Shiftlessness

Since I arrived on the rig for this hitch 5 days ago, I've been the "3rd hand" out here. So instead of working either the day shift or the night shift, I instead straddle the two, working 12pm to 12am beside whoever else was actually on shift at the time.

All of my previous jobs were not as important as this job, and the goal was always to promote me to night hand as fast as possible. Thus my total time spent as 3rd time adds up to roughly 1.5 weeks over the past 14 months on the job, and it's an amusing change to go back to being 3rd hand, especially now that I'm not being crammed full of information so as to enable me to run the night shift by myself asap. I'm essentially a fifth wheel and I get to perform all those oh-so-enjoyable tasks which are the oilfield equivalent to "making coffee".

Most of this involves paperwork. I have been in charge of the piles and piles of all the computer-based reporting systems which roughly equates to filling out reams of electronic forms. One after the other after the other....

The other is batteries. Before the tool goes in the hole, and once it comes out, one of the most onerous tasks is unloading and loading the batteries. These are 30inch long tubes that weigh about 10lbs each, and each tool takes 2. There are various hand-tools required to accomplish this task, and they're mostly large, awkward, 55lb pieces I get to lug back and forth across the rig deck. The entire battery assembly has to be torqued up to 1000ft-lbs once they're in the tool, and I've performed this task countless times in the past few days. 2 battery-powered tools just came out of the hole, and 2 battery-powered tools are being prepped to go back in the hole, so my past few days have been a blur of batteries going in and out of tools and infinite numbers being punched into excel spreadsheets.

I'm trying to glean bits of knowledge about all the various processes my lead hand has been working on, since we're running a tool I've never worked with before, but I am figuratively (and literally, haha) at sea. Each task, whether it's programming, or quality checking, or processing the data, is completely alien to me and the learning curve is starting to look like a cliff face I'm somehow expected to scale.

Thinking back to where I was a year ago is of great comfort, however, because I was in the exact same situation there when trying to learn the piles of information expected of me for the tools which I can now practically run in my sleep. It's all a matter of perspective, of course.

Sigh. The new directional driller, my current office-mate, is punishing me for having to listen to the cheesy movie I watched yesterday by playing his conservative financial news radio program. It's definitely time to dig my headphones out of the bottom of my bag.

Ahhh, the humor. The show's guest suggested we "burn female US senators to generate BTUs" as a form of alternative energy. WHERE ARE MY DARN HEADPHONES???!!