Swag

I feel like a celebrity being showered in products by companies grateful for them to advertise their logos. In addition to the countless pieces of my own company paraphernalia I've been gifted with over the past year (Baseball Caps, Tshirts, A Lunch Cooler, Mints, Keychains, Pens, etc), I have now begun to acquire a fair amount from the oil companies whose rigs I've been working on.

Recently I received a very nice, very expensive looking windbreaker embroidered with a colorful logo apparently designed for the particular well I had been working on in Wyoming. I had once put my name, address, and jacket size down on a piece of paper sometime back in October, and this was the result. (Unfortunately this jacket is actually waaaayyy to big for me. Any interest in it, Dad?)

I've also gotten these forms in the mail for "Safety Points" I can redeem in reward for my participation at all of the Wyoming Rig's safety meetings. I ordered a set of coveralls with my name and the Evil Oil Company's logo embroidered on them. I figured I'd wear them to my own office one day just to weird everybody out. These coveralls, unfortunately, have yet to arrive.

One thing that did arrive from my safety points form, however, was a 48-quart Coleman Cooler. There was a really random selection of items to choose from, and I found that to be the most potentially useful. It's currently sitting in a closet awaiting summer tailgate season.

The biggest surprise, however, was also sitting on my doorstep yesterday. It was a small box addressed from the same company that sent out the other safety awards, and until I opened it I thought it must contain the missing pair of coveralls. The unexpected contents, however, included a travel coffee mug with the same colorful logo that had been embroidered on the expensive jacket. What really made my jaw drop, however, with the incredibly un-useful awesomeness of the gift, was the high quality pewter belt buckle in the image of that same logo.



Oh yeah, and my mail arrived with another form for 30 more safety points to redeem for anything from a crock-pot to a pair of Evil Oil Company Logo-embroidered overalls.

Veggie Update

I haven't written about vegetables in a while. Frankly, there's not been much to say about them. As far as I can tell, these are the only vegetables they serve on the rig in order of frequency:

Corn off the Cob
Collard Greens
Peas & Carrots
Brussel Sprouts
Broccoli
Grean Beans

And there is typically a bowl of salad in the refrigerator consisting of iceberg lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers, a lifesaver of a dish for me on days like "Fried Seafood Fridays" where they serve all sorts of deep-fried water-dwellers, beans and rice. No other veggies.

So I've been able to live up to my resolution thus far. I've gotten quite used to forking down a fair-sized pile of collard greens with most meals, and I always look forward to dinner on Tuesdays and Saturdays when they serve broccoli, and I often end up filling half of my entire plate with it.

To be honest, I think it will be much harder for me to ensure I get my needed amount of greens when I'm at home, simply because my shopping habits are so odd these days. I almost never know how long I'll be in town, so I have to buy food based on "either I know I'll eat all of this in the next 36 hours, or it better have a shelf life of 6 weeks". Unfortunately I tend to eschew legumes frequently due to their likelihood of being left in the refrigerator to STANK it up while I'm offshore.

I think more frozen items may be the way to go.

P.S. My cold is gone, Yay!

Waiting!

It's confirmed. I'm leaving the rig Monday.

That will be 4 weeks and 3 days offshore. It doesn't beat my record for working in Wyoming for my previous 5-week stretches, but the difference between land & offshore is strongly felt. One cannot leave an offshore rig to go grocery shopping or to just travel around the Rocky Mountains if they're not drilling that day. Out here, my daily routine is limited to my cramped trailer (4 bunk beds in a room, and just barely enough room to squeeze between), my cramped office-box, the helipad where I sometimes take a circuitous stroll (circumference: 120 paces), and the galley for meals. I could sit in the TV room to while away a few hours, but I'm not so interested in the near 24-7 showings of NASCAR and NFL. Just about anywhere else requires me to wear steel-toed boots, hard hat, etc, and not meant for leisure hours.

Needless to say, I'm eager to head home in the appointed 72 or fewer hours. So thus begins the interminable wait until departure. Now that the date is set, I cannot help the countdown dancing through my head, nor the visions of Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans (which I will make it back JUST in time for), nor plans for my upcoming vacation next week to England...

In other news, today I had to skirt the fine line between giving the client what he wants and surpassing the bounds of what I'm willing/capable to do. He wanted me to take our directional data and estimate where we'll end up when we've drilled to our final depth, which is typically a Directional Driller responsibility, and in fact is something that I am completely un-trained on. I was at first pretty uncomfortable doing this (I don't want to hand them a projection that looks rosy and then have them blame me if it doesn't turn out that way), but luckily my manager back at the office took that burden from my shoulders. And I gave our client a ROUGH estimate in the meantime to keep him happy. Yay me!

Plodding Along...

It's been just about four weeks that I've been on this rig for this hitch, with nary a reprieve. Luckily I have a vacation coming up soon, so I should be heading home within the next six or so days. And boy, do I ever want to not be here right now. A flu-epidemic swept our rig. I caught it, and while it's not so bad, I still have to deal with phlegmy coughs, a runny nose, and a big fat pile of fatigue. Not so much fun when I'm working 12+hour shifts.

In other news, haha! I spoke too soon! Less than 24 hours after coming back to life, our OTHER tool failed, so we had no more data at all. Then the drill bit gave out, so we pulled out of the hole. Today is the first day we've been back to drilling since then. In the meantime, well, I've been sick.

We also have an auditor out here today. She's a former field engineer who essentially got roped into the position of "rig auditor", and now that they're actually expecting business to really, truly, surely start slowing down ... any day now! the office is starting to focus a lot more on Service Quality. We were on top of the list because of all our tool failures. The audit is now about 90% done, and things look good for me (I did a self-audit last week, so I was very well prepared), and hopefully the office will get a lot of warm fuzzy feelings when reading my review.

The directional drillers went home. They're expensive, so now that we're in a section of the well where the direction we're going in isn't alllllll that important, the company decided to quit paying for them.

Now hopefully I'll get a replacement for me sent out here before Mardi Gras so I can hit up some of the local festivities. They have something like 10 parades in the city of Lafayette over the course of the past week or so!

It must have been 24-hr Voodoo

Interestingly enough, this morning just before the start of my shift, our dead tool magically revived itself! We were all very confused, because this defies all logic governing how our tools work. It's now been working for the past 10 hours without a single hiccup, so I can say that our tool has indeed been resurrected.

I'm confused, but pleasantly so.

A day of Ill luck

Happy Friday the 13th! I woke up this morning, dashed of to the safety meeting for which I was late for, and when questioned about operations I said "Things look good; drilling ahead!" cheerfully and full of optimisim.

What I did not know, was that an hour before, we had lost communication with one of our tools downhole. Another tool failure. Sigh.

The odd part is, that we haven't lost communication with the tool below it. You see we have 3 tools all connected. The one at the top sends the data uphole. The one in the middle measures the characteristics of the formation. And the one at the bottom, under the aegis of the directional drillers, steers the well. Strangely enough we can still see the data from the tool at the bottom of the stack, even though we've lost all communication with the tool in the middle. This contradicts the very laws of our tools!

The oil company running the rig has decided they wanted to keep drilling ahead anyway. There's a fair chance that our tool is still taking measurements and recording them in its memory, so we'll probably have good data once we pull out of the hole and download its memory. But in the meantime we are drilling ahead sooooooooo slowwwwwwly, that since I have only one tool to monitor now, my responsibilities are now close to nothing.

Time to pick up a new book to read...

1 Year

Today marks exactly one year from the day I started working in this company, and it's been one doozy of a year.

I remember leaving Boston and flying to Houston the day before. I was excited to be starting my new job, but inexpressibly sad at what was the inevitable end of the recent era in my life. I remember arriving at the hotel in Houston the night before orientation began, unpacking my suitcases, and ordering Greek food for dinner. As I waited for my food to arrive, I sat down on the sofa and curled up in a ball and stared into space. I was terrified. I was finally out on my own, and I was more scared than I could ever remember being. But after a few self-indulgent minutes in the fetal position, I gave myself a mental shake and pep talk. One day at a time. I can handle it.

It's now been 366 days (it was a leap year!), and I've come a long way. I'm still scared a lot of the time because this job likes to throw a lot of curve balls my way, but at least I now know what to expect. Let's revisit a few of the highlights from my year:

For work was sent to 3 states I had never been to before, bringing my total up to 23, so I can no longer say that I've been to more countries than I have US States (I've been to 22 countries). I was drenched by a stunning waterfall in the Ozarks, saw Old Faithful erupt in Yellowstone, and I went skydiving over the fields of Texas.

I spent the 4th of July kayaking through the bayous of Louisiana. I spent my birthday exploring Little Rock, Arkansas. I spent Labor Day on the beach in Duxbury, MA. I went to my office in Lafayette on Halloween dressed in a costume I had made and won a prize. I ate deep-fried Turkey on a rig in Wyoming on Thanksgiving. I spent Christmas in Pennsylvania with my family, and I went to bed at 7pm on New Year's Eve so I could be up for the start of my shift on an offshore rig at 6am the next day.

I certainly look forward to sitting down next year to write about all the interesting things I've done. With any luck the list will be twice as long and ten times as interesting!

The REAL Work Part.

I suppose I shouldn't have complained about having so little to do, for now it looks like I'm going to get a lot busier (for at least a couple of days). This afternoon, the rate of penetration dropped to less than half of what it had been before, and to one fifth of what they would prefer to be drilling at, so they have decided to pull the drilling assembly out of the hole and go back in with a new bit and new tools.

This is where I get really busy. When my tools come out of the hole after drilling, I have to stand on the rig floor and watch the rig crew take them apart to make sure they don't un-torque them at the wrong spot and thus expose the sensitive electronics to the elements. Then I have to plug into the tools and download their recorded memory, and process the data. I always have to make sure to keep my fingers crossed that the downloading goes well, and that the data is intact and accurate. Millions of things can go wrong with our tools while we're drilling, and we don't know any of it for sure until we see what they recorded.

Then I process the data, which if its problem free, only takes a couple of hours of clicking buttons on the computer screen. If there are problems, it can take up to a number of days and involve many calls to the office to troubleshoot.

Then, of course, since we're probably going to be running a new drilling assembly back in the hole, I have to have our fresh tools already prepared. I have to load the batteries (which requires multiple pieces of 50 lb+ equipment to do), program them, wait for the rig to be ready to pick them up, and then program them again. This, of course, has to happen *before* the old tools are even out of the hole, because they will want to take our new tools and go right back in as soon as the old drilling assembly is all the way out.

There's only one problem with that right now: the drilling company doesn't know what kind of tools they want to run yet. And until they do, I can't call my office to ask them to send tools, which means the technicians can't start preparing the next set of tools we're going to need, which means I don't even know if the tools we're going to need are available, which means....

It's a delicate dance. I am waltzing along with the music, but I can't quite seem to find the beat.

Twiddling my Thumbs

I'm bored.
I'm really, really, really bored. I've been bored for days, and the prospects don't look to be improving anytime soon. We're currently drilling, and at this rate, we expect to be drilling for another day and a half before they pull everything out of the hole. And then, we might just go right back in again! That means more boredom. DAYS MORE.

Typically my default plan for passing the day involves reading all the internet newspapers and magazines I can get my hands on, but I am so SICK of hearing about the economic stimulus plan, I have decided a media blackout might be necessary for my sanity. I tried ignoring just the stimulus-related coverage, but skimming the headlines is even worse than reading the articles, and so I am done with it. I am done with it all.

I have dozens of eBooks I can download, but I'm currently stuck in the middle of one that is simultaneously insipid and aggravating, and yet I suffer from the inability to put it down and pick up another, more entertaining title.

I'm getting RSI from all the computer solitaire I've been playing. I even sneakily watched a few episodes of TV yesterday from a disc that I accidentally left in my CD-ROM drive when I came out to the rig. I had been conscientiously avoiding watching them, but yesterday I broke. There's only one episode left that I haven't seen yet. I don't think I'm going to last long.

I have a large number of online training courses I need to complete in order to keep my work certifications up to date. I've been trying, but the satellite internet out here is shoddy enough that despite the hours I have spent on them while out here, I have yet to complete a certification quiz and submit it successfully without my connection resetting itself.

I am COMPLETELY up-to-date on the job's End Of Well report. This is a series of documents that are not submitted to the client until the completion of drilling operations. It is incumbent on the engineers currently working on the job, however, to update all of those documents continuously throughout the run, so as to minimize the amount of preparation time necessary to complete it once its due. No one is ever completely up-to-date on End Of Well. THAT is how bored I am.

Downsizing

Some of you have heard recently about my company going through layoffs. In January they let about 5% of employees go, worldwide. Now in my position, that causes barely a ripple, for having such a demanding and lifestyle-disrupting job, there is a great deal of turnover every year. In fact, it's routine to fire about 5% of the field employees every year, not just in times of economic crisis. And from the things that I've heard, the people they let go from the field were consistent under-performers, and should have been concerned for their job in any case.

But that was not why I started this post. I wanted to share with you all the AMAZING euphemism one of our managers used to describe these layoffs in an office-wide email. He called it, and I quote, "a performance-based group separation exercise." Have fun twisting your minds around that little piece of circumlocution (thank you, www.thesaurus.com for that wonderfully apt word).

AAARRRGGHHHH!!!

Ohhhh the frustration!

Pardon me while I exercise the catharsis of blog-writing to vent my extreme outrage. With any luck I will spread the outrage to you, my dear readers, and we may commiserate together on the injustices of certain people.

A few days ago, I entered the training room on the rig for the morning safety meeting. It had not started yet, but the safety officer was already talking fervently to the rig crew. When I sat down and started to listen, I realized that he was preaching (with plenty of religious references) on the horrors of President Obama's economic stimulus plan. The driller and one of the rig hands were trying to get him to finish his lecture so we could start the meeting, and he kept resisting them, saying, "I'll hurry up, I'll hurry up."

Well he didn't go over the official start time of the meeting by more than a minute or so, but he finished with an entreaty for everyone "when you get home to call up your congressman and tell him to vote 'NO'!" I was so disgusted that I felt a strong, and nearly uncrushable impulse to walk out of the meeting that minute. Now looking back on it, I wish I had.

I have not sufficiently analyzed the details of the stimulus package well enough to be able to say whether or not I think it a good one, so my personal opinions were not what caused my disgust. I was more outraged at man's abuse of his authority by executing his political campaign before the meeting that he runs, to a captive audience required to attend said meeting. I found it a vastly inappropriate venue, and I vowed to myself that I would apprise him of such later that day.

Fast forward to that afternoon, I had like a coward procrastinated the moment of confrontation, and was still vowing to walk down there at any minute and express my concerns, when my tool failed and I became caught up in a mire of troubleshooting and paperwork that took me days to sort through. Needless to say the necessary confrontation did not take place.

Yesterday was a crew change, so the rig crew went home and was replaced by another crew. The safety men, however, seem to work on a different rotation, because the safety official in question was still on board. Sure enough, he made the same speech to the men this morning that he made the other day, and this afternoon I mustered the courage to speak to him about it.

I made the case that I found his venue in which presenting his opinions inappropriate, and I tried as much as I could to prevent it becoming an issue of opinions. He then steamrolled me with the fervency of his beliefs, saying that he should be able to share his opinions "with his men", and offered to avoid discussing it in my presence. I was momentarily lulled by that promise before I realized that, no, my concern was with him preaching before groups at all. I'm fine with one-on-one discussions, where people are on an equal footing and therefore able to hash out their disagreements, but the way he brings it up to the rig crew prior to the safety meeting leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

And that was the end result. I was able to make no further progress with him save that he won't be discussing such topics in my presence, which was *not* my intended goal.

I had originally meant to only discuss this with him, since he seemed like a congenial man who would be willing to see how he had behaved inappropriately, but now I'm seriously considering to discussing it with a higher-up. Sigh.