Sunday, July 31, 2011

When it hurts...


I now have until I am finally home after 10 straight work weeks!! I have never been more ready. The distance is starting to get to me and I’m starting to realize that commuting sucks when special things happen at home. Hopefully, this next week will be an easy week due to Ramadan. I had to change rooms one more time because of another guy coming and I found a place that gives a mean haircut and shave.

When it hurts the godfather...
This last week was a great week for Bakersfield. Our close friends gave birth to a boy and girl, Hudson and Payton! We are so happy for them, and I cant wait to meet them myself. Ashley did great and the babies came out on rails. The two are slightly underweight so they are still in the hospital, but they should be out soon! Using my aircard, I was able to skype with Chelsea the whole time and see pictures as soon as they were born, which is incredible in its own right, but doesn’t replace an in-person experience. I guess comes it with the position, but this has been the first time that I really hated being away from home for a specific moment. (On that note, it is worth pointing out, that if any “life-threatening illness or sickness needing aid” happens to any family member, the company will put me on the next flight out of the country with the most expedited path – regardless of the cost.) What makes this even more exciting? Chelsea and I are the godparents of Payton! We are both so honored and excited to be a part of their lives.

Ramadan...
Tomorrow is the start of Ramadan, and even though I am not Muslim I will get to experience the month of fasting since eating and drinking are both not allowed in public in Saudi Arabia. Aside from the eating, my life will be mostly the same with a few additional “perks.” The normal working ours for Ops people have changed from 7am-5pm to 5am-11am, allowing the necessary rest for the fasting and to try to work during cool hours. The 6 hour work day will be awesome, and just what I needed going into week 10…

Haircut...
Inside the Eurovillage I found a gem! There is a barber shop with two guys, one from Pakistan and the other  from Somolia. I coincidentally was there for something else when he looked at me and said, let me cut your hair. I asked, “Do you shave too?” he did! He was a funny guy who showed me how many different styles I could have, he wet my hair and combed it back and said “see Italian” then combed my hair from one side to the other and said “German” (Hitler). I got a head massage to start, then the haircut, then a proper old-school shave, then another shave, then two more. By the end, it was the closest shave I have ever had on my face – I couldn’t feel one prickle. LOL After the shaving, he put a hot cloth on my face, took it off, sprayed me with a squirt bottle with freezing cold water, then put the warm cloth back on. All-in-all it was the most complete haircut/shave I have ever had! How much you ask? $7 then tipped him $3!! Crazy.

As far as locations go, Saudi is one of the best. You get your own car, the food is good, its close to a city, and the rooms are awesome. The only downside is that it is 30-60 minutes away from the workshop. It sets the bar high and now Im going to be spoiled when I go to Angola. =(

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

You Dont Realize How Good You Have It...!


I have now been working for 59 days, and still have 12 days left. I have never been so ready to be home in my life. At the end of all this I will have been away from my bed, my dogs, and my wife for 71 days! Depending on how you look at it, that’s 10 weeks, 1700 hours, or 20% of a whole year! We are definitely going to go on a loooooooooong vacation when I get home!

I am currently on a job that has been going for 30 hours and I haven’t been able to sleep yet. I am babbling, and really slaphappy, so I apologize in advance if this blog rambles. Since I don’t have much new to tell you about, I’ll share with you whats on my mind.

You never realize how good you have it until you experience the contrast between your way of life and someone else’s. The Arabian world is so different I thought I would point out some of these differences and share them with you.

Religion/Prayer
In Saudi Arabia 99% of the population is Muslim and religion is something that greatly impacts everyday life. First off, prayer is done 5 times a day, once before sunrise, another time at high noon, another time at 15:30, another time at 1830, then one last time at 2030. Before each of these prayers they stop whatever they were doing – businesses even close during prayer times, and can be shut down permanently if they don’t – then they wash their hands, face, head, mouth, nose, feet, and arms with water. Finally, they pray for 10-15 minutes… In my opinion, this is an amazing display of faith, discipline, and priorities. I think that we can all learn something from this in our own religions.

Saudi Arabia is one of three countries that has religious rule (the other two being Afghanistan and Pakistan). Islam and the Koran dominate the way their government is run, the laws that are in place, the way family is managed, and their economy. It is a very strict and criminals are dealt with harshly. Sex before marriage and drug trafficking have death tolls, stealing costs you your hands, etc. Furthermore, women are to take care of the family and once a women is married they “belong” to the man. The black dress “Black Ghosts” is a stretch of this rule. No other man should be able to look at another mans wife, so no part of their skin can be seen…

The Kingdom
Saudi Arabia, the area, started with many tribes of people who believed in a few religious men. The old king befriended and gathered the religious people and developed the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is still known as the Kingdom. The king is seen as the protector of the two holy cities. Coincidentally, to my knowledge, the laws aren’t really applied to the king, as he controls the power.

Freedom Rights
“Rights” that we consider as god-given or second nature are not necessarily acknowledged here. Killing, lying, adultery, etc. are against the law, but freedom of speech and expression are definitely not protected. Moreover, gays are put to death, women cannot drive (maybe they did something right =), drinking is forbidden, and women may not go out without a chaperon who must be a brother, father, husband, or son.

My Opinion
I think that in many areas Saudi Arabia needs to evolve into a better nation; however, I also think that its conservatism is great for raising the family, religion, hard work, and discipline. In my opinion, I think that the biggest problem with America today is that we lack discipline, we leave our kids to raise themselves (or have someone else do it all together), or we give in to mediocre-“luke-warm” faith’s. All of the problems we have like corruption, morality, crime, laziness, obesity, etc. etc. are linked to these three issues. For that, I think we could learn something from Saudi Arabia.

I know that I may have offended some of you, I am sorry, but it is also your right to have your own beliefs. Also, I am not saying that we should treat our women or people like the Saudi’s treat theres. My only point is that no one is staying home to take care of the kids anymore and very few people have visible strong faiths in the western world. I am one of these western people. But I will try harder...

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Video Calling - $1 per hour!!


Great news! I finally have internet in my room and can use skype outside of work. I purchased a USB aircard that is really fast (5mB down – 3mB up) for only $30usd. Once all the calculations are done, it costs about $1 per hour of video calls, which is incredible so I can talk to Chelsea from my room. I can also use the internet without going through the companies firewalls, so that means I can watch YouTube, download songs from iTunes, and get on Facebook. Awesomeness!

My roommate, Nour and Salim are really nice, fun people, from Egypt and Algeria respectively. They think that I am crazy (literally) and frequently ask why I don’t ask to stay in Saudi. We have already started to become good friends and I feel like I can talk to them about “sensitive” issues. I have already had good talks with them about the culture, the religion, and the politics in the Middle East. I do not side with them on many issues, but the issue of the US/UK continuing to fight wars that do not “belong to them” is hard to argue, especially when the US/UK do not worry about disputes in non-oil rich countries…

The food continues to be good here, and I have played basketball with the Chinese guys 3 more times. They all work for the same company, Sinopec that does contract management and construction, organizing all the services companies for Saudi Aramco and constructing anything ranging from pipe-lines to advanced office buildings. Their schedules are not very good, living here for six months and then days off for one mopnth!!! One interesting fact I discovered is the biggest construction company in Saudi, who is closely related to the royal family, is “Bin Laden Co.,” the family company that allowed Osama Bin Laden to have millions of dollars.

Since my last job things have settled down here a lot. Most everyone has checked out their tools, trucks, and personnel. Now we are waiting for the next wave of jobs, which seems to be in 2-3 days. It looks like we will have 4 jobs all at once!! Until they start we are slow and I fill my time on travel sites, finance, Wikipedia, and eBay. I need to get a hobby.

With the position in Angola and the visa process being complicated, many times your scheduled days off don’t come through on time. This makes it hard to plan vacations since many times and reservations must be made months in advance. So instead of having Chelsea or I decide we are going to (blank) and planning the vacation for (blank), I have started working on a planner that allows us to choose by activity, month, or location for all of the places that we want to visit, highlighting food, activities, and sites for each. Ideally, we will be able to go many of the places just at the end of their peak seasons when availabilities are high and costs are low. With that said, today I focused on ski trips. It seems like there is always snow somewhere and the logical destinations are Chile and New Zealand in our summer/fall, Wyoming, Colorado, and Canada in our winter, and Switzerland, France, and Italy in our spring.

That’s enough rambling for now.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

While you were sleeping...

The time difference between Saudi Arabia and the West Coast is +10 hours. So when it is 12:00 noon here, it is 02:00 in the morning in CA. Hence the title.

Well, once again I fail to deliver on time to the blog. However, I now have some good pictures from Saudi Arabia that include some scenery, architecture, friends, shop, and the Eurovillage. Enjoy.

A Camel running by our truck

One security entrance to Eurovillage - where we live.

This was $8!!! =)

These high-rises used to hold the US Navy from the 1990's to 2003.


Getting my operators hyped up for the job

The guy in the back was hard cat to crack...

The roads look like this for across the majority of the country.

This guy had his truck breakdown for a weak, bummer dude.

Sand blown onto the road
This was in the middle of nowhere, tons and tons of camels!

Exit to the shop, hardcore security just outside the gate

The hospital in Khobar, the corner has a cool shape

Weird looking balloon building

The entrance to my apartment

Nice doors and pillars

The following pictures are of my new room. I didn’t have a key and called a security guard to come open my door, and when we walked in I said, “Are you sure this is Hibiscus 1???” I couldn’t believe how nice the rooms could be at this facility. Im kind of angry because you don’t realize what you don’t have until you experience it, and now I will always think – well its not as nice as Saudi – about the rooms I get in other locations. The apartment is so over the top, it is about 1800sqft. and there are 2 other people that I share it with. There is 8 person table, full kitchen, laundry room, 3 bathrooms, 3 bedrooms, and a huge living room. The rooms are also unnecessarily large, I never even walk in the back half of my room… All of the floor and walls are marble.


Entrance way

Living room

Kitchen and table

My bathroom

My room - again, I clean for no one! =) (sorry chels)

My puppy friend, seen this guy for about 3 days now.

Overview of the compound architecture

Ambulance and Hospital in Eurovillage

Gym

Market to buy general things

Most of our trucks are unmarked like this one...

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Aramco's assets approx. $2.2 - $7 trillion dollars!!!

It has been a solid week since my last post. I am currently on another specialty tool job, and I will post this once I get back to camp. I have settled into my camp, shop, and met many people that are filled with useful knowledge for my job. I intend to take this knowledge with me back to Angola or on to whatever location may be next. Here in Saudi they run the most complex services for a difficult company – Saudi Aramco.

Aramco is officially the biggest “company” in the world with net assets of 3-7 trillion dollars! Back in the early 1900’s the Saudi government asked Southern Ca. Oil and Gas and New Jersey oil and gas to help them search for, and develop, their oil reserves. They both had about a 30% stake in the conglomeration called ARAMCO, which stood for Arabaian-American Oil Company. Saudi Arabia’s reserves were proved to be the most in the world, and the government bought out the two companies for healthy prices, launching them into their current or parent companies, Exxon-Mobile and Chevron! Now ARAMCO is only referred to as Saudi Aramco, which only means Saudi-Arabian Oil Company. It is the only oil company in Saudi Arabia and is run by the King’s brother or cousin…

Our salesmen here are genius! They manage to sell so many expensive services to Aramco, I can’t believe it. I feel like I have observed an axiom in sales – if you know the customers products/industry (oil exploration and production in this case) better than he does, you can sell them anything. I will definitely try to learn something from them before I leave.

The compound that I am staying at is called Eurovillage. It has ~400 houses with anywhere from 1-8 rooms in each house. (I was incorrect in my earlier post) All-in-all, the facility houses 1200 oilfield employees and is mostly run by Asians. There is a proper restaurant with 30 meal choices and a buffet for every meal. Laundry is done daily and the rooms are cleaned for us. It’s a pretty sweet gig. On top of that, there are 3 basketball courts, 2 soccer fields (with proper irrigated grass), tennis courts, a running track, a gym, and a pool. All of these services (food, maid, etc.) are included in the house rental fee. One 4-person house is rented for one year for $170,000 USD!!! It is the cheaper of the camps!! The upper level management stay at another-nicer camp. So far I have taken advantage of almost all of these services.

My daily routine is to get up at 4am (if the prayers haven’t already woken me up at 0330.) Run for two miles around the track, go to the gym by 0430, then at 0530 I go back to my room, shower, eat breakfast by 0600, then commute to work (35 min) by 0640. Once I get to work I normally Skype Chelsea for a few minutes, then at 0730 we have our morning meeting with the sub-sub PSL leads (i.e. tech workshop lead, shop foremen, sonde foremen, tech advisors, all engineers). We discuss the jobs that will be coming up and go through every engineer and assign a task if they don’t already have one. The meeting is ultra-efficient, considering how much we cover, and never takes longer than 30 minutes. We work all day in blistering heat until about 1630, then leave to go home. We normally get home around 1715, eat, then I try to Skype people with the super crappy internet that I “steal” from poor Afaqmenishal (seriously), play a game of basketball with the short Asians until they ask me to leave, then I go to bed around 2200. Annnnnnnd repeat 7 days a week.

Good here are crazy cheap. With the conversion rate set at 3.75SAR (Saudi Riyals) to 1USD it’s a sweet deal. Most things are approximate the same cost as in the US, just with this advantageous exchange rate. I have found these juice drinks that are dairy/fruit based that have real chunks of fruit in them for 1 riyal and they are delicious!!! I will try and find out the name.

I already implied from the previous paragraph that the food is WAY better here than most other locations. There are about 30 meal choices daily and they range from spaghetti, (my fav.) to steak and eggs, BLT’s, Caesar salads, etc. Most people that have been here for 4-5 years would not agree with this, but for now. I think the food is great, especially compared to Angola.

Since I have been here, I have had the opportunity to acquaint myself with many people. Several people that would posses the power to hire me have actually asked, why don’t you stay here, or you should ask your boss if they will release you… all very nice indirect-complimentary things to say. To make this more enticing, I recently talked with my boss in Angola, and it seems that open hole logging (my specialty) is very slow, I would be filling in cased hole jobs as they have to turn down approx. one million dollars a month due to being short on cased hole engineers. On one hand, I am excited to have the opportunity to get more cased hole experience since I have only done about 40 jobs in cased hole (but about 300-400 open hole jobs), but on the other it will mean that I will once again, put me at a training level, not making much money in bonus until I can run the necessary services. It should only take one hitch to get caught up on these cased hole services, then after that it should be “easy money.” At the end of the day, I have already told this boss that I would work in Angola, I have good friends that already work there, and I think that – in the long run – I can make more money in Angola than any where else in the world. So I have chosen to stay in Angola, at least for one year.

This trip to Saudi is VERY beneficial! I have learned a TON, not only about this specific specialty tool (say that ten times fast), but about better practices on tools I had previously considered myself proficient at running. I hope to catch at least 3-4 more jobs and finish my training here by Ramadan, which starts August 1st

I am going to post pictures tomorrow or the next day, so stay posted for my post. =)

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

"WARNING DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS"


I haven’t blogged for over a month now. Here is a brief update, I had been “home” from Angola for a month and enjoyed 2 weeks off where I stayed in Bakersfield and just hung out with Chelsea. Then on June 5th, I had to go to Fort Worth, TX for some specialty tool training, then on to New Iberia, Louisiana for some off-shore experience, now I am in Saudi Arabia for some hands on experience with the said specialty tool.

My time in Fort Worth was awesome as usual. A friend and I call it traincation. Since field engineers are already used to working Long hours, it’s training from 8am-5pm, then vacation from 5pm-late. I happened to go while 4 friends from Canada where also there. Chelsea also had the opportunity to come visit me for about 5 days, which is awesome because once everything is “said and done” I will be gone from home for 2 months. The instructor at the training school was nice and funny. His name was Igwe, a guy from Nigeria. I have noticed a fun loving, positive attitude in all the 3 people I have met from Nigeria – I realize this is not enough to stereotype a whole population, but just saying…

After 2 flights and 7 hours I arrived in New Iberia, LA which is only ~400 miles from Dallas. I met with a friend that I worked with in Bakersfield and Canada for dinner that night at a great place called Walk-Ons. He has been with the company longer than I have, and knows far more. He is also going to start commuting to Norway, so naturally I am jealous! Ive come to except that the grass is always greener… The following day I went out on a inland water job (Which basically means a rig in the middle of a lake) with a country guy named George. He was really nice and helpful and had an obvious passion for snuff. When we went out on this job I saw that he had a roll (like how you buy scotch tape) of cans of snuff and within 40 hours they were gone!! I said, “Geez, how much do you dip?” he replied, “However much it takes.” LOL. We unfortunately had a really rough job, having to change out equipment, tool failures, etc. At one time the moral was beyond low because we had ~16 hours of lost time I tried to cheer him up by saying, “This job is going pretty bad, but at least it’s a good learning experience.” He didn’t appreciate my comedy. Once the job started going well, everyone’s attitude changed and before the end of our job we were all good friends. He even invited me to come hunting with him on one of my off-hitches. On the drive home we saw 3 alligators in the road. So all-in-all my trip to Louisiana was very stereotypical, but nice. I love the south.


After that job I went on to Helicopter Underwater Escape Survival Training (HUET). They try to get you ready for emergencies offshore where you end up in the water either from a helicopter crash or a rig evacuation. They had a simulator that dunked you into a 12 foot pool of water, flipped you upside down, and then you had to jettison the doors, and unbuckle, then escape to the surface. It was fun. Check out the video. 
On the last exercise where you jump of a 20’ ledge into deep water, I jumped off and the pressure of the water increased too fast for me and I busted an ear drum. It sucked/sucks. The next day I went to a doctor and he gave me some antibiotics and cleared me to fly to Saudi the following day.

On Sunday, July 3rd I started my journey from Lafayette, LA to Dammam, Saudi Arabia. I had a 1 ½ hour layover in Atlanta, then a 4 hour layover in Amsterdam, then I flew on the smallest plane ever on KLM to Dammam. When I sat up straight, my legs literally didn’t fit between the seat. I had to put them at an angle or fold them up to fit. Thankfully, the flight was only 6 hours! I learned my lesson and will only do economy plus on KLM. Just another proof that Delta rules! Once I arrived at the airport, I had no problems getting through immigration or customs. However, on the top of the immigration card it said in big-bold-red letters DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS! Now, Im not a drug trafficker by any means, but just having that on the card made me uneasy. It was my, holy crap, this is the real deal moment.

All the way through immigration, customs, and even in the baggage claim everyone is very nice. When I exited I had to wait for ~1 hour for my transport to get to the airport, then got into a black suburban (ironic) and went on to my camp “Eurovillage”. This camp is where many oil companies live, and it is HUGE. There are about 400 houses with 4-6 rooms each. There is also a hotel, tennis, soccer, basketball, swimming pools, etc.. etc..

The next day I woke up at 5am, creepily followed someone to the restaurant (I didn’t know where it was) then boarded the bus to take us back into Dammam (45 mins) to work. I am now writing this blog and am getting ready to go out to a job in 20 minutes. I will update this blog soon and more often now that things are going on.