It has been a while since my last post and lots has happened. For that reason I will be sparing you a lot of the details and mainly give an overview. I got my receipt on Friday Sept 23 at 8pm, and by 6am the next morning I was on a plane to go to my new semi-permanent home – Cabinda. I flew from the domestic airport in Luanda on a Chevron chartered flight. Then took a bus to the Chevron base Malongo. The base is huge and when I arrived I tried calling both of my managers and no one answered. Fortunately, my friend Jing was walking by and helped take care of me. My badge that I needed to sign in was at a different gate 2-3 miles away. I had all of my luggage with me, and no vehicle to help carry it. They told me to go eat and that they would be back with my badge and a vehicle and sure enough after I had a bite to eat, they came back with a truck. After arriving at the base I met with my bosses boss, the guy who had brought me into Angola and we had an interesting talk.
Previous to coming to Angola I had met three people. All of which were pretty high ranking. The country manager, the BSM (local manager), and another one of my direct managers. However, since I accepted the position ALL of these managers, who made “promises” have left. I now know no one, and worse, no one knows me…
The BSM, Rick, who I was talking to spent about 45 minutes talking with me. We talked about everything pertinent to working in this location. We talked about the food, the hours, the people, the camp, the staff houses, etc… In short, we stay off the base at a staff house 30 minutes away and are transported by bus at 5am and 6pm daily. There are no other cars or ways to get back besides them. So we work 13.5 hours a day minimum. Lunch is served everyday in a facility 2 miles away from my office and its ok. There is normally sandwiches and soup and a variety of cafeteria food. The downside is that we have no vehicles so we have to walk. The people here now are friendly and pretty knowledgeable; but, I guess that they had a “house cleaning” back in January when they got rid of many engineers and managers because of tools breaking and personnel errors that cost us $17 million.
From first impressions on the few days that I spent at the shop and from talks that I have had with people. Everything here is extremely disorganized to add to the confusion everyone is on a back-to-back schedule (35 on/35 off) there is poor transfer of information. So when one boss comes on, he has no idea of the promises/talks you had with the other manger he was replacing. But everything in general is a mess… On top of that, the hours are crazy!!! By the time that you wake up at 4am, shower, eat, bus to work, bus back from work at 6:30pm, eat, then get to your room it is already it is 8pm. Just enough time to get 8 hours of sleep and repeat the schedule again. No time for working out, no time for reading, doing anything personal, etc… Also, the fact that we have to walk everyday to and from the cafeteria is ridiculous… Well see how everything pans out.
I spent the rest of the next two days helping my friend Jing get equipment ready for going offshore and jump through about a million hoops to get badges, access, safety classes, etc. That night I went back to our staff house in Futilla. As we passed a huge-nice house up on a hill the guys said, “There’s our staff house, and there it goes” as we passed it by and kept driving 10 minutes away. I wanted that mansion to be our staff house! It was impressive with many rooms, a pool, a driveway with a guard, but we were still driving… Then we made a U-turn and started driving the other way. I thought to myself. CRAP, there were no nice places that we passed. Then we pulled up to the Impressive Mansion that will be my home for the next many years! SWEET!!! I will take some pictures and upload them later…
The next day I was around the shop getting paperwork ready to go offshore. I would be leaving the morning after next on Wednesday. Wednesday came around and we went to the docks where the helicopters fly us out to the rigs. The rigs are approx. 20-30 miles offshore, a ~20 minute chopper ride.
As we arrive to the rig it is exactly how you imagine it. We landed on the top deck of the housing quarters. (The West Setia) I was shown to my room and met my four roommates. The rooms are decent size for being on a ship, but the ship and drilling platform is HUGE HUGE HUGE. I will take some pictures and post them when I get back because the internet here is very slow. I will also post the remainder of my time offshore, but right now I need to catch a chopper off this place.
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