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.