Ciudad del Carmen

Lots of big changes in the last two months.

I came back from vacation Sept 8^th. Sept 9^th I got my transfer letter to report Sept 16^th in Ciudad del Carmen as a Junior Drilling Engineer. What does this mean? Where is Cd. Carmen? All these questions and more, answered below!

Ciudad del Carmen is just up the coast slightly from Villahermosa. It’s in another state, Campeche, instead of Tabasco and now I’m actually on the coast. In fact, my city is an island. 3 years later and I’m finally getting the lifestyle everyone thinks I had in Villahermosa. I live near the beach (1 km away to be exact) and I finally work with offshore platforms (I was completely land rigs before. No offshore). Maybe I’ll even get a tan.

I’m also working in the office, which is a big change from being a field engineer. I’m excited not to put in anymore 24 hour days and not be constantly woken by trainees. But I’m also going to miss the field. All the sudden my days off are weekends. I’m expected not to watch movies at work and I have to put on real clothes and shower a lot more often. Taking a nap at my desk is also frowned upon.

There’s a lot of benefits that come with moving to the office. I get to go home to my own bed every night. I get to buy food with a much higher probability of finishing it than before. I even get to buy furniture (still working on this one). I have friends that I get to see more often than every few months and my life has a new sense of normality that it didn’t have before.

My job has changed again, for the third time in 3 years. It’s exciting and brings on some new challenges. Previously I was a directional driller, which meant I was in the field executing the well. Now I’m in the office doing the planning. The most difficult part of this right now has been adjusting to the different scale of things here.

I’m working in the Cantarell field, the largest oil field in Mexico and one of the largest in the world. It’s also been declining in production for the past 10 years or so which means Pemex is working very hard to keep that oil flowing in. This results in high volume drilling. We’re working on new wells and also windows off older wells for several different drilling platforms. Sometimes we’re planning for wells happening months in advance and sometimes it’s for wells happening in a week. This creates the environment of low level stress combined with moments of insane pressure that I’ve become so accustomed to. I also get to stay relatively close to the action of the field with daily contact with my field crews.

As an added bonus I suddenly getting some face time with my client. Before, I interacted with the client at only a field level. Now I’m going in front of the guys making the decisions. This is putting a little more stress on my Spanish and I’m really hoping I’ll be able to improve and also unlearn all the bad Spanish I’ve picked up after three years on the rig.

All and all it’s an interesting change and I’m excited to see where it takes me. I’ve been told this is another 3 year assignment. Another three years in Mexico scares me and excites me. It will certainly challenge me either way. 

Venezuela

The nature of the oil industry is ebb and flow. It’s cyclic. And when you work in the field, even a minor change in the industry can affect your day-to-day. That recently happened to us down in Mexico. We lost some contracts and all the sudden we went from being a busy, over-worked location to a slow location. I mean ‘crap there’s not enough chairs in the office for all these field engineers and there’s no rigs to send them to’ slow. This is where it comes in handy working for the largest provider of oil-field services. Instead of sending us home or even laying-off engineers, SLB simply sells us off to the highest bidder in another SLB location.

For me, that highest bidder was Venezuela (although I have suspicions they sold me to the only bidder). This means that Venezuela pays my location over twice my salary for the privilege of my experience and expertise for a set amount of time (in my case, one month). To be honest, I suspect Venezuela is mostly looking for warm bodies with how much activity there is. Either way, it means I got an all-expense paid trip to Mexico City, for the visa, and then on to Venezuela.

I've been here for three weeks now and I finally have some internet and so I will attempt to answer the most pressing of questions.

How to do nothing and get paid for it.

In my job, we’re the main attraction. But there’s still the opening act. And what does the main attraction do waiting for the opening act? If we’re talking rock stars it’s sex and drugs. We’re less glamorous on the rig. We mostly watch movies and eat. Boredom sets in pretty quickly. Some people might think they get bored at work. I understand. I get bored at work too. But for most people, it ends and they go home at the end of the day. Here we don’t get to go home until the job is done. And if the job hasn’t even started then going home is a long ways off.

Take for example, my past week at Juspi 1006. Oh Juspi…

I was slightly upset to be put on this job at first. After a week and a half of ‘Katie, you’re going to work in the US’ ‘Katie, the US doesn’t have space for you, you’re going to South America now’ and finally ‘Katie, we’re just waiting to hear back from Argentina or Bolivia’ I wasn’t as pleased to hear, ‘Katie, no place for you in South America. You’re going to Juspi’.  Juspi and I got off to a bad start. Juspi is not Argentina.

Friday, my coworker and I arrive and spend the first 4 hours directing the installation of our camper and work trailer and the generators that go with them. And by that I mean, I point and say, put it here, then go and sleep in the van. After that, we rig up our desktop computers and discover that neither of them is working. This actually works in our favor. It means we can go to bed. No computers, no working all night checking all the sensors and tools. 

Katie: 1 Juspi: 0

That time I saw an armadillo in Africa

 I was reading CNN and stumbled across an article about the pangolin. Pangolins are apparently the most trafficked mammal in the world. And almost no one has heard about them.This is the link to the article about the trafficking of pangolins. In my own attempt to raise awareness about the very existence of this animal I'm going to tell the story of our pangolin experience on safari in Botswana. And because it's a cool story. I have a lot of cool stories from that time my parents had a mid-life crisis and moved their kids to Africa but I'm not very good at talking about them. I mean, how often do pangolins come up in conversation? About twice in 14 years...

That time I saw an armadillo in Africa:
I was 12 when we went on our big African safari. We'd had about 4 months in Luanda, Angola at that point and my dad's boss was very concerned that my brother and I would see Africa as nothing more than the war-torn, poverty stricken mess that surrounded us in Luanda. A sidenote, Africa is soooo much more than the war-torn poverty stricken messy pictures you see... it's beautiful in so many ways even in the middle of that mess. But that's another story.

My parents agreed that we needed to explore all the continent has to offer and we booked our first safari in Botswana. My mom spent a ton of time researching where to go and what safari camps would accept kids and where you could go to see what animals and which ones had what tactics to keep the lions out at night (no joke). We flew (I think) into Maun and then took a small private plane to the first game camp.

My Dad, Safari Guide, my brother, my mom and me
next to a fully outfitted safari Land Cruiser

On a lack of Inspiration…

I was recently talking with a friend about my blog and the fact that I haven’t written as much lately. I blamed it pretty thoroughly on a lack of inspiration. I’ve been thinking about that the last few days and wondering, where did my inspiration go?! For a while I thought, well I’ve been here in Mexico for a long time now, over two and a half years… Have I stopped experiencing new things? Is everything boring and the same old thing all the time? Maybe. Then I realized that I haven’t stopped experiencing new things; I just haven’t been fully recognizing everything I’ve been doing as the exciting and fun adventures that I used to when I was a new trainee. So, in an attempt to bring some inspiration to my life:

New things I’ve done in the last 4 months.

I watched and wondered if my computer would explode.  

Part of my job is programming my tools. To do that, I need to connect to my tools using a computer, a box, cables, and adaptors. Usually the computer and the box are inside and the cable goes outside the trailer and connects to the tool. The computer is safe and sound inside. The tool is outside and it’s tough so it doesn’t matter. Recently though, we encountered this problem: see picture on the left. My tool couldn’t move close enough for my cable to reach. So we went to plan B and brought the whole set up outside. It was great. Until it started to rain. What you see on the right is my computer covered in a rain jacket. I’m far away hiding (and taking pictures) under cover waiting for the whole damn thing to start sparking and fry my computer and my tool. Luckily, it didn’t. I did have a great safety report though.

Vacation!

You might have noticed this depressing little pie chart I put up on facebook a while ago. In the process of

gathering my work data for taxes I threw together this very telling chart of ‘Where I spent my life in 2013’. You’ll notice I spent 53% of my year on the rig last year. That’s a lot and also not so much. I had some training time in there, which was nice. And most magnificently, I also had quite a bit of vacation/days off. Why do I subject myself to spending 53% of the year on the rig? For my career? Obviously. To gather valuable experience? Clearly.  For the money? Well of course. To earn enough days off so I can take a month long vacation? Bingo.

This year I agreed to work Christmas and New Years and then take off the entire month of January. I pitched it to my boss as though it was coming from a deep rooted need to help out in a time when we were shorthanded, but actually ticket prices were significantly cheaper by waiting until after New Years and I was able to do a lot more travelling.