Saturday

2 am comes quickly. I get up and immediately notice that David hasn’t come back and gone to bed. This is a bad sign, he was planning on going to sleep at around 12 and leaving Paula by herself for a few hours.  I come to the work trailer and sure enough, they’ve been having more problems. In the few hours I was sleeping they changed more cables and did everything they could think of. At one point they gave up and told Pemex to stop drilling and bring the tools back to surface. Lucky for us, they decided to keep drilling and the problem once again mysteriously disappeared.

I arrive in time to see the end of their hard work. We have good data and good signal. I send David to bed. They get stuck briefly, but manage to unstuck the drillstring pretty quickly. This is a good thing. Getting the drillstring stuck often means our tools get lost in the well if they can’t get unstuck.  It’s expensive, time consuming and stressful.  I’m on high alert for further signs that the well is going to cave in on itself and take our tools with it. Then I send Paula to bed.

Without problems, this is an easy job only requiring one person on shift at a time. I can sit and monitor drilling operations from my computer. Make my reports. Write. Read. Watch a movie. The last few days have not been easy. Even this morning I feel the effects of little sleep and a lot of stress weighting down my mind and my body. The generators, which we are unfortunately right next to, cause a constant roar that makes it hard to stand being in the trailer. We wear earplugs inside and have to talk with raised voices and occasional hand gestures (polite ones of course).

The first few hours of Saturday morning are quiet.  My client, Pemex engineers, and some random, very polite and understanding old guy, come in to ask for copies of the log. David leaves for another rig and they send someone out to replace him. While this is a seemingly small change, for me it’s significant. I am now responsible for the job and the outcome.

Then all the sudden, everything seems to go wrong at once. The drill string gets stuck again, which causes them to fire the jar.  The jar is a tool way down in the hole with a lot of potential energy. When you get stuck, the rig pulls the string up as much as it can until the jar snaps back, 2500m down in the ground with so much force that the whole rig shakes on surface. The first time they fire the jar, the box that reads the signal from my sensors crashes.  This crash sets off a whole series of problems that take me about 6 hours to fix in total.

During these 6 hours, my client, Pemex and my polite old guy are still asking for the logs. I have to explain several times why I’m unable to deliver them. Half the data disappeared from the logs and the other half is plotting at a depth 20 m below where we’re actually drilling. I’ve never seen this happen before and it takes a consult from the office to fix it all and get everything back in the right place.

At some point, my client from the office in Villahermosa comes in. He knows we’ve had a lot of problems at this rig. And he’s not happy. He yells at me about another issue, our printer isn’t printing the logs very well and he wants to know why we have a gap in our log. That’s the point at which I lose it. After averaging 4 hours of sleep for the past two days I’m exhausted and the stress of trying to explain (in Spanish) and fix everything is killing me. Part of the mistake is their fault. We have a 4m difference in depth because they gave us the wrong depth at the start. We had just spent almost an hour trying to figure out what the actual depth was because they had it wrong. I yell back at him in Spanish. 4 meters? 4 meters difference between you and Pemex is not okay, and now I have a gap in my log that I have to fix.

He looks a little surprised. Carlos, the new guy they sent me, steps in and smooths it over. The end result? They bring over a printer for us to use.  Then, I have to set it up and print the logs with 5 men standing over me, watching. It’s a little intimidating. Normally it takes me at least 3 or 4 tries to get the printer set up, from loading the special log paper right to getting the correct driver installed. This time, God has clearly taken pity on me, and it prints perfectly the first time. I’m relieved. Maybe I look like I know what I’m doing after all.

Next, we take a survey, a fairly simple procedure where you simply turn the pumps down, then turn them up again. It takes us three tries and some extra instruction to Paula who hasn’t taken very many before we get a good one. With that, my day is finally over.  Everything is running. I leave instructions with Paula, it’s her first solo night shift, then I head to bed. I’m completely exhausted and wound very tightly at this point. 3 stressful days have taken their toll. This night however, I plan on sleeping as much as my body needs.

Thinking about the last few days make me wonder, once again if I’m crazy. Most of my classmates I graduated with have office jobs where they make more money than me and work more normal hours and don’t get covered in mud and get to speak English all the time and don’t get leered at all the time (though this could have to do with them being more male than me).  And then somehow, I wake up the next day and love my job again. Even with the craziness. Or maybe that’s just the sleep deprivation.