Showering is Hazardous

Some very resilient flowers, hanging in there after 3 nights of freezing weather:

Today’s Exploit:

Last night the trailer ran out of water.  This happens occasionally, usually noticed when dish water stops running or someone’s laundry never finishes a cycle.  

Every so often it catches someone in a bit more awkward position.  

Last night the water ran out while I was in the shower.  

Thankfully I had about a 90.342 second warning when the water pressure started to drop.  I managed to get most of the soap out of my hair before the water was completely gone.  

I suppose I should be happy I didn’t run out of HOT water halfway through like I regularly did on the last job.  Due to the washer being cross-hosed (?). Everyone would wash clothes on “cold” and use all the hot water, right before I was ready to get in after a run.

A Long Job

Today’s Exploit:

We drilled 7 feet last night. It was a winner of a 12-hour cycle. 

This job is supposed to be done in 4 days, according to the report I received from my manager at the beginning. We have 2 wells to drill and are still working on the first 500 feet of the first one. That means that we still have over 9000 feet to drill. 

At 1.02 feet per hour. 

This is going to be a long job.

A Poem on Drilling

Countdown:  11 Days.  The nerves.  They tingle.

They’re really trying to convert me to shrimp and crawfish out here.  By way of stuffing it down my throat.  

Today’s Exploit:

It never fails.  

The well is almost done.  You want to go home.  Things are going well. 

Go get excited about going home tomorrow or the next day.

BAM!

Something breaks.  You must stay another week.

Cry.

Too Much Food

Countdown:  Some day I’ll count and know fore sure how many days.

I was just serenaded with “I’m a Little Teapot” over the phone.

By an adult.

Today’s Exploit:

The other day I made pasta.  Lots of pasta.  Probably enough to feed an army.  And only a few people had the required courage to try it  

Now I have a pot of pasta in the fridge.

Then I went home and was given chicken and rice and asparagus.  Enough for another army.  So now I have that in the fridge too.  

When I came back to the rig I had a giant box of fried shrimp and fish and cornmeal and some beans and cabbage waiting.   

Today I was fed by another of the guys in my trailer.  He had enough food to feet 7.2 armies.  

Now the refrigerators are full.  And no one else can eat.  

My Hat is Clean

Countdown:  T minus one less day to prepare.

I started the Insanity workouts today.  All I did was the Fit Test and I’m exhausted.  I will be sore for the first real workout tomorrow.  

Today’s Exploit:

I was very proud of my dirty hardhat.  The one that was black with mud after my stupid mud shower.  The one where I had black hair and mud in my ears and up my nose and soaked through my coveralls.  

The one that made me stink for a week, no matter how hard I scrubbed.  

Well.  

Since I got here the roughnecks have been asking what happened, and why it’s dirty, and telling me how to clean it.

Today one of the roughnecks came over and asked if he could look at it for a minte.

He STOLE IT!

When he came back he had a nice, clean, white hardhat.

Now I can’t tell which one is mine.  And I look like a newbie.

Darn those guys for trying to be nice.  

I was proud of that mud.

This Week: In Review

Countdown:  62 Days.  

Have you read Clockwork Angel yet?  I like it.  

Today’s Exploit:

This week was the week from hell.

Monday:  Start new run.  This should be smooth sailing because we’re using fancy-schmancy tools.

Tuesday: Tool fails, but the help desk and manager are desperate to make it work.  Try random, pointless modifications for 3.16 hours. Aand we have no backup tools. 

Tuesday Night:  Backup arrives 5.3 hours after they told us it should 11pm.  Race to program and pick up new arrival.

Wednesday:  Yay, the tool is working, and I’m giddy from lack of sleep.  Just for good measure I get an infection that makes doing anything and nothing hurt.  Spend 3 hours in the emergency room because the doctor is busy.  Then he prescribes pain pills I said I didn’t want and some antibiotic after beating me up.

Wednesday Night:  Arrive back at the rig to discover tool problems again.  The DD thinks he’s the king of the world, and the manager tells me to change the sensor again.  You know how that story ends.

Thursday:  Things are working, but loopy from lack of sleep.

Friday:  Hospital calls and says that antibiotic isn’t going to work, you have to get a new one.

Friday Night/Early Saturday:  We finished drilling!  PS You get to stay up late changing the tool again.  And that gunk in your eye?  It’s not just sleep, or lack thereof.  It’s probably pinkeye.  Hehe.

Saturday:   Also, the pharmacy’s closed so no one can tell you what kind of eyedrops you should get.  And your eye is going to insist on feeling like a gargoyle is using it as a stress ball.

On the plus side, I did get to sleep for a few hours while they tripping back in.

Mud Bath, er Shower

Countdown:  63 days.  

Doctors: They give you pain meds you don’t want, then the antibiotic they prescribed doesn’t actually do anything and you have to go get a new one.

Today’s Exploit:

Yesterday the tool almost died again.  

After we tried fussing with the pumps and making 480,925 changes to the computers they made me change the pressure sensor again.

I checked with the driller, and he said he’d turn off the pumps and drain pressure from the pipe.  I went and got my coveralls, to avoid getting mud on my town clothes (aka the shirt Cupcake let me borrow) and got my tools.  

I took off the cable and the protector and checked once more with the driller that I could remove the sensor.  

He said it was ok, to go ahead.

I started turning the sensor very slowly, because I knew it would still have some pressure behind it.  Gradually it started leaking, so I knew it was almost free.  I made one more small turn, and BAM!

The sensor was gone and I was covered in mud and I had a 30.84 foot arc of mud shooting over my head.  

I took off my safety glasses and wiped them off. 

When I tried to put them back on I realized that the insides were coated with mud, not just the outsides.  

I didn’t have enough clean material on my coveralls to get it all off because I’d used it to wipe off my face.

When the arc didn’t decrease I ran upstairs to ask the driller if the valves were really closed.  He said that they were, and the flow would abate in a minute.  

So I went back down and watched for a while, until it was low enough that I could force a new sensor on.  I sprayed everything really well with ether-cleaner stuff and put my cable back on.  

Then I went and got a rag and went inside to see if it had helped.  That was when I discovered that I had black hair and a mustache.  

Once I was sure everything was back in working order, and had informed the Directional Drillers and the company man, I went to take a shower.  I spent the next hour and all the hot water dousing my head with dish soap and scraping at the mud on my arms with my nails.  

Speed Bump

I’m having a soup craving.  

Today’s Exploit:

The road to this rig is the worst I’ve ever encountered.

It is paved.

It doesn’t have many potholes.

It isn’t flooded.

It is relatively level, though not very wide.

It does, however, have 3.5 of the largest speed bumps I’ve ever encountered.  

Poor Starla hates me every time I decide to go to town.  I hate me too.

One only spans half the road, so I can go around it.  One is 4 feet across, so going over it is not exceedingly painful.  One is semi-tolerable if I take it at an angle.  

The last one is a doozy.

The last one gets me every time, no matter how fast or what angle I attempt to cross it.  

Starla cries, and I curse and cringe.  

It is a good thing I don’t “need to” go to town often.  Because that bump sure puts a damper on things.  I have been trying to only go when I’m starving because I have nothing else in the fridge.

The Hot-Stove Virus

Cupcake!  What do you think about 31 March?  I couldn’t find any in May.

Today’s Exploit:

It seems a virus is going around in the trailer.  

No one has been able to turn the stove off for days.  

In the last 3 days I’ve gone to the kitchen 4 times to find at least 1 burner on.  

1. I was heating water for tea and couldn’t figure out why it the stove was so hot without boiling my water instantly.  I had made absolutely sure I had the proper burner before turning it on, I’ve started the wrong one a few times.  But not this time!
2. Went to use the toilet only to see 2 burners glowing red, with no one in sight.  Later, one of the boys told me he thought it would heat the trailer because he was cold.
3. Heated some water this morning, but had to go to the trailer.  I turned the heat down, but the solids control guy decided it was boiling too much.  He moved the pot, but left the burner on.
4. I was heating water to make tea this afternoon while Debbie Downer was frying an egg.  When it was done he turned the burner to HI instead of OFF.

Now I’m afraid to go near the stove for fear I’ll trip over one of the loose floor tiles and land on a red-hot burner.

I love my job.  I love my job...Ilovemyjob...Ilovemyjobilovemyjob...

It Will Probably Be My Own

The countdown has started.  We have to be off this location in 10 days or less.  

I’m jumping with joy.

Today’s Exploit:

A few days ago we had a big wind storm.  It came rolling over the horizon 32.4 minutes before it hit us.  I watched as it progressed, sitting outside in the ridiculous heat of a Texas fall.  

Incredibly, when it hit the temperature immediately dropped 11.72 degrees and it almost felt like fall.

Anyway, a result of this storm was the satellite dish moving.  Now that it’s not perfectly aligned it looks as though the TV is having a seizure.  The screen pixelates and the sound blips on and off with an irritating squeak.  

I’m not too worried about the video quality, but the sound drives me up the wall.  No one else seems to care that every 1.83 seconds the sound screeches on or off.  They sit and stare vacantly at the colorful blur, or go on with their normal conversations and arguments.  

I, on the other hand, am ready to tear someone’s hair out listening to the constant cheeping.

How does that not drive them to club the screen and/or receiver with the nearest blunt object?  After 46 seconds of this I’m ready to drop-kick both across the location.

Tired of Working

Today’s TV gems:  super-crazy preacher-lady, Looney Tunes.

I still get the whole back-story, to be sure I’m up to date on these wonderful shows, and the conclusion, in case I might leave just before the show ends.

Today’s Exploit:

I’ve slept four nights in my bed since moving it to my new apartment a month an a half ago.  Most of my nights have been spent running mile and miles to escape the Friday Night Fight Night or Monday Night Smackdown.  

Naturally the top four shows watched in this trailer are:

*The Newlywed Show

*Deal or No Deal

*Smackdown

*Whatever-other-fake-wrestling-show-they-can-find

And they wonder why I don’t spend evenings lolling on the couch with them.  

With the exception of the Newlywed Show each of these contains excessive jumping-around-like-a-lunatic and far to few articles of clothing.  They also contain horrible acting skills, but are taken very seriously by Pat and Ricardo.  

They spend hours discussing the results of the wrestling shows, and exclaiming, “Did you just see that?!”  Most of these exclamations follow very graceful gymnastic stunts where someone gets “knocked out”.

Another delightful pastime of my roommates is to aggravate the night mud logger.  This guy is not pleasant to be around, he complains about everything and is never wrong, but they get him riled up to a fanatical state.

The other night they were doing this as I tried to sleep, after only getting four hours of sleep the night before.  I can generally hear only pieces of their conversations, but this night it escalated into a shouting match.  When I mentioned this the next morning they said, “Oh, we thought you were just taking a long run.”

Seriously?  It’s been dark for two hours!  I’ve never been gone for more than an hour an a half; and you brush off the fact that I probably would have left five hours ago on this run?  At least I know the roughnecks worry about me, they can tell me how long my last four runs lasted.  

I’m stuck in a black hole of utter oblivion, half-naked TV shows and micro-scrutiny.

I want a day off.

They Sent the New Guy

I think someone stole my shirt.  A dirty, muddy, sweaty shirt.  

Gross.

Either that or I lost it,  which is probably more likely.  I just can't figure out when it happened.


Now I’m down to 3, which means laundry every day. 

Today’s Exploit:

I got a new trainee.

I don’t think this one had ever seen a rig before.

And sometimes he gets completely caught up in an idea that really has no bearing on this job.  And won’t let it go while I try to tell him something important.  

Also, he’s a foot taller than me and big and scary.  So I can’t yell at him to listen.

Not really.  

But he is tall.

Mostly I try to answer his questions briefly and then go back to what I was trying to explain in detail to begin with.  

I’m not really sure what to do with him.  Mostly they send me people who have been on another rig, with someone who knows what they’re doing.  So they already have an idea of what is important and what can be left for later.  

I don’t know if I’m the best teacher...

I hope he’s getting the idea.

They Just Sit There, Mocking Me

I need a coffee/tea mug.  This trailer I’m in only has 2.  And I‘m the only one who does dishes. 

That means any time I want tea I have to wash the cup before I can use it.  Usually that means getting the scrubber and clorox out because it has stage III green-and-black mold growing in it.  

I’m learning to keep anything I want to use hoarded away in my food box, otherwise it will disappear and/or culture the newest species of mold.

Also, I’m living with 6 guys, in a 3 bedroom/2 bathroom trailer.  One of the bathrooms is in a bedroom = EVERYONE uses the bathroom I use.  Stock up on the Clorox wipes.  And spray.  And Lysol.  

I might be cleaner if I sleep in my car and not shower for the next month.

Today’s Exploit:

I’m still working on unpacking.  

I’ve got everything organized except for the kitchen.  

I still have 5.7 large boxes of stuff to fit into my kitchen.  It will be trying.  

I can’t throw anything away because I use it all.  Amazingly enough.

It might take me until my lease is up to figure out what to do with this stuff.  

In the mean time, I don’t have hardware to put my table together.  So my boxes are residing in my dining area, quite content to mock my attempts to re-organize everything yet again.

Horrible

I have a pedometer in my new iPod.  Fascinating. 

I ran for 55 minutes and took 4475 steps.  I estimate that to be 5 miles.  Plus some walking in the middle.

Today’s Exploit:

North Dakota was a disaster.  

It was pretty and green and not entirely flat.  And it was not 103 degrees every day.  In fact I got up to temperatures in the mid 50s two days.  It was delightful.  And I got to run without feeling like I was going to pass out from heat if I stopped for a second.  

And it was the worst experience I’ve had since starting my job.  

I was completely miserable.  

The tools didn’t work, and I messed up and I got yelled at for not knowing how to fill out their multitude of paperwork.  In triplicate.  Sometimes in four-plicate. 

Then they wouldn’t tell me how to fix the paperwork.  They’d just yell at me some more.  

And after that they would patronize me. 

I wanted to strangle all of them.

So I had some melt-downs behind the storage shed and pretended the phone got unplugged without me knowing.  

My real manager is now my hero for telling them I needed to come back to Texas early.  

Never thought I’d be homesick for TEXAS.  

Disgusting.

Epic Battle

I discovered the other day that I left the power cord for my work computer in the office.  In Houston.  Yay.

Today’s Exploit:

I think I’m finally better.  

That fever turned out to be the not-so-subtle message to me saying “GO TO THE HOSPITAL!”  I  am a bit oblivious sometimes and didn’t catch the more delicate hints.

So I went to the doctor and got drugs for my illness.

I spent the next few days sleeping on the couch because the bed was too hard.  

I also had the pleasure of being squeezed by a bridge troll, stabbed by an evil pixie, stomped on my an elephant and bashed over the head by a gargoyle.  

It made me want my mom.  

It made me want chicken noodle soup.

Next time I get a “knot in my back” I’m not waiting until I get a chance to get a massage.  I’m going to the doctor.  

Stupid kidneys.

Fevered Delusions

This is my favorite song right now.  

Today’s Exploit:

This morning I woke up freezing.  FREEZING.  In Texas.  In the summer.

At first I just thought they turned down the AC and I’d be fine in a minute.  

After an hour of shaking violently enough to rattle my teeth I decided that I needed to go outside to get warm.  I could tell something was not quite right because my skin was warm to touch, but I was still shivering like I was in an earthquake.  But my main focus was getting outside so that I could be warm again.

So I went out and sat in the sun.  

Normally just walking outside makes me feel like I’ve been slapped in the face with a shot of steam, but today it took me a full 4.87 minutes to feel warm.   

About when I started to feel warm I also started to feel like I might be sick and wanted some privacy.  So I stumbled behind the trailers and across the road.  After tripping over a rock and my own feet 17 times I made it.  That was when I realized that I had a good chance of losing consciousness and privacy probably wasn’t at the top of the list of things I needed anymore.  

So I turned around and shuffled back to the trailer where I scared the socks off Enrique, the other MWD.  He helped me to the couch and gave me drugs to help my fever, and then he made me sleep on the couch the rest of the morning so that he could make sure I didn’t get any worse.  

Ha Ha. Tricked You!

The guy:  Outdoor adventure guide.  Travels all over the states for activities similar to a Ropes course.

The line:  I’ve stayed in some pretty amazing places, and I’ve woken up to many views that rival your beauty.


The response:  ... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Today’s Exploit:

I was really excited to come to this job because I thought I’d get to be the boss.  Not only work days, but be in charge as well.  I would be working with a contractor.

I was happily setting things up in the trailer when Patrick showed up.  

He’s not a contractor.  He’s just out of Eng-1, the three month class to learn about the basic tools.  

After getting most of our gear set up I finally hooked up the internet and got some emails.  

Turns out I get to work nights.  

Again.

Patrick has to break out on this job.  

I’m not sure I’m the best candidate to break him out.  I’ve led three jobs in my time here.  I’ve only worked with someone less qualified than I once before.

Also the rig is broken.  I’m beginning to think it’s me that causes these problems, for reals.

Building Showers Can Be Quite Entertaining

I’ve been invited to feed alligators by hand.  

I think I might have to decline.

Today’s Exploit:

We reached the desired depth for this section of the well, so yesterday I didn’t have much to do.  So I harassed the roughnecks for most of the day, in addition to making some bread.  

I went to the floor and bothered the driller for 87 minutes and the floor hands for 5.28 hours.  They kept trying to get me to do their work, but I stuck with supervising.  Supervising is way more fun, you get to boss people around without having to do any actual work.  

Then one of the rig hands was told to build a shower.  I was curious about this so I went to bother him.  Turns out it was a safety shower for hazardous chemicals.  One of those that you pull a tab and freezing water gushes out at 47 gallons per second.  In this case I suspect it might be hot water, considering the outside temperature.

I ended up telling him how to put each piece together because he couldn’t read the schematic.  Also, he spent half the time bolting it to the floor just to have to remove the bolts.  

I was quite entertained for all of 45 minutes.  

Then I got bored and went to bother someone else.  

I don’t know if he actually finished the shower.