Work hard, play hard

For people that are interested in what exactly I do for a living can enjoy another story on my blog. As always, I have tried not to go into endless and boring details too much, and hope to break the stories with short anecdotes that spring into my mind while writing the story. For my growing international database of friends I will, at least for now, switch to English.

It’s blood, sweat, sometimes tears.
– Bob Hayes –

Schlumberger is the world leading oilfield service provider for oil and gas companies around the world. This means that we do most of the behind the scene hard labor to find and retrieve oil and gas around the world for the big and more famous names like Shell, BP and Exxon. These latter companies are more or less logistical companies that bother with transporting the retrieved oil and gas from the fields to our doorsteps. It is mostly these companies that own the licenses to certain fields, and therefore are more involved in politics as can be seen daily in the news. When oil has to be found, or a well has to be drilled and subsequently evaluated (part of Wireline), and finally made ready for production, that is the moment where we come in, the oilfield service providers, of which Schlumberger is the biggest in the world (more than 80,000 employees in more than a hundred countries around the world). Within this high-tech industry, Schlumberger is the number one choice of most big, international clients (which can be anyone from Shell to an oil-rich dictatorship like Libya or Turkmenistan). In this industry, money is the name of the game, and there is plenty of it. Schlumberger does not compete on price, but differentiates itself with technology.

You'll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you've got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.
– D.H. Lawrence –

Schlumberger is known within the oil industry as ‘the Slave Company’, a fact that I knew about before I signed up, but I did not understand its meaning until being send to Abu Dhabi for training. Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy working for this company greatly, but I just never imagined being able to work 40+-hours straight without sleep, performing heavy physical labor under the burning Arabian sun in summer, or in the freezing conditions of the Karakum desert in winter, combined with brain challenging work carried out under a constant time pressure provided by a furiously shouting company man managing a rig that costs up to hundreds of thousands dollars a day to operate. When a minute costs $150, imagine what your manager will tell you upon return from the job when you tell him you just lost 19 hours of precious rig-time due to a tool failure downhole; needless to say you have a lot of explaining to do.
Within this big industry, I take up the role as Wireline engineer. The term Wireline refers to a cabling technology used by oil servicing companies to lower equipment or measurement devices into the well for the purposes of well intervention and reservoir evaluation. With tools, of which some use radioactive sources (sources that we as engineers have to load ourselves), we are able to evaluate a well (in other words we are among others able to tell the client exactly at what depth he (what can I say, it’s a man’s world) can find oil and gas), or we can do well intervention using among others explosives (which we as engineers have to load and arm ourselves) to create holes in the metal casing to start flowing the well. As Wireline engineers we operate many different tools, of which many at the same time when running super-combo toolstrings downhole. When everything is setup and checked, we are ready to run in hole and start our computers to gather the data. Looking at several screens at the same time, with 18 different windows full of running lines with different colors and several lights flashing, I feel like the operator in the Matrix who is able to see the world through a stream of information presented to him in a waterfall of signs. Our job during logging is to control this huge amount of information. To make sure we are able to do all of this, while at the same time managing a cell including a team of operators, a truck and all equipment, managing the client, and keeping the boss happy, wireline engineers are selected from the countries best universities before being put through a four months of military-style training school, where adaptability, flexibility, stress resistance, and being able to absorb and process huge amounts of information while being deprived of necessary sleep, are the key performance indicators. Along the way, many fail. After four intense months in Abu Dhabi (four months that I also enjoyed greatly) I was very tired, but feeling like standing on top of the world.

Hard work is the key to success, so work diligently on any project you undertake. If you truly want to be successful, be prepared to give up your leisure time and work past 5 PM and on weekends. Also, have faith in yourself.
– Charles Lazarus –

Here in Turkmenistan we work every day, for seven weeks straight; no weekends. We work from eight o’clock in the morning till six o’clock in the afternoon, and most evenings we work as well. When we have jobs we even work nights. Last month has been a particularly busy month for me. First I was send into the desert to log the first section of a newly drilled well on the Gara Altyn rig. After a day and a night of working, we finished a quick, clean and successful job. Upon return I had to finalize the data and deliver all the logs to the client as soon as possible, because the moment I finished I was send offshore immediately with two colleague engineers to do four runs on the Astra rig, operated by Dragon Oil from Dubai. Instead of flying out in the helicopter, we took the supply boat traveling the Caspian from rig to rig. Because summer starts early here in Central Asia, we were enjoying a great day on the deck sunbathing and enjoying the view. On the horizon were literally hundreds of production platforms and the occasional drilling rig, burning off gas and setting the horizon on fire; a majestic sight that only the lucky few on this planet have the privilege to see. After a week offshore, having done four successful runs with very little sleep, some workouts and more sunbathing on the helideck, we returned home to the base in Balkanabat for some well deserved Russian vodka. Some days later I did my sixth and last run of the month, the end of well section, again on Gara Altyn.

We all dream a lot, some are lucky, some are not. But if you think it, want it, dream it, then it's real. You are what you feel.
– Andrew Lloyd Webber¬ –

During night-logging especially, when the job is running smoothly and everything seems under control, my mind often wonders off to the more important things in life. In a semi-awake state of mind I think about my home, family and friends, and my objectives in life. During my last job on Dragon, I shared my thoughts and gained new insights talking to my fellow engineer Fola, and we discussed and philosophized until the sun came up. Fola is a very industrious guy from Nigeria who is working hard to make his dream a reality, which is making his first million before he hits thirty five. To realize this dream he is buying a gas-plant in Denmark which he will be running in Lagos. Because as a Wireline engineer your job is always at risk, as you never know if your next fuck-up will be your last, we were discussing how losing our jobs would affect our lives. My point of view was that it would first of all hurt our pride, but that we would find something else soon, and therefore try not to stress too much about this. Fola showed me a different reality, as he told me that most people in Nigeria go without insurance, and when people get sick, they die. Luck has a peculiar habit of favoring those who don't depend on it. He has diabetes, and needs the insurance provided by a steady and secure job. Because this job is not secure, he is very motivated to become rich fast. This, he told me, is probably the difference in attitude during the first training school between Europeans and Americans on one side, and employees from the developing world on the other. Where the former practice the motto ‘work hard, play hard’, partying many nights away in clubs and bars, the latter are more dedicated, studying firmly every day and late into the night. They avoid any risk of losing their job. Again, this showed me how lucky people from the developed world are, and how relatively ‘careless’ we live our lives. Fola does not want to leave his destiny to chance; he wants to make it his choice. He chooses not to wait for his destiny, but chooses to achieve it.
Today Fola became father for the first time of a beautiful son.