OFS 103 Alpha
12/18/2004 12:04AM (10:04AM Khartoum)
I had a pleasant surprise today. My cousin who has been away has just returned. He was working in Libya's Western Desert, as a field engineer working for an oil services company which shall remain nameless (they are not the one with shady ties to the Vice President). He returned to us in fairly good shape, and with many stories to tell about his time in the oil fields. He'd been out in the field for almost nine weeks, spending two of those in training at the corporate training center in Dubai, and the rest out in the middle of nowhere. Since they are working in a "hardship" area, they get 2 weeks of vacation for every 7 weeks of work, and so he has decamped for the end of the year. The camp, as he described it to me, is a series of prefab boxes in a flat area among the dunes, with barracks, a mess hall and a lounge. They spend some of their time at the camp, just eating, sleeping and filling out reports, but the majority of their time is spent outside the camp, on "jobs".
"Jobs" require a field engineer or two or three to truck out to an oil rig, and perform some sort of service for the client. I'm still a little hazy on what these services entail, though I gather they involve helping out with drilling problems, making deep sensor measurements and so on. The jobs happen when the rig is not in use (time is almost literally money in this environment) which ends up being between the hours of 2am and dawn. At this time of the year those are the coldest most miserable hours of the day, and that is amplified by the wind, which has nothing to stop it as it gallops over the surface of the desert. The job has to be finished quickly, to enable the rig to get going again, and the next job always seems to be waiting. The whole thing reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer goes out to the oil fields in west Springfield to work as a "roughneck" with Lenny.
His return was not just a surprise for me, but for pretty much everyone other than his brother, his brother's wife, and me. We picked him up at the airport at three in the morning, and argued for a moment or two about whether or not to take him home. We quickly came to the conclusion that ringing the doorbell at 3am could only mean that something terrible had happened, and would most likely prompt one, if not several, coronaries. Instead we went back to my cousin's apartment, and talked for a while before falling into a deeply exhausted sleep. My oil field cousin (or OFS, as he's now known) passed out almost instantly, exhausted from the weeks of work, leaving me to toss and turn for a bit before drifting off myself.