how i spent thanksgiving

It's been an odd 30 or so hours.

I spent most of yesterday, Thanksgiving, sitting on my hands waiting for my job to call. The company man at the rig called for first time late in the morning with a notice to be on location by 1800, which meant we would be at the yard by 1500 in order to have enough time to prepare equipment and drive out to the rig. Au contraire. The company man called again at 1400 to change the be on location time to 2000. That's never a good sign especially with this particular rig (and its sister rigs). There's no such thing as a two hour delay. And given the problem that I was told they had, my guess was six to eight hours. But we're the service company at the beck and call of the operators so we'll go when they say to be there even when we're certain that they won't be ready for us. Thus, more football watching ensued. Too bad I hate the Cowboys.

Suffice to say, we arrived at location well on time only to discover a couple of less than pleasant surprises. For starters, the rig was nowhere near ready, which is normally a bad thing, but this gave us some time to deal with unpleasant surprise number two. The job procedure had changed and no one told us. By us, I don't mean just the crew, but our office, which really means they didn't tell me or my manager. That's the third time in just a few months with this client that a change to the job procedure has been made and their office has failed to communicate it to us. The problem was easy to deal with because it only involved going back to our yard and grabbing some extra equipment, but the principle of it is what bothers me. On our way back to the rig, the other supervisor and I stopped to get some quality dinner for the crew. Seeing as how it was Thanksgiving, there wasn't much open, but every Sonic in town was open till 2300 so we bought a bunch of cheeseburgers for the guys. A veritable feast for the ages.

Meanwhile, back on location, the rig seemed to be progressing smoothly, but slowly so we had time to kill. Thus, we slept, which is what we normally do because it's usually unclear when we'll have to get up and how long we'll be up for. But alas, at 0130, the company man came by and told us that we were released, meaning we could leave. The rig was having difficulties with "downhole conditions", a most ominous catchall phrase that really means, "There's something wrong with the hole, but since it's several thousand feet in the ground, we're not really sure what it is, but this is what we think it is so we're going to try and do something to make it better." And by the way, this is the same problem that caused the two hour delay in the location time originally. Time to pack it all up, go back to the yard and go home while more normal people are getting up.

By the time I got home, it was about 0530 and I was tired, but restless and this was the biggest shopping day of the season and you all know how much I love to shop! And if you believe that, then you don't know me very well. But, I did go shopping, or more accurately, buying. Plus, I was curious to see what kinds of people went to the store at 0500. Apparently, all kinds. And apparently the store didn't open until 0600. Despite that and the somewhat restless crowd, there was no trampling of people smaller than me by me or anyone else. I guess I was surprised by how generally well-behaved and good-natured most people were. Personally, I made off with some cheap DVDs I wanted and some Sharpie pens I needed.