I Jinxed It!

I was just about to start my shift this morning in a rather good mood. I had gone jogging on the treadmill in the gym after waking up, then ate a good breakfast, and I was looking forward to a nice calm day of steady drilling. As I put on my steel toed boots and braved the strong sea winds, I thought to myself "How pleasant the job is when we drill steadily for thousands and thousands of feet. The daily routine becomes solidified, paperwork is kept up-to-date, and I have plenty of time to update my blog on the relative merits of the local vegetation."

Thirty seconds later my bliss was shattered when I arrived in the logging shack to find out that they had STOPPED drilling only three hours before because they suspected the drill bit had failed. We had gone from drilling 100ft/hr to 4ft per hour in a matter of minutes, and they decided to change drilling assemblies in hopes of a better rate of penetration.

So lucky me, I got to spend all day doing the most labor-intensive aspects of my whole job, all rolled into one shift. I had to program tools, prepare paperwork, and prep them for drilling. I had to stand around on the rig floor to watch all our equipment being loaded and unloaded. I had to dump the recorded data off our old tools, process it, and write brand new log formats before I could even generate the logs to send to town. And I've got plenty more to do.

In fact I should be working on keeping all my paperwork timely right now, since its fast getting out-of-date. But I needed to detail my day's struggles and thus benefit from the therapeutic aspects of writing a blog.

We're almost back to drilling again. In 14 hours! I cannot recall the last time we turned around drilling operations in ONLY 14 hours. I'm honestly surprised I'm not dead on my feet right now from having to work that fast -- although I can't say the same for the directional driller. He's gotten less than half the sleep I have!

I look back at the post I wrote yesterday about having to juggle many different tasks throughout my shift and I LAUGH! I LAUGH at that girl who thought she knew what it was like to juggle a million different tasks at once. SHE HAS NO IDEA WHAT A MILLION TASKS IS LIKE!

I had probably better stop now before I jinx myself even worse...

Oh! And in an interesting side note: our rig was struck by lightning last night! I was lucky to be asleep at the time, because it tends to surge all of our equipment and crash all of our computers. My night hand thus had the enviable task of getting us back up and running. And kudos to him for doing such a good job at it that he didn't have to wake me up. I have such a good night hand!