The Opposite of That

It is a flaw of mine to be overly concerned with how other people perceive me. This can sometimes be beneficial, for it makes me more diligent and conscientious in my work, but it can also lead me to overly stress out about my mistakes.

I have had the good fortune to be working on a deepwater rig running high-tier tools with two other women from my company, whom I truly respect and like.

Unfortunately I keep making mistakes. I cannot seem to go an entire 12-hr shift without doing something (or forgetting something) of dire consequence (or importance). This is surprisingly easy to do, because of the great deal of scrutiny paid to each detail of this job due to the expense of deepwater work.

Each time one of my mistakes or omissions is found out, I see my coworkers' eyes widen in what I assume to be horror.

- "You forgot to check the resistance between each tool and it's extender lead?!"
- "You let the rig crew take the sensor down without supervising them?!?!"
- "You wrote what in that email?!!!?!!!?!!!"

I try to avoid making too many excuses, but I can't help trying to defend myself in what seems to be an unreasonably catastrophic loss of my esteem in their eyes. This morning, for example, the aforementioned sensor had just been removed and replaced by the rig crew, and alas, not yours truly. The subsequent re-calibration of said sensor proved unsuccessful so I went up to the rig floor, shaken and cringing from the minor hysteria my day-hand experienced when I told her of my actions.

I spent the next two hours (past the time I was supposed to be in bed already) troubleshooting the 30 lb solid steel sensor. I dragged a replacement up the 3 flights of stairs and hooked it up. No luck. I tried a backup sensor cable which happened to be handy, and went back and forth from the phone to the plug about 6 times to see if I had plugged it into the right place. No dice. I tried the backup cable with the original sensor. No chance. I then got to spend about 45 minutes crawling through the grease, the grime, and the slightly caustic drilling fluid running a new cable. When I plugged it in guess what happened! No signal!

Sigh. Or scream. Yes, a great big ROAR of frustration might be appropriate at that moment.

My day hand came up to the rig floor to see what else we could check. Then we went to the series of plugs where all our sensors are plugged in and she asked:

"Where did you plug it in?"
I point where.
"That's the wrong plug. It's the one right below it."
"No it's not; I followed the mnemonic!"
"The Horse Died Placing 12th?"
"No! It's 'The Dead Horse Placed 12th'"
and so on and so forth.... until I realized I was wrong.
At least we were both able to laugh about it.

I think the moral of the story is that my day hand needs to come to the terms with the fact that I'm not perfect. I'm still learning, and I'm GOING to make mistakes.

Either that or come up with a better mnemonic that isn't so easy to flip around. I'm currently leaning towards: "Theo Huxtable Didn't Pass 12th [grade]". No way I can flip the H & the D around on that one!