Happy Halloween!

Greetings on All Hallow's Eve from the oilfield!


It's a simple sort of costume (since I still have to wear my flame-retardant coveralls, my hard hat, safety glasses, etc.), but it certainly livened up things out here. Unfortunately I was the only one to dress up on this rig, but I still got a pretty decent haul in trick-or-treating around the offices. One thing there's never a shortage of offshore: candy.

I hope everyone back on land is having a festive time!
Love,
Holly

My life is like a Game... literally

Rough seas today!

I noticed after I went to bed last night that the rig seemed to be rocking at a higher than average amount. Sure enough, when I went to the evening meeting after found out that the heaving of the rig was so extreme that it made drilling unsteady enough that we need to pull out. They hope that we'll be able to drill the extra 1500 feet we didn't finish on our next bit run without any problems. I guess we'll see.

In the meantime I'm just hanging out, getting odds and ends taken care of at a leisurely pace since I have little real work to do tonight. Lucky for me my queasiness is far below that of earlier, when I was a poor wretch of a landlubber on my first day at sea. I was walking across the deck earlier this evening so I could fetch myself a sandwich from the galley when I made a marvelous discovery.

The mere act of walking around is reminiscent of those old marble labyrinth games which so frustrated me. Only out here instead of holes to fall into there are countless pieces of heavy machinery that are not fun to tangle with.

Most of the time it's nothing like this, but for this past week we've had some pretty rough weather, and the Maritime Weather report predicts tomorrow will be worse. So now, when you want to think of me, you can just pull out one of these:

More Birdwatching

I don't know how I missed this when I first arrived on shift this afternoon, but when I turned around in my chair I looked out the window and saw this!


Do you see all those birds? I noticed a flock of them flying overhead when I was about to go to bed this morning, and apparently they decided to take a rest on the huge reels of steel anchor cable just outside my unit.


I decided to go outside and take a closer look.



I walked towards the cable reels slowly with my camera out.


There were a lot more birds than I originally thought!


When I got even closer, they got antsy and started to take flight


Quickly they all took off and flew to another spot on the rig for rest.


My coworkers made fun of me for seeming so interested in the birds, but in my opinion, anything that isn't made of steel out here is a thing of novelty.

Don't Shoot, Troubleshoot!

Today was an interesting day at work. And by interesting, I mean that lots of stuff went wrong. My job can be very, very easy when nothing goes wrong, but this is the oilfield. Something ALWAYS goes wrong.

Today we installed a new sensor, found out it didn't work, lost signal about a dozen times to our tool, had two unsuccessful attempts to reprogram it while drilling before the third time worked, and got some really terrible looking data from downhole that we spent hours trying to tidy up. And we just unjammed a week's worth of clogged paper from our log printer. Yes, a week. The last page I pulled out had the date "October 21, 2009" printed on it.

So in case you couldn't tell, a lot of the work I do involves troubleshooting any one of a thousand different problems. Which (like my post about job ownership) reminds me of my interview for this job.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~Flashback to July 2007~*~*~*~*~*~

It was the second floor conference room at a Hilton on the outskirts of urban Houston, located in the middle of a thriving? Middle-Eastern and Indian neighborhood. It was two o'clock in the morning and I was full of the delicious Tex-Mex and Margaritas they had treated us to for dinner. But we were not about to go to bed, we were about to start our first real interviews of the "interview weekend" they had arranged for us.

It was an open forum, and they would ask us all a selection of questions as we took turns standing in front of the entire group. I, as usual when speaking/performing in public in turns, volunteered to go first (I hate waiting for that sort of thing. It always makes me much more nervous and skittish when I finally do take the spotlight). But there was one question that they asked me that I was almost completely unprepared for, and I will never forget it.

They asked, "Have you ever had a MacGyver Moment? Describe a time when you fixed something with whatever resources you had available."

I could not think of a single instance. Actually, the problem was, I could think of one. Unfortunately it wasn't my story, it was my friend Janet's, and for the life of me my brain could not un-fix itself from Janet's story long enough to remember one of my own.

You see Janet had gone through the job-interview stage of college recently, and she had described to me an instance when she was in a bit of a bind shortly before a particular interview. She had no clean dress pants to wear, and was therefore planning to wear a skirt. But Janet played rugby and bruised easily and often so pantyhose were a necessity. Unfortunately for Janet, she could find no normal pantyhose in her room that were not full of runs. She could however, find a pair of flesh-colored thigh-high pantyhose. And since the fates were not making it easy for her, she could not find a garter belt. Searching about her room for anything that would serve, she set eyes on a box of paperclips on her desk and was quickly inspired to string them together for such a purpose. She was successful, made it to the interview on time, and was only frustrated that it seemed too inappropriate to describe such an example of her problem-solving skills to the interviewer at the moment.

So standing in front of the interviewers and a room full of fellow interviewees, I naturally thought it would be a much more appropriate time to tell such a story. I related the story as if I had been Janet, employing my theatrical skills to do so. Then and now I have felt strong pangs of guilt for perjuring myself in my interview but I do solve problems similarly, if not that particular problem.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Return to present day~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Today was a PERFECT example of a "MacGyver Moment" for me. There are four huge pumps that push the mud into the hole. The mud acts as a coolant, a lubricant, a safeguard against the borehole collapsing, a medium to transmit our data through, and many other things necessary to our operation. On each pump I installed a stroke counter sensor to monitor how fast the pistons are moving at any given time. Our computers take the strokes-per-minute that these sensors measure and calculate the gallons-per-minute being pumped downhole, and these are two very important numbers that we track throughout drilling operations.

These sensors are very simple devices, but not quite perfect for their environment. They are similar to the sensors pictured here (a photo I found on Google):
Our sensors are small digital counters mounted to C-Clamps like these shown above. Do you see that pointy metal stick that juts out? That rod is pointed down into the frightening part of the pump that houses the huge, fast pistons shooting back and forth as they pump. You line it up so that something on the piston hits the rod with each stroke, causing the sensor to record a tick as the rod moves.

The rod can move forward or backward and record a count each time. One of the major problems with this sensor is that if the rod moves too far, it will count twice as many strokes as its supposed to.

At one point throughout the evening, one of our stroke counters was going a little haywire. It was showing twice or three times as many strokes as we expected, so I went down to check on it.

The issue was not that the rod was being over-extended. In this case, the piston was hitting the sensor rod so fast that it bounced back and forth a number of times each stroke. The rod was dancing beautifully in the air and causing horrific things to our logs.

What should have looked like this (note the green lines in particular):

Looked like this:

We readjusted the arrangement of the pump stroke counter numerous times to see if a different alignment might ameliorate the problem. This had worked on previous occasions but it failed today. We were out of luck.

I sat in the my unit thinking to myself and brainstormed possible solutions. What if I attached some sort of mass to the end to slow it down? But no, that would create more of a pendulum-effect and would probably exacerbate the situation.

But then I had my epiphany. What about the reverse? What if I attached a mass to slow it down at the joint? My mind immediately scanned the itemized list of supplies we have available to us, and a quick glance around my unit afforded me a very "MacGyver" (if not particularly elegant) solution.

And so here you have it. I solved the problem with a wadded up paper towel and some electrical tape. And that was only because I was too lazy to fetch the duct tape. It might not work forever, but it will probably work at least until this well is drilled which is more than long enough.

Take that MacGyver! I've got more of your moments than you would know what to do with.

Ahh, what a work of art.

The Bug Guy

I learned the coolest new thing today. They have a paleontologist on the rig now. He analyzes samples of the formation cuttings we get while drilling. Why a paleontologist, you might ask? This paleontologist looks at the samples under microscopes to analyze fossils of the prehistoric bugs embedded in the rock to correlate what type of rock we are drilling through. When I thought about it a bit more, I realized that it was probably a pretty tedious job. People on the rig call him "The Bug Guy" cause he looks at bugs all day. But in my head I will forever call him "The Dinosaur Guy" -- even if it is an inaccurate epithet. Because right now I'm a 10-year old kid on my first trip to the real-life "Jurassic Park".

Post For Post's Sake

When I haven't posted a blog update in a while, you can usually attribute my 'radio silence' to one of three reasons:

1. I'm not on a rig and therefore have little to say about rig life.
2. I'm on a rig and ridiculously busy with work and have no time to write.
3. I'm on a rig and am bored out of my mind with no work to do and have nothing to write about.

Can you guess which one I'm experiencing now? Congratulations, number 3 it is with a bullet. For the past 3 nights I have entertained myself by various methods including but not limited to:

1. Reading articles on my favorite online news magazines
2. Cropping, labeling, and sorting my 1,500+ family photos I scanned from the collections in Duxbury
3. Napping

Well, it's 4:25 am on a Saturday morning, so I have 95 minutes left until my relief arrives to sit here and do nothing all day. I've finished my nap, I've run out of articles to read (there has GOT to be more news in the world. WHERE IS IT???), and I've completed what I thought would be a months-long project of organizing the collection of family photos. They're even arranged chronologically. Beginning in 1898. After that I even studied up a little on the nuclear tool we'll soon be running. Believe me, I'm reeeeallly bored.

So I decided I might as well write SOMETHING on the blog, if only to keep Eric entertained. (Hi Eric!)

So here's an update on the goings-on in oilfield world. They're too short to make a blog post about each, but compiled together they make a nice briefing of sorts:

• While home and in Boston on vacation, I barely managed to increase my vegetable intake. I cannot say for sure that I even had a whole serving per day, so my firm resolve to up my veggies fell flat on its face. But, I eat TONS of veggies on the rig with lunch & dinner, so I can justify it, right? right?
  
  
• The wind has been quite brisk out here and the rig continues to rock, but in the way of experience mariners I seem to have developed my sea legs and the nausea has abated. Or maybe that's my sea stomach.

• We have about 3000 more feet to drill before we reach the section where we plan to run the nuclear tools, so until then I'm getting plenty of sleep. At this rate, we might never get there because they accidentally injected enough extra cement to fill an unexpected 400 more feet of hole than they planned, and we have spent the past 3 days drilling through it (That's 3 million dollars in unplanned operations costs, roughly, for those keeping score). 100 more feeet to go and then I'll actually have some work to keep me from being so bored all night.

• The rig recently received a new treadmill for the gym to replace the one that hasn't worked since before I got here in September. Now I have something to do cardio on besides the stationary bike (or the person that was going to steal the bike has now vacated it for the treadmill, either way its a win!).

Tune in next week for your oilfield briefings! Thank you, and good night.

-- Radio Silence --

Nausea Ad Nauseam

The wind has been rather strong since I arrived on the rig yesterday, and the pitch and roll have been feeling it most acutely. Do you know what else has been feeling it acutely? My stomach.

I am for perhaps the first time in my life, seasick.

I never thought, as a child skipping over wave after wave on the open-air Whaler motorboat across Duxbury Bay, that I could ever get seasick. The sea was the most refreshing thing possible, and the waves we slammed into, careened over, and tossed merrily through could never cause me more distress than a sharp bump to my tuckus on a particularly bouncy crest.

But here, I sit in my 12' x 8' steel box, with the only window -- which looks out into the black night sea that I know is there but cannot discern -- at my back, I am experiencing the kind of disconcerting motions I never felt with the spray on my face and the seaweed streaming through my dangling fingers. The rocking here is gentle but on unpredictable axes. The swaying of the rig takes me unexpectedly and causes minor bouts of vertigo while I'm climbing stairs. One time during my last hitch after I had just finished a workout in the gym, the rocking caused such a mirror of dizziness in me that I was afraid I had pushed myself too hard and I was going to faint.

I should perhaps state that I am nowhere near the full-blown "heaving my breakfast over the railing" level of seasickness. Rather I am at the undulating nausea that hits my gut and my head in unpredictable waves (haha, waves). The facts that I have drunk 3 cups of green tea today and took a huge multivitamin on a not-quite-full stomach have probably not helped. In such situations, caffeine is not my friend. From a vast deal of experience in minor nausea from car trips, I find that water and sodium are my best remedies, and I recently downed a big cup of iced H20 and ate a bologna sandwich.

I'm feeling better already, but the swaying has redoubled in the past minute. Would turning away from the computer monitor help? Probably, but that doesn't mean I'll do it.

Another Day, Another Sleepless Night...

I was complaining to a friend yesterday about how I was almost switched over from night to day shift, but not quite. I realized that after I woke up at 11pm this evening and passed four more sleepless hours, that I am not even CLOSE to being "almost switched over from night to day shift". I am so far from it, I may as well be running the clock in reverse. It's not like it's going to make any sense to me either way.

I'm flying to Boston today for my eagerly anticipated vacation, but I have to drive the 2+ hours to the New Orleans airport to catch the plane that I booked at a much cheaper rate. I sincerely hope there is a coffee shop in the terminal open at 5 am, because I'm in the mood to hit the road now and I'll be needing someplace comfortable to crash with my laptop full of distractions for the 6 hours before my flight takes off.

I have discovered that when arriving at the rig, it takes me roughly 2-3 nights to reach the stage where it is no longer excruciatingly painful to stay awake from the proscribed 6pm-6am hours, but shifting back after arriving home takes no less than 1 - 1.5 weeks before I can make any sort of plans at times other than 2-7am that I can be assured to be awake for. By that estimate, I should be back to normal sometime between this coming Tuesday through Friday. My return flight is scheduled for early Sunday morning, and I expect to be back to the rig the Tuesday after.

Perhaps this is not the optimal state to be traveling to a different time zone in, but I can hardly get any worse, right? On second thought, scratch that statement. It is distressingly thick with what may be interpreted as a tempt to fate.

Irradiated

Congratulations to me! I received my radiation Level 2 Category 1 certification yesterday. This means I am certified to work with unshielded radioactive sources. Plus side: this is one of the biggest steps towards getting my next promotion. Minus side: I now have legal responsibility for any nuclear-related activities I am involved in since I have been deemed "educated enough to know better". So if something goes wrong and I am determined negligent, I could go to jail. Ha ha ha..... don't you love promotions?

Back in May and June when I was sent home from the rig for 5 weeks when it shut down for repairs, I spent a lot of time working on my nuclear certification. The way this certification is performed is through a checklist of tasks to be done in the office. Each tool that is run with a nuclear source must be calibrated prior to going on a job, and these calibrations are long, arduous processes typically lasting 4-6 hours on a good day. Finish four of these, four wipe tests (which ensure a source is not leaking), do a bunch of toolbox inventories and various other tedious tasks, and you're given a set of keys and a LOT more responsibility.

I didn't write any blog posts about it, because I was too darn tired. I was in the calibration shack for about 15 hours a day, which was mostly outside in the Louisiana summer heat. The "shack" has a roof, but no walls, and within a 15 hour period we got a lot of sun on our faces.

I nearly completed my certification in the early summer, but then I went off to school in Houston before I could get to the very last step. The last step was to learn about all the proper shipping paperwork. I tried scheduling it again and again, and was put off again and again, until I fiiiiinally was able to corner the instructor this week and get it done.

So as of this afternoon I'm done! Yay! My next step is to obtain a set of keys that open the locks to the source transfer shields and then I have to go on a "breakout job". There a current nuclear cell manager will let me run the job, evaluate how I do, and determine whether I'm ready or not to become a nuclear cell manager myself. After all, this certification I just received is only a piece of paper. They're not just going to stamp my sheet and send me out into the wilderness on my own. They need to make sure I'm actually fit to run a job before I'm allowed to do one on my own. And I have just two words to say to that...

THANK GOODNESS.

More Veggies, Please!

I've been doing pretty good so far this year at purposefully increasing my vegetable intake, but there is still one major flaw in my progress.

I am TERRIBLE at eating vegetables when I'm not on the rig.

At home, I get stuck in this "vacation" mentality. Since I'm not on the rig, I often overindulge in all my favorite vices, and the only time you're likely to see me pigging out on the green stuff is if I've just bought a couple bags of frozen edamame. If it weren't for those and my drug-of-choice (jalapenos), I wouldn't keep anything green in my refrigerator at all!

I will be home in just over 12 hours from now, and I am taking this opportunity to RENEW MY VOW to .... well... whomever it is one makes a vow when adopting a New Year's resolution. Myself! That's right! I'm renewing my vow to myself to EAT MORE VEGETABLES.

Even if it means eating a whole bag of edamame each day...

An Inadvertent Omission?

There is a catering company working on this rig that has been contracted by the drilling company. I have been told that working for the catering and cleaning crews on oil rigs is a popular back-to-work program for persons who have been formerly incarcerated. I have never inquired into the veracity of such claims, but I have noticed a significantly higher percentage of people on these crews with whole mouths full of gold teeth. It is something to behold.

But I digress from the point of my story. You see the catering company on this rig is a large and prosperous one, and they seem to be very concerned for the health and well being of their clientele. To promote these ends, they have publicity campaigns in place for displaying informational posters in and around the galley on how to take small, beneficial steps for improving yourself.

Most of these posters focus on exercise and eating right, but there is a poster that was just put up at the start of this month that has been intriguing me. It promotes handwashing, and it even lists a series of situations in which one should wash one's hands. They are as follows, verbatim:

• Before eating
• After smoking
• When they are dirty
• After coughing or sneezing
• After taking out the trash

I thought it admirable to encourage cleanliness among such a notoriously unclean environment as an oil rig, but something bothered me about this. Did it bother you too? They did not include in their list "After using the restroom".

Now at first I just brushed it off. I gave this poster writer the benefit of the doubt, assuming that the author failed to include it because it was unnecessary. Everyone is taught to wash their hands after using the bathroom. It's just too OBVIOUS.

But then I looked again, and my whole theory was blown out the window when I reread the phrase "When they are dirty". That's right. They are coaching us to wash our hands "When they are dirty", because that's not too obvious.

I am amused, I suppose. If I were to allow any other reaction, I suspect it would be "offended", but good gracious, let's not go there. So I shall remain amused.

Psych!

I had the most wonderful surprise when I was just about to go to bed the other day. Having completed my 5th to last hitch (which mostly involved surfing the web and watching movies -- we were between drilling runs), I found out that the hole liner they had run had not sealed properly. The liner (or casing, but the differences are not germane to this story) is a series of steel collars used to protect the freshly-drilled hole from collapsing. After we finish each drilling run, the rig runs casing or liner to the new deepest point and injects cement in between the casing/liner and the earth surrounding it.

Since the liner did not seal properly, the rig has to remove the liner, go in with a milling assembly to chop up all the pieces of the failed seal that were left behind, pull that assembly out, and then finally pick up the next set of tools for our next drilling run, and this couldn't have come at a better time for me. With just a few days left on the rig, sure! I'd love to sit around and watch more movies for those few days left! The slower they go, the happier I am.

But we found out just a few hours ago that they had decided that we had to work after all. They wanted to see the pressure downhole, and the only way they can see that is with our tools. So we had to prep our backup tools (the ones we've already prepped are slightly inaccessible right now) and then we have to go through the motions of putting them together, running them in the hole, tracking the depth of the drill bit, and reading the pressures. It's going to be a lot less work than a regular drilling run, and it's probably all going to happen during the daytime, so it doesn't affect me all that much....
but...
It still means I have to do some actual work between now and Tuesday morning. Sigh.

The Pride and Pitfalls of Ownership

Today I was thinking about the rig I'm currently on. I'm scheduled to go home in four days for my vacation, and the current plan is for me to come right back in two weeks once that is complete.

But I'm a little worried that they might just send me somewhere else. It's not too likely, since I am marked down as part of this crew, but there's a slim chance that some other job for a much more lucrative client will suddenly find itself short one crew member right about the time I return from my time off. The job will be desperate and will have already called the (short) list of available people, and will start trying to pull someone from the list of people who are unavailable, yet are not on a rig at the moment. Once they reach that second list, I am a prime target. I have a rig, but the rig has a full crew. My fellow crew members will appreciate me relieving one of them after my vacation, but it won't be necessary (unless one of them happens to have a medical or family emergency at precisely the same time).

This scenario of being pulled from my crew's rotation is all purely hypothetical and slightly paranoid conjecture, although if another job comes up out of the blue at the precise time that I come back from vacation, that is exactly what would happen. But this whole "what if" scenario reminded me of something that happened at my recruiting session for this job, and I've been thinking a lot about it this afternoon.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~Flashback to July 2007~*~*~*~*~*~

I was invited to Houston for a second interview after I had impressed them enough over my first telephone interview. This was to be in a group setting, with about 14 other science and engineering students and recent graduates from across the country. The whole thing lasted about 2.5 days, where they took us on tours of a couple of nearby land rigs, walked us through a small portion of the main campus just outside Houston, and gave us countless presentations on what the job was like, what the lifestyle was like, and what the benefits were like. They painted a rosier picture than I am currently experiencing, but they did try to include as much reality as possible.

They also tested us, not on paper, but in other ways. They took us out to dinner one night, and when we stumbled back into the hotel at about 11:30 pm, stuffed with yummy Tex-Mex and ready to call it a day, they herded us back into the conference room to start another round of interviewing. They finally let us go at about 5 am, with instructions to meet in the lobby at 8 am for our next rig tour. This was accompanied by a stack of forms requiring at least 1 hour to finish "in our free time". Ha. I however, recognized this cruel Darwinian experiment for the test it was, and after about 2 hours of sleep I made sure to be as bright-eyed and bushy tailed that morning as I could possibly be.

But the part I am particularly reminded was one of the first activities they had for us when we arrived. It was another test poorly disguised as an ice-breaker game. They divided us into teams, gave us each a stack of printer paper and some scotch tape, and told us that the goal was to build the tallest tower that held the most weight with those two materials. They warned us at the start that they might throw a wrench in the works "just to see how we react". Ha ha.

I had immediately come up with a brilliant idea. Maybe it was all those toy castles I built out of printer paper and scotch tape as a kid (really? I did that? Yep.), or maybe it was some awesome MIT engineering skills that had unknowingly worked themselves into my brain over the past four years. Regardless of the source my idea was stellar. As soon as my team got together I laid it out for them with barely contained enthusiasm. Since none of them had any other ideas they were interested in pushing for, they readily agreed to mine, and with a few tweaks here and there, we got to building.

The plan was to roll the sheets of paper up into tubes, tape them together like a honey-comb, create a whole bundle of them, then stack a sheet on top of the bundle and start the next layer. My teammates suggested we use 3 or 4 sheets per roll and about 10 sheets per top layer to add sturdiness. Since we had a pack of 500 sheets, I readily agreed.

About 2/3 of the way through the time limit, the recruiters made an announcement. They were going to shuffle around the teams a bit. They chose two or three people, myself included, and assigned them to a different team. My second team was building a tower similar to a telescoping tube: a skinny single structure with each subsequent stage only slightly skinnier than the last. I could tell immediately that this structure was of inferior design and construction, but I swallowed my criticisms and got to work.

It wasn't hard to see through to the underlying purpose of this exercise, which was to show the recruiters how good we were at fitting in to the team dynamic. So I simply asked my new team's leader what I could do to help, and got right to work doing exactly that. I offered a suggestion here and there, but made sure to keep myself from undermining their previous work.

In the end, my own idea and my first team's tower performed above and beyond all others. It reached just four inches short of the ceiling, stopped only by the time limit and the room's physical constraints. It was sturdy and strong, and held the recruiter's full coffee cup without even wavering. It would have held more weight, but there was nothing heavier than the coffee that would fit between it and the ceiling tiles.

My second team's tower couldn't even stand up on it's own.

But I smiled and congratulated my new teammates on a job well attempted, and the recruiters got us all together and explained how this was supposed to be a sort of a parallel to rig life. It is to be expected, they explained, that one might get pulled off of a job halfway through and sent to a new job with a new team, new rules, and a new command structure. You cannot expect to stay on a job indefinitely, no matter how much of an impact you have on it or how much they need you, and you can't let yourself get frustrated by that. At the time, it felt like they had almost been lecturing me, for I had been singled out (well, doubled or tripled out) to be moved from the team where I had provided such leadership.

I knew I had impressed the recruiters in multiple ways that afternoon by my engineering skills, my teamwork, my adaptability to change, for that had been the true purpose of the exercise. Perhaps I manipulated my behavior to match the circumstances, but that's what interviews are all about, right?

~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Return to present day~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Now I'm on the rig, looking forward to some time off, and I worry about what might happen once I'm gone. I was the first one sent out here, and I'm the only one of my crew who hasn't had some time at home since. It has been commented upon more than once by various crew members that this job is very well organized; all the files are kept in their proper place, all our reports are up to date, all of our forms are filled out fully and accurately, and they know to attribute those accomplishments to me. As one person said, "Wow, this is really detailed. Oh right, there's a girl out here" (The implication being that a male would cut corners?)

In some ways I consider myself the grease that keeps the gears of our job turning. I know this rig well, I know the crew, I know all the computers, tools, and crazy little quirks of our operations. I've been the one to teach all the new arrivals where everything is, how it all works, and who to ask (and when to ask them) to get things done. I'm afraid the job would suffer in some ways (perhaps insignificantly, but suffer nonetheless) were I to never come back, and what's more, I want to come back. I want to see this through to the end. But I have to remember the paper-tower exercise, and remind myself that my desires are not going to be considered by my office should they need me somewhere else. It's almost tempting to stay on this rig until we finish drilling in roughly a month's time....

But I also want to get to Boston next week. So I'm just going to hope for the best, and screen my phone calls from the office.