Pre-life Crisis

I heard a discussion on NPR a few months ago how many of today's college students struggle with having too many options -- too many things that they could do with their lives -- which was certainly not the case for past generations and surprising considering the lack of job opportunities in today's economy. You'd think that the recent graduates who were lucky enough to get jobs would be desperate to keep them, but I can't think of many people I know that want to be doing what they're doing now in two years.

I know that's the case for me. I always thought that I would do something really awesome when I was older, and graduating from Princeton solidified the idea in my head that I would be successful. A part of me has always wanted to be an editor and journalist, but I feel that dream slipping away whenever I see the lists of publications on the resumes of people I knew from high school newspaper. I chose to go the practical route in college, focusing on engineering and quitting the newspaper for lack of time and interest (who wants to write stories about snowball fights on campus?). I knew engineering was the right thing to study if you want a job post-undergrad, but is it practical if you don't actually want to work as an engineer once you get out? Maybe not, but the money I make may buy me some time to figure it out.

Today is the one year anniversary of my start date, and I've started to browse the internet for jobs. I applied for a position with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as an engineer, and getting it would be really great as I would be minutes away from my family and boyfriend. I'm scared though because unlike this job, that's a job I could see myself sticking with for several years, even until retirement. A comfortable government position. I hear my boyfriend talk about the older people that work in his office at the Department of Homeland Security, just doing the minimum to get by. I'm scared of that. I don't want to feel less successful when I'm 60 than I do at 23.

Wise words

Since coming to Midland I've been talking to a girl who started at this company a few months before I did. She works on a nearby rig and knows a lot about the equipment used here, so I bug her a lot online by asking her questions. This morning there was some bad data coming up on the computer and I told her about it and that I hadn't noticed it for a few minutes. Her response:

"woops

oh well

it's just a hole in the ground"

It made me think of the last post I wrote and how you can mess something up, but most things are fixable and it's not something to beat yourself down over.

Highs and Lows

Three close calls in the past 24 hours:

1) I almost shorted out the electronics on a very expensive tool. I had the power on when we plugged into it when it should have been off. This is a well established no-no for my job. I realized what I had done almost immediately and when my lead hand walked in, I pretended that I had correctly turned the power switch on after plugging in. He sat down and said, "That's weird, the voltage is reading twice what it's supposed to." I replied, "That is weird." Nevertheless he programed the tool and everything seems fine. Phew.

2) On the rig floor. I tried to remove this plug that is responsible for protecting the electronics inside the tool until we are ready to put the tool in the hole (underground). The tool is like a huge pipe with a whole bunch of electronics inside it. Tools communicate with each other through delicate connections which fit into one another (male-female) once the pipes around them are screwed together one on top of the other on the rig floor. The way you remove the plug is with a socket wrench. So I'm turning and turning it and it's not getting any looser. Turns out the plug was stuck on the connection it was protecting and I was spinning the entire innards of the tool round and round. You're not supposed to do that (delicate, remember?). Paco, my lead hand, banged on the wrench a bit and loosened the plug. Anyway, we did our shallow hole test -- a test that you do once all the tools are connected together and underground to make sure they're working properly before you send them 11,000 into the earth -- and everything was fine. I asked Paco if I had done something wrong up there on the rig floor, and he said no (though maybe his attitude would have been different if I actually had broken the electronics in the tool). Phew.

3) Okay so I had managed to get this far without shedding a tear until close call # 3 happened. There is a sensor that we have to install on the rig itself in order to get signal from our tools downhole. This sensor is screwed into a pipe where many, many gallons of nasty petroleum-smelling mud flows through.

Anyway, our sensor had broken and needed to be switched with a new one, and Paco told me that it is safe to install this sensor while the crew was lowering the tools to the bottom of the hole. So. I unscrew the old broken sensor very slowly, knowing that there was likely pressure built up behind it and mud would shoot out as it normally does -- I had seen people do this before. I saw a slow trickle of mud seep out. Okay, no big. I keep unscrewing and BAM!! The sensor vanished almost immediately and before I knew what had happened a very pressurized stream of mud shot up 20 feet into the air. After what seemed like eons of watching it shoot up in full force, I realized that this pressurized mud fountain wasn't stopping any time soon, which is what is supposed to happen. I walk up to the drill floor to let someone know what I had done. Upon looking at me and my mud covered face and clothes a rig hand asked, "What happened to you?" I said, "I tried to change out my sensor and mud is shooting up. Is it going to stop on its own?" "No," he replied. He informed the driller and they managed to stop the fountain of mud, which at this point had covered most of the ground and that side of the rig in a thick milk chocolate colored layer.

I felt humiliated and scared that someone would mention this incident to the company man, who would likely run me off when he found out what a safety hazard I was. I could have been seriously injured if my hand or face was directly in the path of the explosive fountain of mud or worse, the metal sensor which had been catapulted. Why do I keep fucking things up? Am I so much more stupid than everyone else in the oilfield that I haven't learned these things by now? Maybe I should quit before I really mess something up or get hurt.

Walking back toward the trailer I ran into the DD, Dan, who took one look at me and asked if I had been playing in the mud. Even though I was embarrassed, I was shook up by the experience and said, "I did something stupid" and told him what happened. My voice cracked. Dan said, "Oh hell, that exact thing happened to me once, except when it happened to me I was so startled that I fell back into the cellar under the rig - It was about as deep as I am tall! Don't worry about that. I'm sure it's happened to every guy on this rig at some point." I laughed. Him saying that made me feel so much better. It was the first time anyone in the oilfield had ever recounted an embarrassing story to me - a story where they did something foolish. Maybe I'm not such an idiot after all. God I felt better.

Fast forward several hours later in my shift. I pick up the phone. A stern voice on the other end said, "Yeah who was it that made such a mess on the rig earlier?" I was speechless. My mind flashed to the ground below the rig, covered in a thick layer of mud.

"Uh...You mean the mud on the ground?"

"Yeah."

"Um, that was me."

"Well you gon' clean it up?"

Silence. I didn't know what to say. How could I clean up mud? It's not like you can mop it up. What do I say? Is this the company man? Is he gearing up to run me off?

More silence. And then...

I heard what sounded like ten people laughing on the other end of the phone. Never has being laughed at been such a relief.

Hurry up and wait.

I got a call a few days ago asking if I was willing to work for two weeks in Midland, TX, home of George W. and Laura Bush. If they had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have tried to come up with some excuse not to go. But doing absolutely nothing for three weeks was getting old and I was starting to miss the extra $130+ I get from being on a rig...

Sure it was fun in the beginning. I made crafts and decorated the patio of my apartment (see below), but after a week of that my days became variations of the following: wake at noon, People's Court, Desperate Housewives, Starbucks, read 30 pages of a book, glass of wine.

Oh yeah, one day me and a friend went to a place called Jungle Gardens in Avery Island, LA and it was beautiful. The Tabasco factory is also there but we passed.

Anyway, now I'm back to work and on loan to Midland, TX until my vacation at the end of the month. I've been here for about 3 days and haven't been sent out on a job yet because the rig isn't ready for us. I'm nervous about going to the rig because the measurement tool we're going to use (called PeriScope) isn't something I've ever seen or learned about before. I have a 350+ page .pdf explaining the tool, but I've only skimmed it. I'm hoping I can learn when I get there...?

On this job I'll be working days because the lead hand that I'm going out with likes nights better. For the most part, the person working days on a rig (whether it be the company man, directional driller, etc) is the more experienced person and I don't want people coming up to me assuming I'm in charge. The lead hand is very experienced so I know I can always wake him up if necessary. I just hope he doesn't assume I know a whole lot, because my experience is limited to the way things are done in Conway, AR. Things that are done in Texas may not be the same things that are done in Arkansas on a job.

Though I'm nervous, the sooner we start this job, the sooner it will end (9-12 days) and the more days I'll have before my vacation starts. If I get out of here early enough, I can go to Maryland before my trip and see my family and boyfriend. I'm really excited and hope it works out.