My company runs some of the only tools in the Gulf of Mexico that enable you to fish the source out while the tools are still in the hole, but at almost 30,000 ft deep, there's no guarantee that we'd be able to fish it out successfully. If the source is stuck, the entire hole must be filled with red cement and a placard must be placed on the sea floor warning any future visitors (if fish can read) that there is radioactive material down below. Then there's a LOT of paperwork and the oil company has to eat the cost of the abandoned well.

So here we go. We're at 29,000 feet now, with a planned total depth of 33,700, so I'll be keeping my fingers crossed until then.

I'm a Vampire

I spent the past week NOT working the night shift. This was a near-unbearably painful experience for me.

Apparently I hate the sun. I enjoy coming to work just as it starts to sink over the horizon, catching the last glimmers of the darkening sky as I drink my English Breakfast tea after having eaten a breakfast likely consisting of baked chicken and cucumber salad.

I love the blackness of the world during my 12-hr shift. No matter how crazy and stressful things are inside my artificially lit logging unit, the world itself seems that much more peaceful and quiet outside when the sky is unlit.

I adore leaving work while it's still dark out -- I can pretend that it's 10 o'clock at night instead of 6 o'clock in the morning, and thus a reasonable time to go to bed. It's a race to make sure I can leave before the sunrise even begins so as to maintain the self-deception. This is now a lot harder after Daylight Savings, but is nothing compared to the challenges I've faced this past week.

I decided it would be a good idea to work a "split shift" of 12am-12pm so as to learn more about what it takes to be a nuclear cell manager (someone who can run a job involving nuclear tools). In retrospect I don't know why it seemed like a scheme that would work, since there was very little I wouldn't see on night shift that I would see in the daytime. The main difference between working nights vs. days is that the office is twenty times more likely to call up and ask questions or ask for favors during the day, but my cell manager fielded those calls without my help anyway.

Then there was the sun. With Hurricane Ida barreling through the gulf the clouds have kept it at bay lately, but earlier this week I would hiss in pain each time I walked outside to feel the skin-scorching rays hit my face in the daytime. I was almost surprised that I didn't actually start to smoke and crumble to ash like a real vampire (please forgive the oxymoron).

But my new roommate was the proverbial camel's straw. She's a petite Asian woman who works in the galley on the day shift, and spends about two hours each evening puttering around in the room before she goes to bed. For the past three nights she has proceeded to wake me up countless times between the hours of 6:30-9:30pm, and would only settle into the top bunk and turn off the light mere moments before my alarm would go off at 9:25.

So as of today I am switching back to the standard night shift. Hooray!

Batten Down the Hatches, Mateys!

Weather reports say that we'll be on the "dry" side of Tropical Storm Ida, with only 20-30 mph winds expected. The rig has spent the past 24 hours preparing for the worst, however, by storing or securing all loose objects on deck. There is always the worry of freak gusts or waves that might catch us unawares, so we've been strapping things down and tidying up just in case.

I love nautical terms, and can still enjoy them even when they seem to lose some of their novelty when you're actually at sea and their meanings are taken literally. My current trainee who hails from North Dakota (has anyone else ever met someone from North Dakota? Eric -- you don't count) had never heard the phrase "batten down the hatches" before so I explained it to him. Then I searched Google to make sure I had it correctly.

A "batten" is a strip of wood. A "hatch" is a door or portal. I had guessed the latter, but was interested to learn the former. So battening down the hatches is to secure planks across all the doors and windows on a ship in preparation for a storm. Our doors out here are rather secure, but we've had plenty of other objects that needed strapping down.

The company man prefaced his discussion for the need of this in a meeting with "Now I'm sure I'm not the only one in this room who has ridden out a hurricane on the rig." Perhaps it was my imagination, but his tanned and weather-beaten face seemed to show a far off look in his eyes and perhaps a hint of long forgotten fear. I shuddered after he spoke those words.

The heaving of the rig has been gradually increasing over the course of this day, and I find myself a touch excited to face the weather ahead. This is the thrill of imagined danger, like riding a roller coaster. All the safety precautions are in place, and I wouldn't be buckled into that seat if there was a chance I could be hurt. I'll fly through the loop-the-loops with the wind in my face, a scream in my throat, and in my heart the knowledge that this is all just for fun. I'll get off on the other side just as fine and dandy as when I stepped on, with a fun story to tell that will surely receive much embellishment.

So here we go now. The heaving's getting stronger and my internet connection won't last once the rain comes. I'll see you on the other side.

Update: As of late November 8th, Ida has been upgraded to the status of Hurricane.

On Second Thought...

Well, it seems like the head honchos back in Houston, TX have decided, in their meteorological expertise, that Tropical Storm Ida will be too weak to cause us any trouble when she comes our way.

So we're staying.

Now I was disappointed at first; I HATE it when someone says I might get to go home and then dashes all my hopes once I've just gotten them up. But I was able to quickly progress from indignation to stoic resignation to satisfied acceptance and even willingness to stay, since the longer I am offshore, the stronger my case for a nice long break after I finally DO get home.

And... dare I hope? A Thanksgiving with family?

Nope, nope, nope. Ignore the above. I don't want to jinx it.

Ready, Set, Wait for it....

For the past couple of days we've been preparing non-stop for our next drilling section. I've been filling out the paperwork for the nuclear source, getting all of our other pre-run documentation ready, programming the tools, prepping the computers, etc, etc.

As of yesterday morning at 10am we were all set and ready to go. It was just a matter of time before the rig let us know they were ready for us. And sure enough, at about 12:30 they told us we were going to pick up tools in 30 minutes.

5 minutes after that all plans were dropped.

Why? I'll show you why:


Tropical Storm Ida seems to be moseying up our way sometime early next week. People were already whispering "evacuation" last night, and next to leaving people on a rig during a hurricane/tropical storm, there's one thing you really don't want to do: leave a radioactive source in the hole during a hurricane/tropical storm.

Side note: I was once talking to a galley hand on another rig who told me this unbelievable story about his brother who worked on oil rigs in the 1980's. They hadn't fully evacuated the rig he was on by the time the storm came, and he and a good 20 other men were swept out to sea. They spent the next 21 hours barely staying afloat in the 30ft+ high waves until the hurricane passed and they were picked up by the coast guard. There was a class action lawsuit and this galley hand's brother never had to work again. I was a little bit skeptical until I saw the photos of his brother's 3 Hummers parked outside his mansion. But when you think about it, most safety regulations out here are on the books because of mistakes made in the past. That lawsuit ensured the oil companies would do all in their power to prevent that situation from ever happening again.

If an evacuation is called while drilling, the rig has to unlatch from the drilling assembly and the riser (a giant tube extending the depth of the sea and secured to the rig floor, protecting the drilling fluid and drilling assembly from the sea -- and vice versa), and leave the entire drilling assembly in the hole. It happens occasionally upon returning to the site after a hurricane that the well can no longer be found. No riser, no tools, nothing. This would be disastrous if a radioactive source were still in the hole.

To maintain productivity while they wait on a decision, the rig decided to go back to drilling with a drilling assembly made entirely of "dummy iron" -- no expensive electrical equipment or radioactive sources.

We'll probably find out about an evacuation once the offices in town have discussed it at their first morning meetings, so by 8 or 9am I'll probably have an answer. But a rig 40 miles south of us being run by the same oil company has already gotten their orders to evacuate, so I've got a hunch about what we're going to be doing tomorrow.

I'll be sitting here watching movies in the meantime.

Busy at Work

It has become my responsibility to prepare an updated version of the rig-up instruction manual for this rig. This document will hopefully be used by field engineers on future jobs out here, since they seem to enjoy having us do a full rig-up and rig-down of our equipment every 4 months or so on this rig. When I was working on rigging everything up back in September, they told me we probably wouldn't have to rig it down for 5 years if everything went well. But a different oil company will be leasing this rig on it's next well, and we have to clear on out.

The (very small) silver lining to this (enormous) cloud was that I got to take my camera around the rig and take lots of pictures that might otherwise be frowned upon in the "pursuit of service quality". In between snapping views of our cable wiring and sensor configurations, I got a few scenic shots as well.



First on the to-do list: ride the elevator up the derrick to check on our sensor WAAYYYY UP HIGGHHH.


It's hard to catch the perspective, but I'm reeeeallly high up.


See that drill pipe I'm looking down at? Those are each about 95 feet long. And the rig floor itself is about 85 feet above the water.


It makes for a great view!


But also a bit scary when looking down. Do you see that white box a little lower than left of center? That's the logging unit I spend 12 hours of my day in. It fits about three people and a good dozen computers relatively comfortably.


Between blogging and sleeping, I actually do have to work sometimes.


This is the kind of wiring that I get to document and record! Looks like fun, doesn't it?

In this blog I've written a few thousand words or so describing my life in the oilfield and the sort of work I perform. So I hope you enjoyed a few-thousand more condensed into picture form here, since there are some things about my job that words cannot begin to describe.

Happy Halloween!

Greetings on All Hallow's Eve from the oilfield!


It's a simple sort of costume (since I still have to wear my flame-retardant coveralls, my hard hat, safety glasses, etc.), but it certainly livened up things out here. Unfortunately I was the only one to dress up on this rig, but I still got a pretty decent haul in trick-or-treating around the offices. One thing there's never a shortage of offshore: candy.

I hope everyone back on land is having a festive time!
Love,
Holly

My life is like a Game... literally

Rough seas today!

I noticed after I went to bed last night that the rig seemed to be rocking at a higher than average amount. Sure enough, when I went to the evening meeting after found out that the heaving of the rig was so extreme that it made drilling unsteady enough that we need to pull out. They hope that we'll be able to drill the extra 1500 feet we didn't finish on our next bit run without any problems. I guess we'll see.

In the meantime I'm just hanging out, getting odds and ends taken care of at a leisurely pace since I have little real work to do tonight. Lucky for me my queasiness is far below that of earlier, when I was a poor wretch of a landlubber on my first day at sea. I was walking across the deck earlier this evening so I could fetch myself a sandwich from the galley when I made a marvelous discovery.

The mere act of walking around is reminiscent of those old marble labyrinth games which so frustrated me. Only out here instead of holes to fall into there are countless pieces of heavy machinery that are not fun to tangle with.

Most of the time it's nothing like this, but for this past week we've had some pretty rough weather, and the Maritime Weather report predicts tomorrow will be worse. So now, when you want to think of me, you can just pull out one of these:

More Birdwatching

I don't know how I missed this when I first arrived on shift this afternoon, but when I turned around in my chair I looked out the window and saw this!


Do you see all those birds? I noticed a flock of them flying overhead when I was about to go to bed this morning, and apparently they decided to take a rest on the huge reels of steel anchor cable just outside my unit.


I decided to go outside and take a closer look.



I walked towards the cable reels slowly with my camera out.


There were a lot more birds than I originally thought!


When I got even closer, they got antsy and started to take flight


Quickly they all took off and flew to another spot on the rig for rest.


My coworkers made fun of me for seeming so interested in the birds, but in my opinion, anything that isn't made of steel out here is a thing of novelty.

Don't Shoot, Troubleshoot!

Today was an interesting day at work. And by interesting, I mean that lots of stuff went wrong. My job can be very, very easy when nothing goes wrong, but this is the oilfield. Something ALWAYS goes wrong.

Today we installed a new sensor, found out it didn't work, lost signal about a dozen times to our tool, had two unsuccessful attempts to reprogram it while drilling before the third time worked, and got some really terrible looking data from downhole that we spent hours trying to tidy up. And we just unjammed a week's worth of clogged paper from our log printer. Yes, a week. The last page I pulled out had the date "October 21, 2009" printed on it.

So in case you couldn't tell, a lot of the work I do involves troubleshooting any one of a thousand different problems. Which (like my post about job ownership) reminds me of my interview for this job.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~Flashback to July 2007~*~*~*~*~*~

It was the second floor conference room at a Hilton on the outskirts of urban Houston, located in the middle of a thriving? Middle-Eastern and Indian neighborhood. It was two o'clock in the morning and I was full of the delicious Tex-Mex and Margaritas they had treated us to for dinner. But we were not about to go to bed, we were about to start our first real interviews of the "interview weekend" they had arranged for us.

It was an open forum, and they would ask us all a selection of questions as we took turns standing in front of the entire group. I, as usual when speaking/performing in public in turns, volunteered to go first (I hate waiting for that sort of thing. It always makes me much more nervous and skittish when I finally do take the spotlight). But there was one question that they asked me that I was almost completely unprepared for, and I will never forget it.

They asked, "Have you ever had a MacGyver Moment? Describe a time when you fixed something with whatever resources you had available."

I could not think of a single instance. Actually, the problem was, I could think of one. Unfortunately it wasn't my story, it was my friend Janet's, and for the life of me my brain could not un-fix itself from Janet's story long enough to remember one of my own.

You see Janet had gone through the job-interview stage of college recently, and she had described to me an instance when she was in a bit of a bind shortly before a particular interview. She had no clean dress pants to wear, and was therefore planning to wear a skirt. But Janet played rugby and bruised easily and often so pantyhose were a necessity. Unfortunately for Janet, she could find no normal pantyhose in her room that were not full of runs. She could however, find a pair of flesh-colored thigh-high pantyhose. And since the fates were not making it easy for her, she could not find a garter belt. Searching about her room for anything that would serve, she set eyes on a box of paperclips on her desk and was quickly inspired to string them together for such a purpose. She was successful, made it to the interview on time, and was only frustrated that it seemed too inappropriate to describe such an example of her problem-solving skills to the interviewer at the moment.

So standing in front of the interviewers and a room full of fellow interviewees, I naturally thought it would be a much more appropriate time to tell such a story. I related the story as if I had been Janet, employing my theatrical skills to do so. Then and now I have felt strong pangs of guilt for perjuring myself in my interview but I do solve problems similarly, if not that particular problem.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Return to present day~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Today was a PERFECT example of a "MacGyver Moment" for me. There are four huge pumps that push the mud into the hole. The mud acts as a coolant, a lubricant, a safeguard against the borehole collapsing, a medium to transmit our data through, and many other things necessary to our operation. On each pump I installed a stroke counter sensor to monitor how fast the pistons are moving at any given time. Our computers take the strokes-per-minute that these sensors measure and calculate the gallons-per-minute being pumped downhole, and these are two very important numbers that we track throughout drilling operations.

These sensors are very simple devices, but not quite perfect for their environment. They are similar to the sensors pictured here (a photo I found on Google):
Our sensors are small digital counters mounted to C-Clamps like these shown above. Do you see that pointy metal stick that juts out? That rod is pointed down into the frightening part of the pump that houses the huge, fast pistons shooting back and forth as they pump. You line it up so that something on the piston hits the rod with each stroke, causing the sensor to record a tick as the rod moves.

The rod can move forward or backward and record a count each time. One of the major problems with this sensor is that if the rod moves too far, it will count twice as many strokes as its supposed to.

At one point throughout the evening, one of our stroke counters was going a little haywire. It was showing twice or three times as many strokes as we expected, so I went down to check on it.

The issue was not that the rod was being over-extended. In this case, the piston was hitting the sensor rod so fast that it bounced back and forth a number of times each stroke. The rod was dancing beautifully in the air and causing horrific things to our logs.

What should have looked like this (note the green lines in particular):

Looked like this:

We readjusted the arrangement of the pump stroke counter numerous times to see if a different alignment might ameliorate the problem. This had worked on previous occasions but it failed today. We were out of luck.

I sat in the my unit thinking to myself and brainstormed possible solutions. What if I attached some sort of mass to the end to slow it down? But no, that would create more of a pendulum-effect and would probably exacerbate the situation.

But then I had my epiphany. What about the reverse? What if I attached a mass to slow it down at the joint? My mind immediately scanned the itemized list of supplies we have available to us, and a quick glance around my unit afforded me a very "MacGyver" (if not particularly elegant) solution.

And so here you have it. I solved the problem with a wadded up paper towel and some electrical tape. And that was only because I was too lazy to fetch the duct tape. It might not work forever, but it will probably work at least until this well is drilled which is more than long enough.

Take that MacGyver! I've got more of your moments than you would know what to do with.

Ahh, what a work of art.

The Bug Guy

I learned the coolest new thing today. They have a paleontologist on the rig now. He analyzes samples of the formation cuttings we get while drilling. Why a paleontologist, you might ask? This paleontologist looks at the samples under microscopes to analyze fossils of the prehistoric bugs embedded in the rock to correlate what type of rock we are drilling through. When I thought about it a bit more, I realized that it was probably a pretty tedious job. People on the rig call him "The Bug Guy" cause he looks at bugs all day. But in my head I will forever call him "The Dinosaur Guy" -- even if it is an inaccurate epithet. Because right now I'm a 10-year old kid on my first trip to the real-life "Jurassic Park".

Post For Post's Sake

When I haven't posted a blog update in a while, you can usually attribute my 'radio silence' to one of three reasons:

1. I'm not on a rig and therefore have little to say about rig life.
2. I'm on a rig and ridiculously busy with work and have no time to write.
3. I'm on a rig and am bored out of my mind with no work to do and have nothing to write about.

Can you guess which one I'm experiencing now? Congratulations, number 3 it is with a bullet. For the past 3 nights I have entertained myself by various methods including but not limited to:

1. Reading articles on my favorite online news magazines
2. Cropping, labeling, and sorting my 1,500+ family photos I scanned from the collections in Duxbury
3. Napping

Well, it's 4:25 am on a Saturday morning, so I have 95 minutes left until my relief arrives to sit here and do nothing all day. I've finished my nap, I've run out of articles to read (there has GOT to be more news in the world. WHERE IS IT???), and I've completed what I thought would be a months-long project of organizing the collection of family photos. They're even arranged chronologically. Beginning in 1898. After that I even studied up a little on the nuclear tool we'll soon be running. Believe me, I'm reeeeallly bored.

So I decided I might as well write SOMETHING on the blog, if only to keep Eric entertained. (Hi Eric!)

So here's an update on the goings-on in oilfield world. They're too short to make a blog post about each, but compiled together they make a nice briefing of sorts:

• While home and in Boston on vacation, I barely managed to increase my vegetable intake. I cannot say for sure that I even had a whole serving per day, so my firm resolve to up my veggies fell flat on its face. But, I eat TONS of veggies on the rig with lunch & dinner, so I can justify it, right? right?
  
  
• The wind has been quite brisk out here and the rig continues to rock, but in the way of experience mariners I seem to have developed my sea legs and the nausea has abated. Or maybe that's my sea stomach.

• We have about 3000 more feet to drill before we reach the section where we plan to run the nuclear tools, so until then I'm getting plenty of sleep. At this rate, we might never get there because they accidentally injected enough extra cement to fill an unexpected 400 more feet of hole than they planned, and we have spent the past 3 days drilling through it (That's 3 million dollars in unplanned operations costs, roughly, for those keeping score). 100 more feeet to go and then I'll actually have some work to keep me from being so bored all night.

• The rig recently received a new treadmill for the gym to replace the one that hasn't worked since before I got here in September. Now I have something to do cardio on besides the stationary bike (or the person that was going to steal the bike has now vacated it for the treadmill, either way its a win!).

Tune in next week for your oilfield briefings! Thank you, and good night.

-- Radio Silence --

Nausea Ad Nauseam

The wind has been rather strong since I arrived on the rig yesterday, and the pitch and roll have been feeling it most acutely. Do you know what else has been feeling it acutely? My stomach.

I am for perhaps the first time in my life, seasick.

I never thought, as a child skipping over wave after wave on the open-air Whaler motorboat across Duxbury Bay, that I could ever get seasick. The sea was the most refreshing thing possible, and the waves we slammed into, careened over, and tossed merrily through could never cause me more distress than a sharp bump to my tuckus on a particularly bouncy crest.

But here, I sit in my 12' x 8' steel box, with the only window -- which looks out into the black night sea that I know is there but cannot discern -- at my back, I am experiencing the kind of disconcerting motions I never felt with the spray on my face and the seaweed streaming through my dangling fingers. The rocking here is gentle but on unpredictable axes. The swaying of the rig takes me unexpectedly and causes minor bouts of vertigo while I'm climbing stairs. One time during my last hitch after I had just finished a workout in the gym, the rocking caused such a mirror of dizziness in me that I was afraid I had pushed myself too hard and I was going to faint.

I should perhaps state that I am nowhere near the full-blown "heaving my breakfast over the railing" level of seasickness. Rather I am at the undulating nausea that hits my gut and my head in unpredictable waves (haha, waves). The facts that I have drunk 3 cups of green tea today and took a huge multivitamin on a not-quite-full stomach have probably not helped. In such situations, caffeine is not my friend. From a vast deal of experience in minor nausea from car trips, I find that water and sodium are my best remedies, and I recently downed a big cup of iced H20 and ate a bologna sandwich.

I'm feeling better already, but the swaying has redoubled in the past minute. Would turning away from the computer monitor help? Probably, but that doesn't mean I'll do it.

Another Day, Another Sleepless Night...

I was complaining to a friend yesterday about how I was almost switched over from night to day shift, but not quite. I realized that after I woke up at 11pm this evening and passed four more sleepless hours, that I am not even CLOSE to being "almost switched over from night to day shift". I am so far from it, I may as well be running the clock in reverse. It's not like it's going to make any sense to me either way.

I'm flying to Boston today for my eagerly anticipated vacation, but I have to drive the 2+ hours to the New Orleans airport to catch the plane that I booked at a much cheaper rate. I sincerely hope there is a coffee shop in the terminal open at 5 am, because I'm in the mood to hit the road now and I'll be needing someplace comfortable to crash with my laptop full of distractions for the 6 hours before my flight takes off.

I have discovered that when arriving at the rig, it takes me roughly 2-3 nights to reach the stage where it is no longer excruciatingly painful to stay awake from the proscribed 6pm-6am hours, but shifting back after arriving home takes no less than 1 - 1.5 weeks before I can make any sort of plans at times other than 2-7am that I can be assured to be awake for. By that estimate, I should be back to normal sometime between this coming Tuesday through Friday. My return flight is scheduled for early Sunday morning, and I expect to be back to the rig the Tuesday after.

Perhaps this is not the optimal state to be traveling to a different time zone in, but I can hardly get any worse, right? On second thought, scratch that statement. It is distressingly thick with what may be interpreted as a tempt to fate.

Irradiated

Congratulations to me! I received my radiation Level 2 Category 1 certification yesterday. This means I am certified to work with unshielded radioactive sources. Plus side: this is one of the biggest steps towards getting my next promotion. Minus side: I now have legal responsibility for any nuclear-related activities I am involved in since I have been deemed "educated enough to know better". So if something goes wrong and I am determined negligent, I could go to jail. Ha ha ha..... don't you love promotions?

Back in May and June when I was sent home from the rig for 5 weeks when it shut down for repairs, I spent a lot of time working on my nuclear certification. The way this certification is performed is through a checklist of tasks to be done in the office. Each tool that is run with a nuclear source must be calibrated prior to going on a job, and these calibrations are long, arduous processes typically lasting 4-6 hours on a good day. Finish four of these, four wipe tests (which ensure a source is not leaking), do a bunch of toolbox inventories and various other tedious tasks, and you're given a set of keys and a LOT more responsibility.

I didn't write any blog posts about it, because I was too darn tired. I was in the calibration shack for about 15 hours a day, which was mostly outside in the Louisiana summer heat. The "shack" has a roof, but no walls, and within a 15 hour period we got a lot of sun on our faces.

I nearly completed my certification in the early summer, but then I went off to school in Houston before I could get to the very last step. The last step was to learn about all the proper shipping paperwork. I tried scheduling it again and again, and was put off again and again, until I fiiiiinally was able to corner the instructor this week and get it done.

So as of this afternoon I'm done! Yay! My next step is to obtain a set of keys that open the locks to the source transfer shields and then I have to go on a "breakout job". There a current nuclear cell manager will let me run the job, evaluate how I do, and determine whether I'm ready or not to become a nuclear cell manager myself. After all, this certification I just received is only a piece of paper. They're not just going to stamp my sheet and send me out into the wilderness on my own. They need to make sure I'm actually fit to run a job before I'm allowed to do one on my own. And I have just two words to say to that...

THANK GOODNESS.

More Veggies, Please!

I've been doing pretty good so far this year at purposefully increasing my vegetable intake, but there is still one major flaw in my progress.

I am TERRIBLE at eating vegetables when I'm not on the rig.

At home, I get stuck in this "vacation" mentality. Since I'm not on the rig, I often overindulge in all my favorite vices, and the only time you're likely to see me pigging out on the green stuff is if I've just bought a couple bags of frozen edamame. If it weren't for those and my drug-of-choice (jalapenos), I wouldn't keep anything green in my refrigerator at all!

I will be home in just over 12 hours from now, and I am taking this opportunity to RENEW MY VOW to .... well... whomever it is one makes a vow when adopting a New Year's resolution. Myself! That's right! I'm renewing my vow to myself to EAT MORE VEGETABLES.

Even if it means eating a whole bag of edamame each day...

An Inadvertent Omission?

There is a catering company working on this rig that has been contracted by the drilling company. I have been told that working for the catering and cleaning crews on oil rigs is a popular back-to-work program for persons who have been formerly incarcerated. I have never inquired into the veracity of such claims, but I have noticed a significantly higher percentage of people on these crews with whole mouths full of gold teeth. It is something to behold.

But I digress from the point of my story. You see the catering company on this rig is a large and prosperous one, and they seem to be very concerned for the health and well being of their clientele. To promote these ends, they have publicity campaigns in place for displaying informational posters in and around the galley on how to take small, beneficial steps for improving yourself.

Most of these posters focus on exercise and eating right, but there is a poster that was just put up at the start of this month that has been intriguing me. It promotes handwashing, and it even lists a series of situations in which one should wash one's hands. They are as follows, verbatim:

• Before eating
• After smoking
• When they are dirty
• After coughing or sneezing
• After taking out the trash

I thought it admirable to encourage cleanliness among such a notoriously unclean environment as an oil rig, but something bothered me about this. Did it bother you too? They did not include in their list "After using the restroom".

Now at first I just brushed it off. I gave this poster writer the benefit of the doubt, assuming that the author failed to include it because it was unnecessary. Everyone is taught to wash their hands after using the bathroom. It's just too OBVIOUS.

But then I looked again, and my whole theory was blown out the window when I reread the phrase "When they are dirty". That's right. They are coaching us to wash our hands "When they are dirty", because that's not too obvious.

I am amused, I suppose. If I were to allow any other reaction, I suspect it would be "offended", but good gracious, let's not go there. So I shall remain amused.

Psych!

I had the most wonderful surprise when I was just about to go to bed the other day. Having completed my 5th to last hitch (which mostly involved surfing the web and watching movies -- we were between drilling runs), I found out that the hole liner they had run had not sealed properly. The liner (or casing, but the differences are not germane to this story) is a series of steel collars used to protect the freshly-drilled hole from collapsing. After we finish each drilling run, the rig runs casing or liner to the new deepest point and injects cement in between the casing/liner and the earth surrounding it.

Since the liner did not seal properly, the rig has to remove the liner, go in with a milling assembly to chop up all the pieces of the failed seal that were left behind, pull that assembly out, and then finally pick up the next set of tools for our next drilling run, and this couldn't have come at a better time for me. With just a few days left on the rig, sure! I'd love to sit around and watch more movies for those few days left! The slower they go, the happier I am.

But we found out just a few hours ago that they had decided that we had to work after all. They wanted to see the pressure downhole, and the only way they can see that is with our tools. So we had to prep our backup tools (the ones we've already prepped are slightly inaccessible right now) and then we have to go through the motions of putting them together, running them in the hole, tracking the depth of the drill bit, and reading the pressures. It's going to be a lot less work than a regular drilling run, and it's probably all going to happen during the daytime, so it doesn't affect me all that much....
but...
It still means I have to do some actual work between now and Tuesday morning. Sigh.

The Pride and Pitfalls of Ownership

Today I was thinking about the rig I'm currently on. I'm scheduled to go home in four days for my vacation, and the current plan is for me to come right back in two weeks once that is complete.

But I'm a little worried that they might just send me somewhere else. It's not too likely, since I am marked down as part of this crew, but there's a slim chance that some other job for a much more lucrative client will suddenly find itself short one crew member right about the time I return from my time off. The job will be desperate and will have already called the (short) list of available people, and will start trying to pull someone from the list of people who are unavailable, yet are not on a rig at the moment. Once they reach that second list, I am a prime target. I have a rig, but the rig has a full crew. My fellow crew members will appreciate me relieving one of them after my vacation, but it won't be necessary (unless one of them happens to have a medical or family emergency at precisely the same time).

This scenario of being pulled from my crew's rotation is all purely hypothetical and slightly paranoid conjecture, although if another job comes up out of the blue at the precise time that I come back from vacation, that is exactly what would happen. But this whole "what if" scenario reminded me of something that happened at my recruiting session for this job, and I've been thinking a lot about it this afternoon.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~Flashback to July 2007~*~*~*~*~*~

I was invited to Houston for a second interview after I had impressed them enough over my first telephone interview. This was to be in a group setting, with about 14 other science and engineering students and recent graduates from across the country. The whole thing lasted about 2.5 days, where they took us on tours of a couple of nearby land rigs, walked us through a small portion of the main campus just outside Houston, and gave us countless presentations on what the job was like, what the lifestyle was like, and what the benefits were like. They painted a rosier picture than I am currently experiencing, but they did try to include as much reality as possible.

They also tested us, not on paper, but in other ways. They took us out to dinner one night, and when we stumbled back into the hotel at about 11:30 pm, stuffed with yummy Tex-Mex and ready to call it a day, they herded us back into the conference room to start another round of interviewing. They finally let us go at about 5 am, with instructions to meet in the lobby at 8 am for our next rig tour. This was accompanied by a stack of forms requiring at least 1 hour to finish "in our free time". Ha. I however, recognized this cruel Darwinian experiment for the test it was, and after about 2 hours of sleep I made sure to be as bright-eyed and bushy tailed that morning as I could possibly be.

But the part I am particularly reminded was one of the first activities they had for us when we arrived. It was another test poorly disguised as an ice-breaker game. They divided us into teams, gave us each a stack of printer paper and some scotch tape, and told us that the goal was to build the tallest tower that held the most weight with those two materials. They warned us at the start that they might throw a wrench in the works "just to see how we react". Ha ha.

I had immediately come up with a brilliant idea. Maybe it was all those toy castles I built out of printer paper and scotch tape as a kid (really? I did that? Yep.), or maybe it was some awesome MIT engineering skills that had unknowingly worked themselves into my brain over the past four years. Regardless of the source my idea was stellar. As soon as my team got together I laid it out for them with barely contained enthusiasm. Since none of them had any other ideas they were interested in pushing for, they readily agreed to mine, and with a few tweaks here and there, we got to building.

The plan was to roll the sheets of paper up into tubes, tape them together like a honey-comb, create a whole bundle of them, then stack a sheet on top of the bundle and start the next layer. My teammates suggested we use 3 or 4 sheets per roll and about 10 sheets per top layer to add sturdiness. Since we had a pack of 500 sheets, I readily agreed.

About 2/3 of the way through the time limit, the recruiters made an announcement. They were going to shuffle around the teams a bit. They chose two or three people, myself included, and assigned them to a different team. My second team was building a tower similar to a telescoping tube: a skinny single structure with each subsequent stage only slightly skinnier than the last. I could tell immediately that this structure was of inferior design and construction, but I swallowed my criticisms and got to work.

It wasn't hard to see through to the underlying purpose of this exercise, which was to show the recruiters how good we were at fitting in to the team dynamic. So I simply asked my new team's leader what I could do to help, and got right to work doing exactly that. I offered a suggestion here and there, but made sure to keep myself from undermining their previous work.

In the end, my own idea and my first team's tower performed above and beyond all others. It reached just four inches short of the ceiling, stopped only by the time limit and the room's physical constraints. It was sturdy and strong, and held the recruiter's full coffee cup without even wavering. It would have held more weight, but there was nothing heavier than the coffee that would fit between it and the ceiling tiles.

My second team's tower couldn't even stand up on it's own.

But I smiled and congratulated my new teammates on a job well attempted, and the recruiters got us all together and explained how this was supposed to be a sort of a parallel to rig life. It is to be expected, they explained, that one might get pulled off of a job halfway through and sent to a new job with a new team, new rules, and a new command structure. You cannot expect to stay on a job indefinitely, no matter how much of an impact you have on it or how much they need you, and you can't let yourself get frustrated by that. At the time, it felt like they had almost been lecturing me, for I had been singled out (well, doubled or tripled out) to be moved from the team where I had provided such leadership.

I knew I had impressed the recruiters in multiple ways that afternoon by my engineering skills, my teamwork, my adaptability to change, for that had been the true purpose of the exercise. Perhaps I manipulated my behavior to match the circumstances, but that's what interviews are all about, right?

~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Return to present day~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Now I'm on the rig, looking forward to some time off, and I worry about what might happen once I'm gone. I was the first one sent out here, and I'm the only one of my crew who hasn't had some time at home since. It has been commented upon more than once by various crew members that this job is very well organized; all the files are kept in their proper place, all our reports are up to date, all of our forms are filled out fully and accurately, and they know to attribute those accomplishments to me. As one person said, "Wow, this is really detailed. Oh right, there's a girl out here" (The implication being that a male would cut corners?)

In some ways I consider myself the grease that keeps the gears of our job turning. I know this rig well, I know the crew, I know all the computers, tools, and crazy little quirks of our operations. I've been the one to teach all the new arrivals where everything is, how it all works, and who to ask (and when to ask them) to get things done. I'm afraid the job would suffer in some ways (perhaps insignificantly, but suffer nonetheless) were I to never come back, and what's more, I want to come back. I want to see this through to the end. But I have to remember the paper-tower exercise, and remind myself that my desires are not going to be considered by my office should they need me somewhere else. It's almost tempting to stay on this rig until we finish drilling in roughly a month's time....

But I also want to get to Boston next week. So I'm just going to hope for the best, and screen my phone calls from the office.

Self-preservation vs. Self-promotion

I am in the middle of a pleasantly lazy night. We finished drilling our last section 2 days ago, and I'm in the blissful state of standing by. This, however, is purely by luck of the timing.

They pulled the entire drilling assembly out of the hole last night. Between one thing and another, the tools I am responsible for were not out of the hole until after my shift ended at 6am. I could have stayed up late and helped out, but the 3rd hand had gone to bed early the night before to wake up just for that purpose. Plus I was ready -- after a long night of doing nothing -- to go to bed and relax.

When I came on shift tonight at 6pm, they had finished processing all of the data and were halfway through uploading it to town. I had managed to miss just about all of the work.

A lot of the work done today I could probably do blindfolded I have done it so many times. But there's this tool that uses sound waves to analyze the formation which I have only seen a couple of times, and it would have been useful for me to get another practice round processing and analyzing its data. But did I really want to lose that much sleep? Goodness knows how long it would take, and I'd still have to cover the night shift as well.

Soon this will have to change. I am fast approaching my next promotion which involves being authorized to be the lead hand on a nuclear job. Nuclear cell managers are legally responsible for the radioactive source inside the tool, and are notoriously sleep-deprived. Being a cell manager in any case can be an exercise in insomnia if you have a poor night hand -- in such cases you need to stay awake as long as you possibly can and pray that your night hand doesn't mess it all up while you're asleep in your chair.

In the meantime I feel like I may be letting down my lead hand for not staying up to help out more today, and not intending to do so tomorrow. Our next shipment of tools will be arriving in the morning, a couple hours after I expect to go to bed. I also feel like I'm letting down myself for not making more of an effort to learn what I can about the sound-wave tool, but I suppose I don't feel so bad that I'm going to stay up 24 hours a day...

After 3 weeks offshore with so little downtime however, I consider myself entitled to making sleep a priority. I can just kid myself and say I'll work doubly as hard on my next hitch!

The Audit Results

We were supposed to have an audit last week. I am constantly hearing news stories of people getting punished/fired/incarcerated for inappropriate postings on the internet so I'm going to try to refrain from including much of the "office gossip" that was surrounding this audit, but I must mention that there was A LOT of it.

Let's just say it was suggested that our auditor had an agenda.

The audit was postponed because the heliport they were flying out of in Galveston, TX was covered in thunderstorms last week. We found out yesterday that they were planning on coming in today. Fortunately we were nearly ready last week, and only had a few minor items to check off before we'd be completely ready for today.

All in all, we did wonderfully. We scored a 91 or 92 out of 100 points, depending on how you count it. Most of the points we missed were because they quizzed our poor trainee on all sorts of standards and procedures not 30 minutes after he got off the helicopter.

I was the luckiest of all. I got to sleep through the entire thing! One of our managers had called me at the end of my night shift, and mentioned that it was raining again in Galveston so they might be delayed. I took that as my cue to not wait up for them, was asleep by 8am (they arrived at 8:30, darn! haha), and they left a good 3 hours before I was up and about this afternoon.

We finished drilling early this morning, so now I just have to wait until our tools are out of the hole before I have any more work to do. It's going to be an easy night, and I for one could use the rest.

The Countdown Begins

I know when I'm going to leave the rig. This knowledge, although useful for planning my life (or what remnants of a life I have outside the Gulf of Mexico), serves no better purpose than to begin the interminable countdown until the final day.

I may be wrong, but the above paragraph seems to imply that I can't stand my job. There are times when I hate, loathe, and wish I never had my job, but for the most part I'm satisfied with where I am right now (for now--this job is not forever). But it's a fact of oilfield life that EVERYONE counts down till the day they get to go home. There are a few exceptions, and those mainly involve marital troubles which make work an escape from stress at home.

The magic day for me is October 6th, which will be four weeks and one day after I first arrived here. I'm so used to it that the length of time doesn't surprise me, but in an abstract way a month is quite a long time to be away from home.

That's a month's rent that I paid for my house to sit and be vacant. Granted, the rent is very reasonable and I love my house enough that it is well worth it. It's also a month's fees for the lawn guy to cut my grass that I didn't see. If I leave it until I get home from the rig, the neighbors will complain to my property managers -- I got quite a stern warning last summer when I was in Texas for 9 weeks. It's a month of car payments and insurance that went unutilized, internet bills and utility bills....

It's an odd life to be away from home for such long stretches. Last autumn was even worse, when I was off in Wyoming for 6 weeks at a time. After each hitch I came home for two weeks, but I spent a significant of that time in Boston and Philadelphia for fun and holidays.

In fact, on my upcoming time off I have a vacation scheduled to fly to Boston to meet with my MIT professors who are writing recommendation letters for my graduate school applications. This of course brings to mind another countdown; the countdown of months I still intend to work in the oilfield. That's right, months. By this time next year (barring my plans fail utterly), I will be off on my next great adventure and in another life I never expected I'd have.

In the meantime I have one week, three days, and six hours left on this piece of steel.