Plodding Along...

It's been just about four weeks that I've been on this rig for this hitch, with nary a reprieve. Luckily I have a vacation coming up soon, so I should be heading home within the next six or so days. And boy, do I ever want to not be here right now. A flu-epidemic swept our rig. I caught it, and while it's not so bad, I still have to deal with phlegmy coughs, a runny nose, and a big fat pile of fatigue. Not so much fun when I'm working 12+hour shifts.

In other news, haha! I spoke too soon! Less than 24 hours after coming back to life, our OTHER tool failed, so we had no more data at all. Then the drill bit gave out, so we pulled out of the hole. Today is the first day we've been back to drilling since then. In the meantime, well, I've been sick.

We also have an auditor out here today. She's a former field engineer who essentially got roped into the position of "rig auditor", and now that they're actually expecting business to really, truly, surely start slowing down ... any day now! the office is starting to focus a lot more on Service Quality. We were on top of the list because of all our tool failures. The audit is now about 90% done, and things look good for me (I did a self-audit last week, so I was very well prepared), and hopefully the office will get a lot of warm fuzzy feelings when reading my review.

The directional drillers went home. They're expensive, so now that we're in a section of the well where the direction we're going in isn't alllllll that important, the company decided to quit paying for them.

Now hopefully I'll get a replacement for me sent out here before Mardi Gras so I can hit up some of the local festivities. They have something like 10 parades in the city of Lafayette over the course of the past week or so!

It must have been 24-hr Voodoo

Interestingly enough, this morning just before the start of my shift, our dead tool magically revived itself! We were all very confused, because this defies all logic governing how our tools work. It's now been working for the past 10 hours without a single hiccup, so I can say that our tool has indeed been resurrected.

I'm confused, but pleasantly so.

A day of Ill luck

Happy Friday the 13th! I woke up this morning, dashed of to the safety meeting for which I was late for, and when questioned about operations I said "Things look good; drilling ahead!" cheerfully and full of optimisim.

What I did not know, was that an hour before, we had lost communication with one of our tools downhole. Another tool failure. Sigh.

The odd part is, that we haven't lost communication with the tool below it. You see we have 3 tools all connected. The one at the top sends the data uphole. The one in the middle measures the characteristics of the formation. And the one at the bottom, under the aegis of the directional drillers, steers the well. Strangely enough we can still see the data from the tool at the bottom of the stack, even though we've lost all communication with the tool in the middle. This contradicts the very laws of our tools!

The oil company running the rig has decided they wanted to keep drilling ahead anyway. There's a fair chance that our tool is still taking measurements and recording them in its memory, so we'll probably have good data once we pull out of the hole and download its memory. But in the meantime we are drilling ahead sooooooooo slowwwwwwly, that since I have only one tool to monitor now, my responsibilities are now close to nothing.

Time to pick up a new book to read...