Job Challenges

There are a lot of challenges I face on my job every day. Some are more frustrating than others.

First, because I’m a trainee, everyone assumes I know nothing. I’ve been working for 3 months now, which is about twice as long as most trainees work before getting sent to school. I’m not in school because as a company, we’ve been training a lot of engineers and the schools have been full. I don’t go to school until March. My area is busy so I’ve been thrown into responsibilities earlier. Every time I go to a new job with a new engineer and hear ‘This is a survey frame and this is a utility frame’ for the 10^th time I get a little more frustrated with being just a trainee.

My favorite kind of pipetally.
Beer crosses all kinds of
cultural barriers! 

Second, the language barrier plays in heavily. When my coworkers talk, they speak Spanish and often I can’t follow the entire conversation. Some people remember to stop and explain, some people I bother until they stop and explain, and some people just keep right on going. Even after listening and speaking Spanish for 4 months, it might be surprising to learn that I am not fluent in the language. It’s frustrating for me to have to ask for everything to be repeated back so I can understand. It’s frustrating for coworkers who don’t speak English very well. Sometimes the only explanation I get is “I’ll be right back” or “Don’t worry, everything is okay”.  Usually when I hear ‘everything is okay’ I get annoyed because I know it’s not all okay. I can usually get the gist of a conversation, I might not know the details but often I can tell when something is not okay but my coworker doesn’t take the time to explain it. Ugh.

On this job I’ve gotten to deal with a special combination of these two factors.

For the first two days my MWD cell manager (I’m an MWD, the cell manager is the engineer with seniority over me. They are also responsible for my actions as I’m a trainee.) , we did not get along professionally. I think he was as frustrated by me as I was by him. Things got a little better with time, but still not my favorite working relationship. Yesterday, he left for days off. And there were no available MWD engineers to come take the job. So they gave it to me. After my frustrations with not being trusted to do the smallest task, they turned over an entire job to me.  If only until they find someone to come take over. Still. I’m thrilled. And praying very hard that nothing goes wrong.

The other part of this job is that the directional driller doesn’t speak any English.  I’m actually really enjoying this. He’s really nice, very good at his job and he takes a lot of time to explain things to me.  We’re sliding (basically drilling really really really slowly to steer where the well is going) and that requires someone on the rig floor at all times. At first, I was really annoyed with this. Now, I kind of enjoy it. I go up there and hang out with the driller, the directional driller and the crew. They feed me a lot. And, most importantly for me, I’m communicating completely in Spanish. As it turns out, I am capable of doing my job in Spanish, it just requires a little more effort on both sides.  

The moral of this story is basically that sometimes I have challenges and obstacles I can’t do anything about. And sometimes I’ve found that I actually can do something about them. I’ll still have trouble with my abilities being doubted. I’ll still have trouble communicating. But at least I’ll know that I’m capable given the chance. And for me that makes all the difference. 

P.S. I realize the pictures have little to do with the post. Just go with it.