Hey folks,
I´m writing again from the rig. I´m still here- 15 days and going strong. It´s eight o´clock, and I´ve been up since 2am, after going to sleep at 11pm. We´re waiting to start the second part of job. I´ll probably be awake for another 12 hours at least. We´ll see. If there´s one thing I´ve learned (actually I´ve been learning tons), it´s that everything takes forever.. much longer than you think it should.
The first part of our job went really well. We connected our tool to the string of pipes going into the oil well, but then we have to stay there and watch while they run enough drill pipe (generic pipe that the rig has tons of), to get to the correct depth for us to operate our tool. We had to get to almost 5000 meters (about 3 miles). Vagner (my coworker) and I took turns sitting in the driller´s cabin while they lowered 180 stands (90 feet each) of drill pipe at about 10 minutes per stand. The challenge was not the actual job, but staying awake during the boring, repetitive-ness.
Toward the end of the drill pipe fun, we had fluid flowing back out the top of the pipe as we were lowering the pipe into the well. It was more than normal, and the wind was pretty strong. It ended up blowing the fluid all over the place and making the whole rig dirty. The poor guys working on the rig floor were covered in the stuff. The craziest part was when the wind changed direction, and the fluid started covering the windows of the driller´s cabin. It looked like the windows were covered in melted chocolate ice-cream (nasty smelling melted chocolate ice-cream). We kept working, despite not being able to see, using just the gauges inside the cabin.
I totally dropped the ball on this job. Haha.. gotcha.. I bet you think I messed up, right? Wrong! When we activate our tool, we drop a brass ball down the tubing to create a seal in the tool, so we can pressure up the tubing above the ball. (Hopefully that makes some sense). I got the honor/responsibility of dropping the ball down the tube and watching it disappear into the stinky, melted chocolate ice-cream fluid.
This morning, we were preparing all our equipment for this next phase of the job. It was still dark, and from up on the drilling platform, we could see tons of lightning in the distance. As it started coming closer, I wondered if the rig would stop working in a thunderstorm. I stood there for a moment and considered that I was standing on a completely metal structure with a massive metal tower sticking into the sky... surrounded by water. Sounds stupider than Ben Franklin flying a kite... Electrocution anyone? Haha.. just kidding. I´m assuming there are some massive lightning rods on this thing, because the storm reached us and we didn´t stop at all (At $7000 per hour, a rig needs a better reason than silly weather to stop operations). Anyway... that´s a lot of oilfield engineering talk. I´m sorry if it´s not as fun to read as other stuff. (In case my emails gave you the impression that I was permanently on vacation in Brazil/France... be not mistaken... I´m workin, workin, workin).
Most of my friends that I made have since left the rig, so I haven´t played dominoes in quite a while. I´m getting to know a new set of people, but since I work whenever they need me, I have to take any opportunity to sleep and to eat when I can. My poor natural clock is so confused. It doesn´t know when to be awake or when to sleep.
I have a little notebook that I write all my observations and job notes in. It´s so funny- as my portuguese gets better, I´ll write one thing in english, the next in portuguese, then back to english. It just depends on what language I happen to be operating in at the moment of writing whatever it is down. Anyone who would pick it up to read it would think I´m seriously confused about what language I speak.
Oh, I forgot to mention the fashion horrors that are completely acceptable here on the rig. We all have boots that we wear while working, but you can´t wear them in the cafeteria, common room, or bedrooms, so you have to change into flip-flops in the hallway. You wear socks with your boots, so when you change, everyone ends up wearing socks with their flip-flops. It´s so ugly and feels so strange, yet it´s totally acceptable... all the cool kids are doing it. To make matters worse, the laundry guys write your room number on your clothes when they wash them to make sure you get your stuff back. So... you have a bunch of guys walking around in shorts, socks, and flip-flops, with a three digit number written in black permanent marker on their socks. Watch out New York Fashion Week, here we come!
Well.. I´ll stop writing now.. I hope you all have a wonderful day- eating and sleeping on a normal schedule :-P
Love,
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