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| Currently I am on location in the eastern part of Saudi Arabia. This particular field is called Shaybah, and it is in the middle of nowhere, literally. In fact for a very long period of time the border between Saudi Arabia and its neighbors here was undeclared and unmapped. This changed when oil was found here of course. Quickly borders were drawn to the benefit of the Saudi royal family. For the sake of curiosity, I input the coordinates of this particular well into Google Maps and discovered that they believe I am in the United Arab Emirates rather than Saudi Arabia. Basically I am really close to the border. The other interesting thing is when you look at the area from Google Maps, it has a rather unique landscape. There are these oddly shaped light colored places within a reddish background. Yes it really does look like that, even at low altitudes from an airplane. There are other interesting things about this place. The sand is orangy red and in some places a brick red. It is warm. The first week of April here and it is already around 105 degrees. In fact it is now the time of the year where you use the hot water tap to cool off the cold water tap..... Odd, but the cold water comes from a huge tank sitting outside getting hot, and the hot water heater (after you turn it off the power to it) is inside the cooler room thus making the water colder. Not even close to the summer yet... Pictures later. | | |
| Well I am in the same place as the last time I wrote. (If you can see the picture in the next entry, you know what I am talking about when I say it is dull) It has now been 53 days..... From time to time, actually far more frequently than I would like, my company sends me a trainee on the verge of getting his first promotion. This means he sort of knows how to do the job, but doesn't comprehend the infinite tedium of paperwork. My new job, while making sure operation runs smoothly, is to introduce him to this tedium and make him hate his new life. Generally this wouldn't be a bad thing. I remember when I was in his or her position. I know that I asked a lot of questions, some of which people were not able to answer. (I have a knack for seeing problems in this job that my supervisor has never seen before with which he does not know how to deal.) At any rate, they have finally sent me someone that is relatively intelligent, I think. He is Indian, he is smart and he was a programmer before. A quintessential stereotype. To further this stereotype, it is painfully apparent that he would not be able to make his way around a garage. I, personally, have not found this job particularly difficult, just stressful. The stress lies in dealing with management directly and clients directly. The stress lies, for me, in making sure the client is happy, and the manager sees things as being profitable. To a large extent making the client happy involves getting things done quickly. Knowing the theory of nailing two boards together doesn't mean the job is easy and you can do it quickly. This is something most people forget. Most of the time theory doesn't work out here because you do not have the ideal settings in which theory was created or developed. As a result, horribly inefficient decisions are made. This is my stress. Self-exacting, because I am worried that I am projecting a bad image by being inefficient. I found myself slightly amused this morning. I had been taking care of the trivial task of loading a radioactive source into one of the companies tools. It takes me around 10 minutes from start to finish, and sometimes I feel slow. Today I realized just how wrong I was. My colleague is the one that could not get around his garage, it took him twice as long. I am not sure that I have just done the procedure so many times that it goes quickly for me, or if it really is somewhat trivial. (I am inclined to think the former) At any rate it took him two and a half times the time it takes me. I know I am suppose to be training him to do this on his own, and I did let him do this on his own. But the amount of time he took was excruciating. All I can hope is that he will get faster at it. The other thing is he keeps asking to watch him and makes sure he 'does it right' We are talking about paperwork here. Filling in information into forms should be pretty self explanatory. The information to be filled out is in this form that is ridiculously long and a nuisance to fill. The office is suppose to put the preliminary information in and we are suppose to complete it. The preliminary information is placed into these things called job packets which the office is suppose to give us. This allows the option to save to the job packet. That never happens here, we have to create from scratch and therefore the option to "export" is unavailable. He then asks me how to get the information relating to one well, I tell him the way I know, which involves him backing up the information he already has somewhere else. In short it cannot be merged. He ask me how to do it. I do not know. I tell him I do not know. He says but there must be some way. Sure if everything were programmed in the correct way there would be. But again this goes back to theory and reality. The reality of the situation is that it was not done correctly and someone forgot that option, unless it is buried in a menu. I relay this thought of mine and tell him if he can figure out how to do it, let me know. I would not mind having that information myself. Now comes the argument, in which I do not really care to participate, (but that does further the Indian stereotype). Oh well... Another day, another dollar, at least they pass quickly some of the time. | | |
| Today is day 24 of me being at a rig doing a job. Here is a picture of the rig from on top of the derrick. Technically not suppose to be shooting photos of these places. (Paranoia maybe) 
And here is another one of a typical morning I see. 
Isn't it nice.... | | |
| Yesterday I received an email from a Will Rice alumni. It was to let us know that the ever famous "Beer Bike" was just around the corner and it was time to come by and ride in the races. It is also a time when the young alumni have an informal reunion. As time goes on fewer people that you know show up to this reunion. Most of my friends, when I was a student, graduated before I did and I watched the years go by to the point that when it was time for me to return for the first time, most of them stopped returning. By this point I had effectively become one of the regulars in Valhalla. Valhalla is a bar run by graduate students and most of the "GSA alumni" have some affiliation with Valhalla though not necessarily Rice. They were and perhaps still are a most colorful group people. Becoming a regular at Valhalla contributed a lot to me knowing a colorful handful of post-doctorate "experimenters" They experimented with everything, and were extremely creative. From things such as the "pogo bike" (hopping at the right frequency propelled it) to a blue volvo covered with the ever famous Billy Bass, Lobsters and what not that were rewired to sing opera. At the time, most of the people I knew were alumni, and had been alumni for several years. When I became an alumni myself, many of these people began to move themselves. Better job opportunities, even a marriage or two took them to other cities. There was one man though that was a true fixture of this bar and everything that was associated with it. He was Dr. John Schroeter. He was the first manager and had been there since the inception of this bar.
Unfortunately he passed away last year. I was in Saudi Arabia at the time and heard about it through some friends. It was quite shocking to hear the news, which happened some months ago. I returned to Vallhalla for the New Year's Party this year. That took on quite a sombre tone. Those that were there could be divided into two groups. One composed of a younger generation that was trying to have a good time, and the other that had been around for awhile. This latter group had voices that were flat and unemotional. This was after all the first time in almost 30 years that Schroeter didn't come to the party. Those to whom I spoke had two things to say. The first was that his death was hard and the second was a new year is coming and perhaps it would be a better one.
Schroeter and I spent a lot of time discussing various things at Valhalla, everything from strange math paradoxes to the effect of hallucinogens. He became a good friend over the years, and as is common in life most people pass away before you have the chance to say goodbye. In a way, I got that chance. Just before I woke up this morning, I finally had slept long enough to dream. In my dream, I was walking across Rice's campus past Valhalla. It seems to be very early in the morning, before dawn. Houston still has the orangy night glow about it. The air is a little crisp, perhaps this is why it seems like the morning is about to break rather than simply being the middle of the night. At any rate the door is open and the sounds of someone doing work is spilling from the door. I venture inside where I find this bearded, tie-dye cladded figure repairing a stool. I ask Schroeter if there is anything I can do to help. And he tells me that he is just making things ready for beer bike. While he is working, we converse for a while. Talking about what will happen as the day continues. Somewhere along the way, time established itself as the morning of beer bike, and in our conversation it was established that Schroeter, who was standing in front of me at the time, wouldn't be seen there. In a moment of child-like naivete, I tell him not to be silly, of course we would see him there as it was only hours away. Somewhere deep down at that point, I realized that I was the one that was silly. That, in fact, this year he would not be seen there. This year, we would not see a man in tutu riding a child's bike around the track, that we would not see a blue robe figure on a pogo bike hopping along, his beard floating in the wind. This year and all the years to come we would not see this man who had a tie-dyed costume for every occasion that you could imagine and then some. In my dream, I looked at him with understanding. I express my gratitude, and bid him farewell. I stepped on the first step in the entry way to the bar and awoke.
Schroeter was a part of Valhalla, and Valhalla was a part of Schroeter. Valhalla changed, the Valhalla that I knew is not there anymore. It is a much younger crowd that seems to go there now. The regulars that I knew don't really go there that often anymore either. I suppose everything moved on, but I think the spirit of both will remain awhile.
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I made it back into Saudi Arabia and taken several of the preliminary steps to obtaining a relatively deserved promotion. Being the type of person that I am, I have a tendency to think that a promotion is something that is earned. Given my job, I often do not really believe that I deserve a promotion because I do not really do anything. It was a day such as today that I realize that in fact I do deserve one. One of the most often used descriptions of drilling a directional oil-well is trying to thread a needle with your hands in a box that you cannot see into. With the advent of most technology, this can be done to some degree, but as the well gets deeper the uncertainty becomes greater. This is when you 'know' what is going on, where you are located underground and other such things. Today I was placed in the situation that the tool we use to 'measure' where we are was not doing its job. Well this is not entirely accurate, in fact, much like the image on your TV from your digital cable box if you miss a little bit of information, you typically loose the the whole image temporarily (sometimes permanently). Our 'tool' was not decoding the intial ... say 10 out of 1000 of pieces of information and as a result the 'picture' of where we were located was unavailable. This can be acceptable, but only for so long.
I am applying what I know about a wide variety of topics to get our picture back. I am also trying to minimize the time that I am working on this, and not productively drilling (everyone looses money if we are not drilling).
After a couple of hours of trying to find a solution to this problem. Attempting to fix the problem, myself and the Directional Driller (very experienced guy) feel that the we are past the point where it would be better to cut our losses and get a new working tool into the well. Our manager and our support center have other ideas. They give us a wide range of things to attempt, all of which we have already done with one notable exception. That is to establish communication to the tool by changing its rotation. There are two problems with this.. One is that there is an ordered pattern of how things should be changed that we don't happen to have a copy of around. The other is that if the problem is related to not being able to receive a pattern because it is distorted coming up, why would the distortion not occur in the other direction. ( Changing the pressure of fluid in a pipe at one end and viewing at the other is directionally independent.
Trying this out is not a bad thing, but there again there are two problems. 1) Upon requesting someone to inform us of the procedure to get this to work, we are met with a stony wall of silence. (The support center, whose sole job is to provided support of this nature, is, in fact, not supporting us.
2) We have already been asked to go ahead and change out our tools.
Now the fun begins, my boss calls his boss, who then makes a phone call to the client's boss to try and get the client representative out here to allow us to do this tasks, who then calls his representative out here to get a clearer picture. If this sounds convoluted, it is. The end result is the same in any situation where someone tries to circumvent and go over someone else head, the 'victim' gets angry. Don't get me wrong, this is an excellent reason to become frustrated, annoyed, and many other emotions that eventually lead to anger.
In the end we lost an additional 7 hours on top of before (This corresponds to an additional 7% loss of revenue.) Should I be able to make the educated decision of which I am actually capable, that would be an additional $40,000 for the duration of this job. If you factor in the fact that it keeps tools at one job longer and it can't earn revenue elsewhere, as well as the fact that there are 40 more people in the same position, that is a whole lot of money involved because someone is incompetent. <Sigh> I need a promotion so that I will be allowed to do my job. Where I am now, dealing and smoothing client relations on the spot... I should probably be paid more.
In light of all of this. I just have to remember that I am being compensated and every morning I wake up to a nice sun rise, and see peculiar things. For example:
As you can see I have all of my gulls in a row. Well a few rows anyway.... By the way, at night
they all seem to sleep sitting in the water and just rocking along....
Now that could be a life.
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