The Difficulties I've Faced....

The engineer who I had been working with since before New Year's on this offshore job was scheduled to have a vacation last week, so he was training me to become "Cell Manager" of the job so he could leave me in charge and take his vacation. This was going to be a bit of a challenge, because the person they had slated as my Night Hand had not actually gotten his promotion to Night Hand, and had not actually held an entire night shift on his own. So in addition to it being my first time in charge, I was also going to have to stay up extra late and wake up extra early so as to ensure that he was handling the job competently. Yikes.

So I guess I wasn't too disappointed to find out that my intended Night Hand got sent on another job the day before I came back from standby. But I did have to go in to the office to find another Night Hand, since he had failed to inform them that they were technically "stealing" him from my rig. The only people that were in town and available to work were either a bit more experienced than me, or a LOT more experienced than me. They sent the guy that had only 6 months more experience then me out to be my Night Hand.

So first thing I do when I get out here is to power up our unit, and get our computers turned on. Of course I mess that up. This is the first rig I've worked on that has me working in a pressurized unit, which keeps flammable gases out of the computer equipment, and keeps me from blowing up the rig. Now I've learned how to turn on the pressurization system before, but I've never actually done it on the rig, so OF COURSE I do it wrong. My night hand fixes it for me, and I make a note to myself to practice on the units they re-kit at the office next time I'm in town (Minus 100 points for Holly).

The next step is to turn the computers on, but we can't! There is a problem with their power supply! Not all the power in our unit is bad, however, because the lights are working. The air conditioning is working. It must be the box that all the computers are plugged into which has a battery to keep the computers powered for 30 minutes in case the pressurization system trips the power shut-off while we're drilling. That box is beeping and not fully turning on, so something's wrong with it. But there's not much troubleshooting we can do. We have to call the office for suggestions, or get them to send a new one ASAP, but our satellite phone has no power either! And we're offshore, so cellphone reception is not at its best. We're trying to figure out alternate solutions, and halfway started on rewiring our entire unit when my Night Hand sees that one of the circuit breakers is tripped. Problem solved. Sigh. (Minus 1000 points for Holly)

I did solve one problem on my own, *pat on the shoulder*. The mice and the keyboards for 2 of our 3 computers were working, but NOT working. It was a conundrum which was fixed when I rebooted all three machines. Yay me (Plus 5 points).

So we had everything up and running, and our next object was to get our tools ready to go in the hole on the next drilling run. We loaded the batteries and programmed the first tool, but when we plugged into the second tool, it blew a fuse in the box that connects it to the computer! That has never happened to me before, so I had no idea what was going on. When my night hand pulled out the fuse to see if it had shorted, I gawked at him like he was performing magic (Minus 10 points for Holly).

Hours later, we have shorted about a dozen fuses in attempting to diagnose the problem, and we are down to our last 2. We have been working with the office to check everything and anything it could be, and we only have one possibility left. It could, maybe, Poooooosssibly (but not very likely), be one of the cables that's causing the short. Sure enough, it is, and we're lucky enough that minus the faulty 300-ft long cable, we still have enough length in the rest of our cables to reach all the way to our tools so we can plug into them (barely). (No points for anyone on this one, except the Directional Driller who told us how to check the cables)

It went on like that for a while, and I think I ended up with somewhere around the neighborhood of -35,725 points by the weekend's finish. But I guess that negative net worth somehow translates into having learned something at some point along the road, hopefully.