real engineer, sort of

Some days, I actually feel like I know what I'm doing. Not about management (see yesterday's post), but about what we actually do here: oilfield cementing. While my knowledge base represents only a tiny fraction of the possible knowledge that exists, I'm still actually capable of constructive advice. It's exciting!

This is hard to explain, or perhaps it isn't. Knowledge has a way of becoming very niche, very fast and this is a great example of that. I've got a spongy brain, theoretical high energy, and selective enthusiasm and these combine for? I'm not sure, but I can get surprisingly geeked up about cementing. It's what I do right now. Probably not what I'll do my entire professional life, but it is what I do now and it's a pretty challenging gig in a lot of ways, but very satisfying to actually provide a useful service in a fairly fundamental industry.

One of the things I learned a long time ago is that age doesn't necessarily equate to knowledge. It can be ever so niche. The first clear example I have of this is from fifth grade. It was a word problem about how many different outfits can be made if you have a something likes 3 hats, 4 shirts, and 2 pants. I'm not sure why I knew it or when I learned it, but I knew that you just had to multiply 3 times 4 times 2 to get the total number of outfits. I explained this, not sure how successfully, to my teacher at the time who seemed surprised that this would yield the answer. Since then, I've lost all faith in adults. No, not really. But I have known that age does not lead to greater knowledge about all subjects. It does mean greater experience, but it doesn't mean new experiences, new knowledge, new challenges and puzzles to solve.

It's a hard sell to convince people that just because they did something a certain way in the past and it worked, doesn't mean it is a good idea this time around or that it will even work this time. Something I try to tell our guys at work is that no matter how many times they think they've done a particular job, they haven't. Every day is different and every job is different, even if we are approaching it the same basic way. It is my attempt to impress upon them that they must always pay attention to what they are doing and how some seemingly irrelevant details can actually make or break the successful outcome of a job.

Anyway, nothing is ever the same, even when it is the same, because we have never been right here, right now, doing whatever is we're doing before (depending on which cosmological models you believe). Every day is a new problem, even if it is only slightly different than the last one, but it means a chance to learn something new.