Whoopee!

Oh my goodness. After almost 24 straight hours of some pretty heavy-duty work, I got to go home early! No one else was ready, so I got to take the helicopter allllll by myself. I felt like I was a celebrity being escorted someplace super secret.

But this marks the beginning of my days off. I need them. I am sooooo tired of working right now that I am perfectly happy here, watching a Project Runway marathon on a friend's tivo.

So while you wait for my next post, here's a picture of the drill bit that we pulled out of the hole this morning. Enjoy!

Post For Post's Sake

When I haven't posted a blog update in a while, you can usually attribute my 'radio silence' to one of three reasons:

1. I'm not on a rig and therefore have little to say about rig life.
2. I'm on a rig and ridiculously busy with work and have no time to write.
3. I'm on a rig and am bored out of my mind with no work to do and have nothing to write about.

Can you guess which one I'm experiencing now? Congratulations, number 3 it is with a bullet. For the past 3 nights I have entertained myself by various methods including but not limited to:

1. Reading articles on my favorite online news magazines
2. Cropping, labeling, and sorting my 1,500+ family photos I scanned from the collections in Duxbury
3. Napping

Well, it's 4:25 am on a Saturday morning, so I have 95 minutes left until my relief arrives to sit here and do nothing all day. I've finished my nap, I've run out of articles to read (there has GOT to be more news in the world. WHERE IS IT???), and I've completed what I thought would be a months-long project of organizing the collection of family photos. They're even arranged chronologically. Beginning in 1898. After that I even studied up a little on the nuclear tool we'll soon be running. Believe me, I'm reeeeallly bored.

So I decided I might as well write SOMETHING on the blog, if only to keep Eric entertained. (Hi Eric!)

So here's an update on the goings-on in oilfield world. They're too short to make a blog post about each, but compiled together they make a nice briefing of sorts:

• While home and in Boston on vacation, I barely managed to increase my vegetable intake. I cannot say for sure that I even had a whole serving per day, so my firm resolve to up my veggies fell flat on its face. But, I eat TONS of veggies on the rig with lunch & dinner, so I can justify it, right? right?
  
  
• The wind has been quite brisk out here and the rig continues to rock, but in the way of experience mariners I seem to have developed my sea legs and the nausea has abated. Or maybe that's my sea stomach.

• We have about 3000 more feet to drill before we reach the section where we plan to run the nuclear tools, so until then I'm getting plenty of sleep. At this rate, we might never get there because they accidentally injected enough extra cement to fill an unexpected 400 more feet of hole than they planned, and we have spent the past 3 days drilling through it (That's 3 million dollars in unplanned operations costs, roughly, for those keeping score). 100 more feeet to go and then I'll actually have some work to keep me from being so bored all night.

• The rig recently received a new treadmill for the gym to replace the one that hasn't worked since before I got here in September. Now I have something to do cardio on besides the stationary bike (or the person that was going to steal the bike has now vacated it for the treadmill, either way its a win!).

Tune in next week for your oilfield briefings! Thank you, and good night.

-- Radio Silence --

Another Day, Another Sleepless Night...

I was complaining to a friend yesterday about how I was almost switched over from night to day shift, but not quite. I realized that after I woke up at 11pm this evening and passed four more sleepless hours, that I am not even CLOSE to being "almost switched over from night to day shift". I am so far from it, I may as well be running the clock in reverse. It's not like it's going to make any sense to me either way.

I'm flying to Boston today for my eagerly anticipated vacation, but I have to drive the 2+ hours to the New Orleans airport to catch the plane that I booked at a much cheaper rate. I sincerely hope there is a coffee shop in the terminal open at 5 am, because I'm in the mood to hit the road now and I'll be needing someplace comfortable to crash with my laptop full of distractions for the 6 hours before my flight takes off.

I have discovered that when arriving at the rig, it takes me roughly 2-3 nights to reach the stage where it is no longer excruciatingly painful to stay awake from the proscribed 6pm-6am hours, but shifting back after arriving home takes no less than 1 - 1.5 weeks before I can make any sort of plans at times other than 2-7am that I can be assured to be awake for. By that estimate, I should be back to normal sometime between this coming Tuesday through Friday. My return flight is scheduled for early Sunday morning, and I expect to be back to the rig the Tuesday after.

Perhaps this is not the optimal state to be traveling to a different time zone in, but I can hardly get any worse, right? On second thought, scratch that statement. It is distressingly thick with what may be interpreted as a tempt to fate.

More Veggies, Please!

I've been doing pretty good so far this year at purposefully increasing my vegetable intake, but there is still one major flaw in my progress.

I am TERRIBLE at eating vegetables when I'm not on the rig.

At home, I get stuck in this "vacation" mentality. Since I'm not on the rig, I often overindulge in all my favorite vices, and the only time you're likely to see me pigging out on the green stuff is if I've just bought a couple bags of frozen edamame. If it weren't for those and my drug-of-choice (jalapenos), I wouldn't keep anything green in my refrigerator at all!

I will be home in just over 12 hours from now, and I am taking this opportunity to RENEW MY VOW to .... well... whomever it is one makes a vow when adopting a New Year's resolution. Myself! That's right! I'm renewing my vow to myself to EAT MORE VEGETABLES.

Even if it means eating a whole bag of edamame each day...

The Pride and Pitfalls of Ownership

Today I was thinking about the rig I'm currently on. I'm scheduled to go home in four days for my vacation, and the current plan is for me to come right back in two weeks once that is complete.

But I'm a little worried that they might just send me somewhere else. It's not too likely, since I am marked down as part of this crew, but there's a slim chance that some other job for a much more lucrative client will suddenly find itself short one crew member right about the time I return from my time off. The job will be desperate and will have already called the (short) list of available people, and will start trying to pull someone from the list of people who are unavailable, yet are not on a rig at the moment. Once they reach that second list, I am a prime target. I have a rig, but the rig has a full crew. My fellow crew members will appreciate me relieving one of them after my vacation, but it won't be necessary (unless one of them happens to have a medical or family emergency at precisely the same time).

This scenario of being pulled from my crew's rotation is all purely hypothetical and slightly paranoid conjecture, although if another job comes up out of the blue at the precise time that I come back from vacation, that is exactly what would happen. But this whole "what if" scenario reminded me of something that happened at my recruiting session for this job, and I've been thinking a lot about it this afternoon.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~Flashback to July 2007~*~*~*~*~*~

I was invited to Houston for a second interview after I had impressed them enough over my first telephone interview. This was to be in a group setting, with about 14 other science and engineering students and recent graduates from across the country. The whole thing lasted about 2.5 days, where they took us on tours of a couple of nearby land rigs, walked us through a small portion of the main campus just outside Houston, and gave us countless presentations on what the job was like, what the lifestyle was like, and what the benefits were like. They painted a rosier picture than I am currently experiencing, but they did try to include as much reality as possible.

They also tested us, not on paper, but in other ways. They took us out to dinner one night, and when we stumbled back into the hotel at about 11:30 pm, stuffed with yummy Tex-Mex and ready to call it a day, they herded us back into the conference room to start another round of interviewing. They finally let us go at about 5 am, with instructions to meet in the lobby at 8 am for our next rig tour. This was accompanied by a stack of forms requiring at least 1 hour to finish "in our free time". Ha. I however, recognized this cruel Darwinian experiment for the test it was, and after about 2 hours of sleep I made sure to be as bright-eyed and bushy tailed that morning as I could possibly be.

But the part I am particularly reminded was one of the first activities they had for us when we arrived. It was another test poorly disguised as an ice-breaker game. They divided us into teams, gave us each a stack of printer paper and some scotch tape, and told us that the goal was to build the tallest tower that held the most weight with those two materials. They warned us at the start that they might throw a wrench in the works "just to see how we react". Ha ha.

I had immediately come up with a brilliant idea. Maybe it was all those toy castles I built out of printer paper and scotch tape as a kid (really? I did that? Yep.), or maybe it was some awesome MIT engineering skills that had unknowingly worked themselves into my brain over the past four years. Regardless of the source my idea was stellar. As soon as my team got together I laid it out for them with barely contained enthusiasm. Since none of them had any other ideas they were interested in pushing for, they readily agreed to mine, and with a few tweaks here and there, we got to building.

The plan was to roll the sheets of paper up into tubes, tape them together like a honey-comb, create a whole bundle of them, then stack a sheet on top of the bundle and start the next layer. My teammates suggested we use 3 or 4 sheets per roll and about 10 sheets per top layer to add sturdiness. Since we had a pack of 500 sheets, I readily agreed.

About 2/3 of the way through the time limit, the recruiters made an announcement. They were going to shuffle around the teams a bit. They chose two or three people, myself included, and assigned them to a different team. My second team was building a tower similar to a telescoping tube: a skinny single structure with each subsequent stage only slightly skinnier than the last. I could tell immediately that this structure was of inferior design and construction, but I swallowed my criticisms and got to work.

It wasn't hard to see through to the underlying purpose of this exercise, which was to show the recruiters how good we were at fitting in to the team dynamic. So I simply asked my new team's leader what I could do to help, and got right to work doing exactly that. I offered a suggestion here and there, but made sure to keep myself from undermining their previous work.

In the end, my own idea and my first team's tower performed above and beyond all others. It reached just four inches short of the ceiling, stopped only by the time limit and the room's physical constraints. It was sturdy and strong, and held the recruiter's full coffee cup without even wavering. It would have held more weight, but there was nothing heavier than the coffee that would fit between it and the ceiling tiles.

My second team's tower couldn't even stand up on it's own.

But I smiled and congratulated my new teammates on a job well attempted, and the recruiters got us all together and explained how this was supposed to be a sort of a parallel to rig life. It is to be expected, they explained, that one might get pulled off of a job halfway through and sent to a new job with a new team, new rules, and a new command structure. You cannot expect to stay on a job indefinitely, no matter how much of an impact you have on it or how much they need you, and you can't let yourself get frustrated by that. At the time, it felt like they had almost been lecturing me, for I had been singled out (well, doubled or tripled out) to be moved from the team where I had provided such leadership.

I knew I had impressed the recruiters in multiple ways that afternoon by my engineering skills, my teamwork, my adaptability to change, for that had been the true purpose of the exercise. Perhaps I manipulated my behavior to match the circumstances, but that's what interviews are all about, right?

~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Return to present day~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Now I'm on the rig, looking forward to some time off, and I worry about what might happen once I'm gone. I was the first one sent out here, and I'm the only one of my crew who hasn't had some time at home since. It has been commented upon more than once by various crew members that this job is very well organized; all the files are kept in their proper place, all our reports are up to date, all of our forms are filled out fully and accurately, and they know to attribute those accomplishments to me. As one person said, "Wow, this is really detailed. Oh right, there's a girl out here" (The implication being that a male would cut corners?)

In some ways I consider myself the grease that keeps the gears of our job turning. I know this rig well, I know the crew, I know all the computers, tools, and crazy little quirks of our operations. I've been the one to teach all the new arrivals where everything is, how it all works, and who to ask (and when to ask them) to get things done. I'm afraid the job would suffer in some ways (perhaps insignificantly, but suffer nonetheless) were I to never come back, and what's more, I want to come back. I want to see this through to the end. But I have to remember the paper-tower exercise, and remind myself that my desires are not going to be considered by my office should they need me somewhere else. It's almost tempting to stay on this rig until we finish drilling in roughly a month's time....

But I also want to get to Boston next week. So I'm just going to hope for the best, and screen my phone calls from the office.

The Countdown Begins

I know when I'm going to leave the rig. This knowledge, although useful for planning my life (or what remnants of a life I have outside the Gulf of Mexico), serves no better purpose than to begin the interminable countdown until the final day.

I may be wrong, but the above paragraph seems to imply that I can't stand my job. There are times when I hate, loathe, and wish I never had my job, but for the most part I'm satisfied with where I am right now (for now--this job is not forever). But it's a fact of oilfield life that EVERYONE counts down till the day they get to go home. There are a few exceptions, and those mainly involve marital troubles which make work an escape from stress at home.

The magic day for me is October 6th, which will be four weeks and one day after I first arrived here. I'm so used to it that the length of time doesn't surprise me, but in an abstract way a month is quite a long time to be away from home.

That's a month's rent that I paid for my house to sit and be vacant. Granted, the rent is very reasonable and I love my house enough that it is well worth it. It's also a month's fees for the lawn guy to cut my grass that I didn't see. If I leave it until I get home from the rig, the neighbors will complain to my property managers -- I got quite a stern warning last summer when I was in Texas for 9 weeks. It's a month of car payments and insurance that went unutilized, internet bills and utility bills....

It's an odd life to be away from home for such long stretches. Last autumn was even worse, when I was off in Wyoming for 6 weeks at a time. After each hitch I came home for two weeks, but I spent a significant of that time in Boston and Philadelphia for fun and holidays.

In fact, on my upcoming time off I have a vacation scheduled to fly to Boston to meet with my MIT professors who are writing recommendation letters for my graduate school applications. This of course brings to mind another countdown; the countdown of months I still intend to work in the oilfield. That's right, months. By this time next year (barring my plans fail utterly), I will be off on my next great adventure and in another life I never expected I'd have.

In the meantime I have one week, three days, and six hours left on this piece of steel.

Waiting!

It's confirmed. I'm leaving the rig Monday.

That will be 4 weeks and 3 days offshore. It doesn't beat my record for working in Wyoming for my previous 5-week stretches, but the difference between land & offshore is strongly felt. One cannot leave an offshore rig to go grocery shopping or to just travel around the Rocky Mountains if they're not drilling that day. Out here, my daily routine is limited to my cramped trailer (4 bunk beds in a room, and just barely enough room to squeeze between), my cramped office-box, the helipad where I sometimes take a circuitous stroll (circumference: 120 paces), and the galley for meals. I could sit in the TV room to while away a few hours, but I'm not so interested in the near 24-7 showings of NASCAR and NFL. Just about anywhere else requires me to wear steel-toed boots, hard hat, etc, and not meant for leisure hours.

Needless to say, I'm eager to head home in the appointed 72 or fewer hours. So thus begins the interminable wait until departure. Now that the date is set, I cannot help the countdown dancing through my head, nor the visions of Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans (which I will make it back JUST in time for), nor plans for my upcoming vacation next week to England...

In other news, today I had to skirt the fine line between giving the client what he wants and surpassing the bounds of what I'm willing/capable to do. He wanted me to take our directional data and estimate where we'll end up when we've drilled to our final depth, which is typically a Directional Driller responsibility, and in fact is something that I am completely un-trained on. I was at first pretty uncomfortable doing this (I don't want to hand them a projection that looks rosy and then have them blame me if it doesn't turn out that way), but luckily my manager back at the office took that burden from my shoulders. And I gave our client a ROUGH estimate in the meantime to keep him happy. Yay me!