The end of the end

It's official. On Friday afternoon I turned in my company laptop, ID Badge, and all my bright blue flame-retardant coveralls and was escorted out of the office on my official last day. I am no longer an oilfield worker!

I spent a lot of the weekend packing up my belongings and selling my furniture. Come Wednesday, I'll be piling all of my worldly belongings into my car and driving East. Then South. Then finally North (I'm taking the long way home).

I have to include this photo here. We had just finished our sprint-speed rig-down of all our equipment and were on the boat leaving the rig. At the time I had a hunch, which turned out to be true, that I would no longer be sent to a rig after turning in my letter of resignation, so this was to be my final farewell to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. My trainee, who knew I planned on quitting, was easily able to account for my wide smile.

Goodbye oilfield! Goodbye Louisiana! I'm sure you'll miss me!

No time to catch my breath

I'm already at the office, at 9 am on a Monday morning (how normal sounding!) to process my End of Well data and prepare all the final client deliverables. It's been a whirlwind since our tools were pulled out of the hole yesterday -- rigging down all our equipment, processing the data as fast as humanly possible, packing up all my possessions and being dropped on the boat like the discarded bags of compacted trash that joined us. The boat ride was longer than expected and we missed our driving curfew deadline, so we were dropped off at a nearby hotel, called another shuttle for five o'clock this morning, and I arrived at home at 7:30 am to spend about an hour enjoying a good breakfast and starting some laundry before hopping back in the car (which needed gas - check!, some air in the tires - check!, and a carwash - no check) and heading to the office.

85 Feet Left

They changed their minds about where to stop drilling again. Surprised? I'm sure not -- the oil company's office has proved quite fickle lately. But they did choose to drill 400 feet less than they were planning yesterday, which means we'll be done drilling today. YES. I said TODAY.

I am so excited. During our pre-job meeting for this well well over two months ago, my manager said this job was expected to last 3.5 weeks and take 4 drilling runs. We're now just finishing week 7 and drilling run #8. I first arrived on this rig on the 18th of February, and I've had a total of 9 days off since then. To compare, a person who worked a regular M-F job would have had 14 weekend days since then.

All I can think about is rigging down, getting the heck out of here, finishing the End of Well Report, and then driving to my manager's office in Houston and turning in my two week's notice. I am virtually shaking with anticipation. I am so excited about leaving the oilfield and moving back north that I'm surprised I've been able to pay any attention to this well at all. I have, in fact proven a more than adequate cell manager lately. More than adequate is sufficient for me, since I am far too distracted for any superlative performance.

We have 85 more feet left. We're drilling at 10 feet an hour. I am all a-flutter I can barely contain myself. For all I know, these could be the last 85 feet I drill forever. FOR. EVER. Ah me!

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.