what do i do in victoria

As regular readers now know, I accepted a transfer at work to come to Victoria, TX. What I haven't explained is what I do here that I did or didn't do in Farmington. In short, I'm the functional manager of the district. My manager is not here with me. He is about two-and-a-half hours away. Victoria is a smaller district than Farmington and does not suffer from the personnel problems that Farmington is somewhat notorious for. For what it's worth, my actual title is Engineer-In-Charge. Or McLovin. Or a few others that I'm sure people will work out of their systems in due time. I prefer Herr Maestro but you can't have everything.

As the manager, I am no longer in the field on jobs. If I am in the field, which I will be with as much frequency as I can manage, it will principally be for audits and meetings with clients. It is relevant (to me) that field operations here are somewhat different than they were in Farmington because the operating environment is more sophisticated. Most of the wells here (still largely natural gas) are deeper and hotter and involve much higher pressures. This is sort of the opposite end of the spectrum from most of the work in Farmington. Thus, I will also be learning some new things on the operational side, but the fundamentals are the same.

What is very different is the personnel and administrative side of my new position. I'm probably about four in-house training classes behind where I strictly should be. I'll get that training when time permits, so it has been and will continue to be a lot of question asking and generally looking more clueless than I would prefer. My unusually short and frankly non-existent handover from the previous manager didn't help much either but the support I've gotten both in and out of Victoria has been solid. Basically, I'm swamped, but in a good way.