Hit the ground running.... a MARATHON

I was woken up from a lovely nap on Saturday (since I was still partially stuck on night shift from a WHOLE WEEK before) by a phone call from the rig. Guess what! The helicopter that everyone said wasn't going to be scheduled -- because a). it's the weekend and b). the weather is pretty bad for helicopter flights -- was slated for a last-minute departure early Sunday morning. I had three hours to pack, clean my house, and prepare myself and the trappings of my life for my next exodus to the rig.

A 4-hr car ride later, I was dropped off at the "Lighthouse Lodge" in Venice, LA <-- for all those interested in maps, check out that link. Venice, LA is in such a spotty area it doesn't even look like it should EXIST, let alone be habitable. In an unexpected yet unsurprising note, Venice is a world-class fishing destination and the Lighthouse Lodge is marketed as a premier spot to cater to such a tourist crowd. The front desk clerks were slightly befuddled by my pajama-clad, incredibly mussed female self checking in at 11:00pm and scheduling a check-out time for 5:30am the next day. They clearly get plenty of oilfield traffic, and must have assumed that I was part of that set, but under no circumstances do I fall into the "stereotype" of oilfield personnel. No matter how greasy and unkempt, I remain an anomaly.

The early morning helicopter ride was quite hairy, and our first attempt was actually aborted when the pilot did not feel safe continuing after the first twenty minutes out to sea. A few hours in a utilitarian waiting room and one more helicopter ride later, I eventually arrived at the rig just in time for lunch. I wolfed down a quick and juicy hamburger, and headed up to our unit to see what was going on.

They were finishing the data processing from the previous run, and I helped complete it and send out the necessary logs to the client. Once that was complete, there was nothing left to do but wait for all of our tools bobbing up and down on the boat a few hundred yards away. One surprisingly deep and thorough nap later, I was back in my hard hat just as the tools were loaded onto our deck. From there it was a frenzy of preparation for the next foreseeable future.

We had to program the tools (which proved problematic when our cable to plug into the tools shorted), we had to measure them, load two 30-pound lithium battery assemblies into them, type up a few dozen forms of data, etc, etc, etc, and all within a window of roughly 7 hours. There was very little breathing room that night. My cell manager, the night hand and I all worked unceasingly until four a.m. this morning when some equipment on the rig floor malfunctioned (unrelated to us, thank heavens!) and we got a few hours to catch our respective breaths while they repaired it.

Now we are tripping in the hole, which means that they're lowering the drilling assembly in piece by piece; screwing the 90-ft long stands of drill-pipe together one at a time. And lucky for me they seem to be taking their sweet time about it. I have been left on my own to keep this popsicle stand running, as both of my coworkers have gone to bed from utter exhaustion. We're all roughly equally sleep deprived, but in a twisted sort of logic it seemed to make sense to have me be the one unlucky soul who gets to sleep last. So until our tools reach a more interesting depth, I can nap in my office chair with impunity. We've got over a mile to go -- and I have improvised a nice little footrest for my purposes.

Good night.

A new year, a new hope, an OLD resolution

It's been three days since my last post and three days since my last major disaster on the job. Ever since then things have been going (*fingers crossed!!!*) relatively smoothly. There was a glitch or two along the way -- incorrectly configured cables made downloading the data from our tool a challenge -- our surveys were being incorrectly calculated so there was a hunt deep in the bowels of the computer data to solve the mystery -- but nothing so heart-stoppingly hectic as before.

Dare I hope that things have turned a corner for the better? All jobs have their hiccups in the beginning; ours were more like full body seizures. It's a nice feeling to be entering the new year with a few less worries on one's shoulders. Let's hope it stays that way.

We finished drilling the previous section two days ago. I've caught up on all my reports in the meantime, but seeing as how I'm the only one on the crew without any family in Louisiana (the day directional driller has two grandkids, the night directional driller has a pregnant wife, and my night hand has two pre-school aged boys himself) I volunteered to be the one person to stay on the rig while they run casing and act as the "company liaison" to schedule tool shipments and crew transport for everyone when the rig is ready to start drilling again.

So I've got until Monday (by current estimates) to just hang out here and watch movies on my laptop. They might change their minds and send me in anyway, but I'm not opposed to making another holiday bonus for merely staving off the boredom on New Year's Day. After all, I've worked hard enough these past two weeks to deserve a little "easy money".

Oh, and can anyone guess what my New Year's Resolution this year will be?

May you live in interesting times

Heaven forgive me if I ever complained of boredom on the rig. I had one calm day on the day after Christmas, and then WHAM! another failure yesterday causing us to make the rig stop drilling. I solved the problem relatively quickly, but the sheer volume of failures is starting to wear on everybody's nerves -- most especially my own.

Is my job cursed? Specifically, is this job cursed with the above phrase; the classic Chinese ill-wish? I have been rather lucky in my past jobs. Whatever troubleshooting has been required has been minimal and infrequent compared to many jobs. I suppose I might be paying my karmic due for such a string of good fortune.

Of course I'm more worried that management is going to see another side of this: that the one constant in all of these failures is me.

In other news, we'll be done drilling this section late tonight. That means I might get sent home while they run casing tomorrow. It will only be 2-3 days off, with an unfortunate amount of travel time to further foreshorten it (4 hr drive each way to the heliport and a night spent at a nearby hotel prior to departure), but with any luck I might be in town to celebrate New Year's -- with whomever happens to be in town as well.

I'm too tired to think of a title for this one

I reached a new milestone in my career advancement. Unfortunately it's the kind of milestone that makes one want to jump overboard.

This job can be stressful at times, most especially so upon the person in charge. I have seen my cell managers go nearly cross-eyed from the stress and the sleep deprivation required by a troublesome assignment, and I always wondered if I would have the kind of commitment to take responsibility for the job that way.

Well last night it turns out I did, and now I just want to cry.

I left to take a brief nap before we picked up our tools and put them in the hole to start drilling. When I returned from my nap my night hand informed me that the entire network we had set up in our unit was down. We spent the next four hours troubleshooting it, and by the end of the night a second of our three computers had bitten the dust. Once we had the bare minimum of data processing programs running on our third and "last vestige of hope" computer, I went to bed with instructions to my night hand to wake me up when I was needed to help pick up BHA. A mere 70 minutes later at the friendly hour of 2:15am, I got the knock on my bedroom door and the next round of work began.

I've been riding waves of energy, and at my low ebbs I've snuck in a couple of cat naps in my ever-increasingly uncomfortable office chair. Pretty soon my night hand will wake up from his few hours of sleep and come out to give me relief.

The directional driller commented on my lack of sleep and as an afterthought said, "Well, this is the most critical part of the well." Right. Thanks for the reminder. Looks like I won't be leaving my post anytime soon today.

A Few Gray Hairs

Oh the shame, the shame! It's been over a month since my last post. I have been shockingly remiss in keeping you abreast on oilfield news, and for that you have my apologies.

I returned to the Gulf of Mexico a mere five days ago, and I have quickly transitioned through all my major reasons for not posting. From the previous "not on a rig and therefore not posting" to the ever-disappointing "mired in boredom from lack of work on the rig and therefore feel like I have nothing interesting to post", after which the "far and above too busy with work to have time to post".

I arrived here with the directive to rig up all of the equipment and prepare for the first drilling run. At first I was mostly prevented from accomplishing this goal due to the fact that only one third of our equipment was actually on the rig. The rest was floating on the boats it had come out on, unable to be offloaded due to the high winds making crane activity dangerous.

So we did what we could with what we had, which mainly entailed running dozens of cables all over the surface of the rig and installing the few sensors we could. When the rest of our equipment did show up I soon regretted I had ever hoped for such a day.

There were so many problems I did not know where to start. I was overwhelmed, under-rested, and completely at a loss as to how to solve them all. Worse yet, I was in charge. I have the responsibility for this job. I have my name next to the title of "Cell Manager" in the daily reports. I am the one who has to answer for any mistakes. It was nearly enough to send me off the side of the rig and swimming the hundred miles or more to shore. I was a wreck.

But as of this morning I have somehow reached a state of equilibrium, if not success. The equipment having problems that could be solved was fixed, and the equipment with problems that could not be solved will soon be replaced. There are many things that could go wrong between now and when we begin drilling, but I can't solve problems that haven't occurred yet -- or so I tell myself. I am in the eye of the (figurative) hurricane. Once we do start drilling it will be a non-stop race to the end of this projected 40-day well. It's going to be a fast-paced frantic train-wreck of a job and I'm sure to have a few more gray hairs by the end of it. Maybe it's the rarely-seen pessimist in me, but I'm girding my loins for the worst.

Wish me luck!

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.

Foot-Dragging Days

I haven't written anything lately because I've been in a bad mood ever since we finished our first run of drilling, or rather ever since I was obliged to start working again after being on standby immediately following our first run of drilling. I think I was just so physically exhausted after rigging up, that when we finished drilling last Sunday I was so relieved to have a couple days off that the abrupt foreshortening of my standby time threw me into some terrible blue devils.

Since then it's been a struggle to do some of the most mundane tasks, which hasn't made the necessary complex troubleshooting any easier either. Luckily there are a couple of new people out here (my former lead hand was sent home with pink eye, and our third hand was replaced by an expert on the higher-tier tool we're running this section), and they are more than willing to help out with that.

I'm gradually getting myself going again, and now that we're back to drilling this is a lot easier. There's something comforting about the drill bit rotating thousands of feet below and the constant stream of binary data transmitted through the drilling mud that enables me to find my working rhythm; my natural frequency of duty. Productivity is becoming less and less of a struggle these days.

But on Wednesday we have an audit scheduled. One of our managers is apparently hitching a ride on the oil company's swanky helicopter they're flying out here for a day-trip to look over the rig. She thought it would be "fun", and suggested doing an audit on our Measurements While Drilling operations out here in order to justify coming along with them. This means doing a complete inventory of all our tools, filling out endless forms, updating all our computers and making sure that this "chaos" that erupts from the natural order of things out here can be organized into a neat and tidy bundle of information.

I guess it's time to find some more motivation from somewhere...

Maybe tomorrow.

The Opposite of That

It is a flaw of mine to be overly concerned with how other people perceive me. This can sometimes be beneficial, for it makes me more diligent and conscientious in my work, but it can also lead me to overly stress out about my mistakes.

I have had the good fortune to be working on a deepwater rig running high-tier tools with two other women from my company, whom I truly respect and like.

Unfortunately I keep making mistakes. I cannot seem to go an entire 12-hr shift without doing something (or forgetting something) of dire consequence (or importance). This is surprisingly easy to do, because of the great deal of scrutiny paid to each detail of this job due to the expense of deepwater work.

Each time one of my mistakes or omissions is found out, I see my coworkers' eyes widen in what I assume to be horror.

- "You forgot to check the resistance between each tool and it's extender lead?!"
- "You let the rig crew take the sensor down without supervising them?!?!"
- "You wrote what in that email?!!!?!!!?!!!"

I try to avoid making too many excuses, but I can't help trying to defend myself in what seems to be an unreasonably catastrophic loss of my esteem in their eyes. This morning, for example, the aforementioned sensor had just been removed and replaced by the rig crew, and alas, not yours truly. The subsequent re-calibration of said sensor proved unsuccessful so I went up to the rig floor, shaken and cringing from the minor hysteria my day-hand experienced when I told her of my actions.

I spent the next two hours (past the time I was supposed to be in bed already) troubleshooting the 30 lb solid steel sensor. I dragged a replacement up the 3 flights of stairs and hooked it up. No luck. I tried a backup sensor cable which happened to be handy, and went back and forth from the phone to the plug about 6 times to see if I had plugged it into the right place. No dice. I tried the backup cable with the original sensor. No chance. I then got to spend about 45 minutes crawling through the grease, the grime, and the slightly caustic drilling fluid running a new cable. When I plugged it in guess what happened! No signal!

Sigh. Or scream. Yes, a great big ROAR of frustration might be appropriate at that moment.

My day hand came up to the rig floor to see what else we could check. Then we went to the series of plugs where all our sensors are plugged in and she asked:

"Where did you plug it in?"
I point where.
"That's the wrong plug. It's the one right below it."
"No it's not; I followed the mnemonic!"
"The Horse Died Placing 12th?"
"No! It's 'The Dead Horse Placed 12th'"
and so on and so forth.... until I realized I was wrong.
At least we were both able to laugh about it.

I think the moral of the story is that my day hand needs to come to the terms with the fact that I'm not perfect. I'm still learning, and I'm GOING to make mistakes.

Either that or come up with a better mnemonic that isn't so easy to flip around. I'm currently leaning towards: "Theo Huxtable Didn't Pass 12th [grade]". No way I can flip the H & the D around on that one!

The Difficulties I've Faced....

The engineer who I had been working with since before New Year's on this offshore job was scheduled to have a vacation last week, so he was training me to become "Cell Manager" of the job so he could leave me in charge and take his vacation. This was going to be a bit of a challenge, because the person they had slated as my Night Hand had not actually gotten his promotion to Night Hand, and had not actually held an entire night shift on his own. So in addition to it being my first time in charge, I was also going to have to stay up extra late and wake up extra early so as to ensure that he was handling the job competently. Yikes.

So I guess I wasn't too disappointed to find out that my intended Night Hand got sent on another job the day before I came back from standby. But I did have to go in to the office to find another Night Hand, since he had failed to inform them that they were technically "stealing" him from my rig. The only people that were in town and available to work were either a bit more experienced than me, or a LOT more experienced than me. They sent the guy that had only 6 months more experience then me out to be my Night Hand.

So first thing I do when I get out here is to power up our unit, and get our computers turned on. Of course I mess that up. This is the first rig I've worked on that has me working in a pressurized unit, which keeps flammable gases out of the computer equipment, and keeps me from blowing up the rig. Now I've learned how to turn on the pressurization system before, but I've never actually done it on the rig, so OF COURSE I do it wrong. My night hand fixes it for me, and I make a note to myself to practice on the units they re-kit at the office next time I'm in town (Minus 100 points for Holly).

The next step is to turn the computers on, but we can't! There is a problem with their power supply! Not all the power in our unit is bad, however, because the lights are working. The air conditioning is working. It must be the box that all the computers are plugged into which has a battery to keep the computers powered for 30 minutes in case the pressurization system trips the power shut-off while we're drilling. That box is beeping and not fully turning on, so something's wrong with it. But there's not much troubleshooting we can do. We have to call the office for suggestions, or get them to send a new one ASAP, but our satellite phone has no power either! And we're offshore, so cellphone reception is not at its best. We're trying to figure out alternate solutions, and halfway started on rewiring our entire unit when my Night Hand sees that one of the circuit breakers is tripped. Problem solved. Sigh. (Minus 1000 points for Holly)

I did solve one problem on my own, *pat on the shoulder*. The mice and the keyboards for 2 of our 3 computers were working, but NOT working. It was a conundrum which was fixed when I rebooted all three machines. Yay me (Plus 5 points).

So we had everything up and running, and our next object was to get our tools ready to go in the hole on the next drilling run. We loaded the batteries and programmed the first tool, but when we plugged into the second tool, it blew a fuse in the box that connects it to the computer! That has never happened to me before, so I had no idea what was going on. When my night hand pulled out the fuse to see if it had shorted, I gawked at him like he was performing magic (Minus 10 points for Holly).

Hours later, we have shorted about a dozen fuses in attempting to diagnose the problem, and we are down to our last 2. We have been working with the office to check everything and anything it could be, and we only have one possibility left. It could, maybe, Poooooosssibly (but not very likely), be one of the cables that's causing the short. Sure enough, it is, and we're lucky enough that minus the faulty 300-ft long cable, we still have enough length in the rest of our cables to reach all the way to our tools so we can plug into them (barely). (No points for anyone on this one, except the Directional Driller who told us how to check the cables)

It went on like that for a while, and I think I ended up with somewhere around the neighborhood of -35,725 points by the weekend's finish. But I guess that negative net worth somehow translates into having learned something at some point along the road, hopefully.