Self-preservation vs. Self-promotion

I am in the middle of a pleasantly lazy night. We finished drilling our last section 2 days ago, and I'm in the blissful state of standing by. This, however, is purely by luck of the timing.

They pulled the entire drilling assembly out of the hole last night. Between one thing and another, the tools I am responsible for were not out of the hole until after my shift ended at 6am. I could have stayed up late and helped out, but the 3rd hand had gone to bed early the night before to wake up just for that purpose. Plus I was ready -- after a long night of doing nothing -- to go to bed and relax.

When I came on shift tonight at 6pm, they had finished processing all of the data and were halfway through uploading it to town. I had managed to miss just about all of the work.

A lot of the work done today I could probably do blindfolded I have done it so many times. But there's this tool that uses sound waves to analyze the formation which I have only seen a couple of times, and it would have been useful for me to get another practice round processing and analyzing its data. But did I really want to lose that much sleep? Goodness knows how long it would take, and I'd still have to cover the night shift as well.

Soon this will have to change. I am fast approaching my next promotion which involves being authorized to be the lead hand on a nuclear job. Nuclear cell managers are legally responsible for the radioactive source inside the tool, and are notoriously sleep-deprived. Being a cell manager in any case can be an exercise in insomnia if you have a poor night hand -- in such cases you need to stay awake as long as you possibly can and pray that your night hand doesn't mess it all up while you're asleep in your chair.

In the meantime I feel like I may be letting down my lead hand for not staying up to help out more today, and not intending to do so tomorrow. Our next shipment of tools will be arriving in the morning, a couple hours after I expect to go to bed. I also feel like I'm letting down myself for not making more of an effort to learn what I can about the sound-wave tool, but I suppose I don't feel so bad that I'm going to stay up 24 hours a day...

After 3 weeks offshore with so little downtime however, I consider myself entitled to making sleep a priority. I can just kid myself and say I'll work doubly as hard on my next hitch!