900 feet left

Yesterday was the first day all week that I woke up on time and didn't sleep through my alarm, so I took advantage of my early rising to run over four miles on the treadmill before my shift. Had I known what a physically and mentally demanding day was ahead of me after I showered and ate breakfast, I might have cut back on the mileage.

Now after a shaky 5 hours of sleep, I'm stewing in the exhaustion from my 21-hour day yesterday, and enjoying the residual caffeine that's still in my system from downing Diet Cokes just to get through the next round of "To-Do List" items. The rig finally made a decision early yesterday morning to pull out of the hole and finish the last 900 feet (they tacked on a bit more to the Total Depth) with a different set of tools.

Unfortunately for me, my coworker who is super-experienced in these tools had just gone back to town, having finished the week we had been allowed to have him. So I was up until one in the morning obsessively checking every last detail of the processed logs and data before sending them to the client, only occasionally turning to my new night hand and green-at-the-gills trainee to teach them a thing or two about what exactly I was doing and what they should be learning at that moment.

I fear my grammar is suffering this morning. Please forgive me. Last night my brain was so over-worked I would routinely forget the names of both my night hand and trainee as well as what I had told them five minutes prior. It must have been an entertaining evening for them.

In the meantime I get to chill. Maybe I'll even take a chair nap -- but I probably have too much caffeine left in my system for that. We're waiting on a boat to bring a new computer so the rig floor can have a working monitoring system. Apparently you have to be able to tell what exactly it is you're doing while drilling in order to be in compliance with national regulatory agencies.

I hope to take as much advantage as possible of any chances to relax over the next few days. Once we finish this last 900 feet of drilling, my two coworkers are going to do something I've never done before: RIG DOWN. While rigging up usually has to be done quicker than it should be, involves lots of complicated planning and decision making, rigging down always has to be done faster than is humanly possible, is one of the messiest, dirtiest, and in worst cases: most disorganized parts of our job (from what I hear). We take down all the sensors and the cables that have been run all over the rig over the past couple of months. They're caked in mud and oil, tangled into the hundreds of other cables run by other service employees, and secured with thousands of sturdy plastic zip-ties to hand-railings, walkways, and cable-trays a good 30 feet over our heads. All the while you've got the company man breathing down your neck dying to drop you on the boat and ship you back to land; once we're done drilling he doesn't want to pay for us to be out here one minute longer than absolutely necessary. Not to mention the managers in the offices in town clamoring for the final processed data -- because we clearly have PLENTY of time to spend poring over our logs at this point.

And then bliss: when you've reached land, showered the diesel fumes out of your hair, and after a couple of all-nighters in the office End of Well Report is turned in, you can go to the nearest bar and enjoy that first celebratory beer. Who needs "job well done" when the words "job done" are satisfying enough?

I surely can't wait.