Sabancuy

We left Merida the next morning after breakfast and a little sightseeing. We had pretty fully recovered from our adventure in Valladolid the day before and Jana and I were looking forward to continuing on to Carmen. I had the movers arranged to come early the next day and I looking forward to continuing our travels without any more time restrictions or SLB related stress.

It was stepping out of the Cathedral in Merida that I received an email that suddenly changed all my plans. I had a job offer! I had taken the chance and flown up to Houston from Playa del Carmen the week before to interview on the off chance it might lead to something. Turns out I was exactly what they were looking for. I still had some negotiations to do, but an offer in hand less than a month after being laid off was a serious miracle given the times. They later told me they received around 750 applications for the position.

Job offer or no, we still had to head to Carmen and pack up my house. We said goodbye to Hugo and headed out, two American girls driving 385km to Ciudad del Carmen. We expected it to take about 4 1/2 hours with a stop or two. Instead we got stopped by the Campeche police at every damn road block on the way and the trip in it’s entirety took us almost 20 hours. 

At the first road block, they made us present our passports and visas along with the car registration info. My registration was terribly out of date and so I paid the ‘fee’ of 500MX ($35US at the time) that went directly into the pocket of the state policeman. On to the next stop. Once again, we had to present our passport and visas. At the previous stop I had just shown my FM3, as it’s my official Mexican state ID and proves I’m in the country legally. My passport doesn’t have a visa in it. This time I had to get out my passport even after explaining that my work visa was fine. I was already annoyed and so when they started telling me I had to pay a fee again, I got upset and yelled at them that I already paid a fee and they were only pulling us over because we were white. At that, they got defensive and finally let us go without an fees and a reassurance that they do not profile drivers. 

Valladolid

After almost 2 weeks in Playa del Carmen I wasn’t necessarily ready to leave, but my move was scheduled so I didn’t have much choice but to go back and let the movers in. I had spent the previous week with Jana and Hugo, both ex-SLB from Carmen. We were leaving Playa together, Jana planning to travel with me for the next month and Hugo just catching ride to Merida on his Mexico tour. 

We checked out of the Penthouse in Carmen and set out towards Chichen Itza, one of the most famous set of ruins in Mexico and one of the new 7 wonders of the world. It’s a ‘must see’ on the ruins of Mexico list and also happens to be well spaced between Playa del Carmen and Merida. Perfect placement for a day trip before staying in Merida for the night.

Happily we cruised along the paid road, which is expensive, but with less towns to slow down for and much better road conditions. We had just passed the sign announcing the next service station in 65km when the car started to shutter. We went along for another 5km or so, playing with the engine RPM, when it finally died. We drifted over the shoulder and popped the hood. Maybe it’s just low on oil? The check engine light WAS on. 

Travel Reflection - Playa

I know everyone is curious about how the travels have been going. I’ve been lucky to be able to stay in Mexico and travel with friends that are in the same situation. I’m going to write a series of posts about the travels. I’ll put up pictures. I’ll spend more time with the experiences I think are unique and fun and probably less time on things that are more common or can be better described in picture. Writing about travel is supposed to be fun to write and fun to read. If it’s not fun to write, I won’t bother with it. At this point I’m starting to write about experiences happening a few weeks ago and I’ll just break posts up according to how I feel tells a good story. Anyway. that’s the mechanics. Enjoy! 

Immediately after being laid off I booked a ticket back to Houston to see my family. Sometimes you just need some recovery time. I spent about 10 days in the US, traveled up to Arkansas to visit family there and then returned to Houston. I had the chance to make some decisions and get a rough plan together. I also brushed up my resume and applied to jobs, just as a long shot. 

I was hoping to come back to Carmen and pack my things up right away. However, as you’ll read along, you will see that travel has been a study in making plans and immediately having them changed. I learned that I needed to get quotes from different companies and then it would take another week to make estimates and another week for big blue to decide which company would actually do the move. Drat. Two more weeks in Carmen was not what I was excepting. I discussed with HR and finally determined I didn’t actually need to be in Carmen. I left the next afternoon. 

On some big changes...

I’m not sure how much you, my lovely audience (like 3 people and my parents) know about what’s going on right now with oil prices. I am sure everyone has noticed the drop in gas prices. On the other side of that drop is the layoffs. There’s been news stories about it, major service companies laying off thousands and thousands of people globally. While for most people this has been nothing more than a news story, for me it’s been my life for the past months. Watching friends leave, watching people have their lives change in a minute. It’s been difficult to witness, to say goodbye to so many friends and to stay behind in the environment of tension and fear. 

Two weeks ago it was my turn. Since I’ve been working in the office and I’m good at my job I was shielded from the first and second wave of lay offs. My superiors spent at least two months trying to transfer me to a location that could afford to keep me, but couldn’t find one. Most locations are trying to reduce staff, not increase it and my experience of only 7 months in the office didn’t help me. I’m very confident my boss did not want to lay me off and worked hard to fight for me. I’m not the first to leave and I already know that I’m not the last. Unfortunately this drop in prices will effect many, many more lives before things stabilize. 

For anyone wondering what comes next I can give a very general plan that changes about everyday. Big blue will be paying for to move my house of things back to Alaska or anywhere cheaper, which is like… anywhere in the US. Probably everything will end up in Houston in storage until I need it next. I’ve also been given a decent severance package and 3 months of free health care. The cost to break my lease should be covered, although that’s still being negotiated, something to be settled in this next week after everything is packed up. 

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.

A 2013 Roundup

I’m having a hard time believing that 2013 is coming to an end. I still write 2012 on things about half the time. Clearly last year I was in denial that another year had come and gone. This year I’m determined to meet the New Year with a little more acceptance. My tactic? A classic 2012 2013 wrap up.

Things that happened in 2013:

Four of my best friends got married to each other. (in pairs, don’t worry...)

I was very blessed to be able to witness the marriages of first Robert and Melinda in May and Alison and Will in October. Robert and Melinda had a small, beautiful wedding in the mountains that was probably the most fun weekend I’ve had all year. Alison and Will gave me a beautiful picture of what marriage means in God’s Kingdom. Even as I’ve been struggling to keep God in my day to day life amid this crazy life, Alison and Will always manage to remind me what life looks like following Jesus and why it’s worth such a wild ride.

Alison, Melinda and I all met freshman year of college and bonded over various adventures that have no place being written down. I’ve loved having these two ladies in my life even as I’ve moved very far away to Mexico. I’m also so proud to say that I can call each of their husbands true friends. I can’t wait to see how marriage treats them all and the lessons I can learn from them going first!

I travelled. A lot.

One of the reasons I chose to work in Mexico is because it would give me the opportunity to travel more. Luckily I’ve been able to take advantage of that more this year (and hopefully a lot more next year!) I started my year off taking a cruise with Katelyn who works for SLB as a wireline engineer in North Dakota. We started in Miami and sailed for a couple of days before getting off in St Thomas, then US Virgin Islands and Jamaica.  It was great! We relaxed by the pool, had some very tasty food, spent some time at the spa and did some shopping.

On Job Frustrations

A Note: This is a continuation from my post last week. I began to write this, depressed myself, wrote the other one to cheer up, and the returned to this one to finish it. This is about the hard moments that come between the triumphs. 

My job gets harder when my voice gets silenced by (well meaning) coworkers who speak for me. My voice gets silenced usually because I don’t speak Spanish enough to completely keep up with everything.  On every rig is someone(s) who gets upset with having to repeat things even once. Many find it easier to just go around me; to ask my secondhand (who often has far less experience than me) for things, or ask my coworker to ask me for things (often relayed from Spanish to Spanish) or to just refuse to talk to me completely. When this happens it frustrates me to no end. 

Frustrates might not be the correct word. It kills me. It absolutely destroys me each and every time I receive indication that I am not competent to do my job. I love my job. And I’m good at it. I know this because I work hard at it. I am competent to do my job, in English and in Spanish. And every time I receive signals that I’m not… it hurts and I feel more silenced.

I have more than the language working for and against me.  This may be a surprise, but women are not treated equally in the oilfield. It’s a fact, a truth that no one who has been on a rig or platform anywhere in the world will debate with you.  The debate centers around whether that makes it easier or harder to be a woman in the field.  Do I always have help picking up heavy things? Yes. Do I always have a rig hand helping me do the most mundane task like measuring the drillpipe joint? Yes. Does this make my life easier? Sure. 

However, I’m still not convinced the advantages outweigh the benefits.

Fishing Trip

I've been on a very frustrating rig the last two weeks. And I have a post about it. But I feel the need to balance it out with the good. So first I want to talk about the moments that are so good and sweet that I can’t help but love what I’m doing.  During these moments I feel so strongly that God has led me to be exactly where I am so I can do exactly what I’m doing. It’s these moments I hold on to when I’m having a bad day in the field. Or when I've been working for 3 months straight with not enough rest time and am burnt out. Or when the frustrations feel like too much and I can’t see past the situation to what might be waiting on the other side.

One of these moments was at the end of a fishing trip.  Sounds job unrelated right? Wrong! One of our tools I run quite a bit and I've developed a reputation here for knowing it well.  This is mostly because I've seen it fail in the most spectacular ways and can now diagnose problems quickly. It’s what’s called a ‘retrievable tool’.  This means that even if you are unable to get part of the BHA or the drillstring to be removed, you can still pull this tool up the inside of the pipe.  (The picture below might help clarify... it's a little hard to explain) Since the beginning I've said I want to retrieve or ‘fish’ a SlimPulse tool. And everyone has laughed at me because it’s only happened once in this location before. Until about two months ago that is.  When I fished the second one.

A Note on the Cold..

Undoubtedly, whenever I mention that I'm from Alaska, the first comment I get is something about how cold it must be there and why people go there and subject themselves to such a thing. This is my answer about what it feels like, what life is like in the cold, and most importantly, why.

When I arrived in Anchorage it was not terribly cold. It was around freezing (so 32 or 0, pick your unit system).  This is a temperature experienced by many at some point in their lives. It's not bad. You step outside and see your breath; your nose gets cold after a while.  If you're skiing or doing something physical, it's surprisingly easy to overheat, shed layers, and then freeze because all that sweat you've been working up freezes when you take off your jacket to cool down. An unfortunately side effect of hovering near freezing is rain.

Yes, it rained while I was in Alaska. In December. I went skiing that day and so I was going up and down the mountain. I'd start at the bottom with the rain, get soaked and then riding up the chair lift, it would change slowly into ice and then finally snow at the top.  Then of course the whole process goes in reverse while snowboarding down. By the end of the day I was soaking wet through three layers and my down-jacket was practically useless. In Alaska, wet and cold spells hypothermia and disaster much faster than simple cold does.

Pemex

Once again, it’s been a while since I last posted. Hopefully my last small series gave you a taste of my chaotic life.  I should add this disclaimer. Most of my rigs aren’t like that. Lately, I seem to have some sort of rig curse on me that causes everything I touch to fail in dramatic and unheard of ways. But that’s not normal.

Today I’m on one of those normal jobs. With the exception of some bad signal and a generator overheating causing a loss of power for entire night, we’re doing pretty good. It’s been at least a week since I lost any sleep. I thought I’d take this time of tranquility to describe for you some of my favorite people. Pemex.

One of my Pemex rigs. So pretty!

Ah Pemex. The love-hate relationship we have with our dear, (in-direct) client.  Now you should know a few things before we get started. Pemex is one of the largest oil producers in the world. Their offshore operations are supposed to be very tightly controlled and well run. I wish I could say the same for land. If I had a dollar for everytime I’ve heard “Well the logical thing to do is___ so naturally Pemex wants to ____(opposite thing)” I could retire.  Realistically, Pemex isn’t all bad. If they didn’t have at least some of their stuff together, they couldn’t make billions of dollars every year for Mexico. So, instead I’m going to focus on some of the people I encounter every day. 

The Engineer

On every Pemex rig, there’s an engineer. Generally speaking, they’re never sure what to make of me. I had one engineer who refused to speak to me for almost a week. He asked the SLB company man to relay everything to me in meetings. That was a little awkward. I’ve had other engineers request I print logs every two hours. Not that big a deal, but a lot of work for me. I’ve had other engineers who absolutely love me. They email me thank you notes after I send the logs every day and ask me what kind of wireline tools to run. They’re honest and tell us ‘well, we’re lazy, so it’ll probably be later than that.’ When my tool fails, they call my office and tell them that it wasn’t my fault and please don’t take away the pretty engineer.

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).

Friday

I wake up at 2 am Friday morning with Paula telling me it’s time to calibrate. I get dressed fast and grab the stuff from the trailer.  This calibration is for our depth tracking sensor.  Depth is really important to what we do because the tool doesn’t know what depth it’s at. It only knows what time it is. Our surface system keeps track of what time matches what depth. That way, when the tool sending information, the computer can match the time with the depth.

This means we have to keep close track of depth. Starting first with calibrating properly the sensor.  This requires two people, one at the computer and one on the rig floor. Since last time Paula was on the rig floor and I was on the computer, we switch. I go up to the floor and attach a tape measure to the top drive. The top drive is the part of the rig that moves the pipe up and down inside the derrick. When you think of a rig, you’re thinking of the derrick which reaches up 100 ft or more.

I have the driller move the top drive up and down and take the right measurements, sending them to Paula to input in the computer as I do. I get covered in mud as it drips down the pipe onto my hard hat and back.  When I’m finished the driller tells me I have mud all over my face. We start to test the tool again. I’m fully expecting it to work perfectly, but Paula comes and tells me we have no signal. We start troubleshooting. By now it’s about 3:30am. We wake up David and try everything we can think of. Eventually we get signal we are satisfied with. I’m not convinced it will work at bottom, but at this point there’s nothing left to do. We send Paula to bed since she’s been up for a long time and is obviously tired. 

In that time we’ve arrived at bottom and are preparing to turn the tools on and start collecting data. I’m not surprised when the problem is even worse.  We again start troubleshooting. It seems like every fix we try makes it better for about 10 mins and then it gets worse again.  We have our Operations Support Center (OSC) working on the problem alongside us.  Finally the Pemex engineer comes and tells us we’re going back up the hole, to the casing shoe.  There’s less risk when you’re in the casing shoe because here the hole is enclosed in steel and not likely to collapse around you. The trip up to the casing shoe is a sign of defeat. We’ve lost a lot of time and our client is not very happy with us. We’ve ordered back up parts for Villahermosa so we can try again to fix the problem when they arrive.

Thursday

Thursday starts with attending the crew change meeting. My first few meetings I went to, almost a year ago, were very intimidating. Since then I’ve mostly gotten over this, but on occasion I still get nervous going into them.  For whatever reason this is one of those meetings. Maybe it’s because the doghouse (drillers cabin on the rig floor) is very small to cram 10 men and me in or maybe it’s the bikini clad woman taped on the door.  Whatever it is, I’m not excited about this meeting. Luckily the questions are few. What flow rate do we want to test our tool with. Finally we can start.

Bottom hole assembly pick up can take hours. It used to be one of my favorite parts of my job, although why is still hard to explain.  We work hard to get to this point and once it’s all done, we get to sleep and relax for a few hours. Maybe it’s the promise of sleep. Whatever it is, it’s exciting.  As I’ve done more and more BHA pickups, the excitement has worn off, but there’s still something about controlling the floor, giving instruction to connect thousands of pounds of steel, watching it go away and hoping it all works like it’s supposed to. Maybe it’s just the control freak in me.

In this case, nothing seems to work like it’s supposed to. While standing in the work trailer, about to head up to the drilling floor, the power goes out on Paula and I.  We figure the generator ran out of diesel so we go to fill it back up again.  It quickly becomes obvious that we have no diesel.  I ask David if they filled the tank the day before and we eventually conclude that about 200L (53gals) of diesel has been stolen from our tank. Our trailer is hot, dark, and full of bugs. We have a backup power supply (UPS), but it won’t last for long and we need power to test our tools in a few short hours.  I stand on the floor while David tries to find some diesel.

Wednesday

Wednesday starts at 12:01 with us still working out where to lay our cables on the rig.  During the time it took to get the permission to start working, David comes to us and tells us that they can’t put the work trailer in the original location we thought.  This changes how we decide to rig up our sensors.  Everything connects to a box that we lay usually at the bottom of the rig.  Then we run a cable from that box to our trailer. But if the box and the trailer are further away than our cable will reach, then we have to change the location of the box. We decide it will probably work but decide to run the cable to the trailer first just in case it’s too far. 

Luckily, we have just enough cable to get to the trailer. This is a relief for us because our box location means the other cables will be very easy to lay.  If we changed the box location we would have a much more difficult time with the other cables.

During this entire time, our food has been sitting in our van without refrigeration while they work on installing the generator to our living camper.  Finally, we have power.  I immediately start unloading the van and putting all our cold stuff in the fridge and freezer.  It still feels pretty cold, so I don’t think we’ve lost any food. With that, our driver can finally make his trip back to Villahermosa after sitting and waiting for the camper and trailer to be ready. 

We also discover a slight hitch.  In a bizarre coincidence, this camper and trailer are the exact same ones that Paula and I were using at our last job.  We locked everything up and took the keys back to the office, but since they moved the trailer directly to us at this new rig, they don’t have the keys and we don’t either. They managed to break into both the camper and the trailer, but this means we can’t lock anything.  It makes us nervous, especially as we’ve already had a sensor cable go missing and we haven’t even been on the pad for 6 hours.

Tuesday

Tuesday I woke up early because a storm was coming through and a huge clap of thunder went off right over the staff house. It also rained so hard it created a 6 inch puddle that took up the entire parking lot. I got up and showered, ate breakfast (mmm leftover pasta from the night before, no ants) and took the car to the base. I breathalyzed into the base (Again, sober) and went into the office.

Once again, I ended up in the back room. I locked down my computer and went and said hi to some of my friends who came back from days off. Then I sat around for a while. I read a little, I paid bills, I talked to coworkers. When I’m at the base with no current job there’s not much for me to do. That’s not completely true, I do have some re-certifications to work on online and some new training to do, but I’ve been waiting for a nice quiet rig to work on them.

Finally, at around 2 we had stuff mostly ready to discuss my next job. They were still missing a lot of information from the client, which happens a lot, but we knew the basics.  We talked mostly about what frequency to program the tool with so that it could send me information up the hole and I would actually receive it.  Low frequencies travel further, but can get lost in the ‘noise’ the mud pumps create.  We finally came to a decision and got other critical information figured out. 

The next step is always to get PPE (personal protection equipment) from the base store. I also ordered new coveralls (yay!) and rain boots (which are two sizes too big, but better than wet feet).  We always get plenty of gloves, ear plugs, safety glasses, duct tape, electrical tape, and WD-40.  The necessities.

We packed up everything from the office and got in one of the vans we use for transport and stopped to pick up everyone’s stuff. That usually takes an hour or more. Then we shop for groceries.  Lately, all of my rigs have been ones where we cook for ourselves. I’ve gotten better at figuring out what meals are that people like to eat and what it’s possible to make on the rig. But it’s always nice when there’s someone around who actually enjoys cooking and does it well. One of our three person crew assures us he can cook rig-gourmet and so we leave the major shopping decisions up to him.