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Schlumberger Technip Project
For the past few months I have been preparing for a technology trial in partnership with Technip. The trial was originally supposed to be run for a couple of months in Brazil, but after a few changes, it ended up being in France for two weeks. So from a possible adventure in Brazil it turned into a more mundane "hassle" in France. This project started in classic fashion; we had a significant amount of lead time but the last few days turned into a mad rush to make sure all of the parts of the project worked together. Eventually all of the parts seemed to work so we packed everything up and loaded it into a van. It isn't a long way to France but due to the value of the equipment and that no one had really driven in France before, we hired a company to transport everything. Someone would be needed at the French side to unload all of the equipment so a colleague and I went in the van with the driver. It was not really an ideal solution but there really wasn't much choice. After packing everything in the afternoon the van left at about 4pm... we arrived about 6pm the following day.... The journey should have maybe taken around 8 hours, but we had to wait a couple of hours for a ferry at Dover and then at 3am the van broke down on a toll road in France. We stopped just before the exit to the toll road and then the automatic gear box on the van packed up. To get off the road we had to push the van the last few meters past the barrier and into a small car park. The driver called the breakdown services and this ended up in us being towed to a closed garage in the middle of no where which would apparently open at 8am. No facilities there, just pitch black and no lights anywhere. After another few calls and a lot of waiting another vehicle towed us to the proper dealer garage at about 8am. We were then left to wait at this garage for them to get around to looking at the van; at noon they announced that the hydraulic pump to the gearbox was broken and they would have to wait till tomorrow for a new part. At this point we tried to rent a replacement van but we were informed that it was lunch time and the nearest van rental place would be shut for lunch. We had to eat something so we all walked to a roadside van and got sausage and chips, there just wasn't anything else as we were in an industrial park. After a lot more waiting we managed to get a new van and then I convinced a guy at the garage to use one of their forklifts to move some of our stuff from the old van to the new one. One of the things I brought with me was a large server cabinet stuck on a pallet and the only way to move this was with a forklift. Eventually we got on our way and arrived at the Technip facility at 6pm, we then negotiated our way into the site and unloaded our equipment. The driver then left to go back to the UK, but luckily we know another SLB person at the Technip facility doing an unrelated project and he gave us a lift to our hotel. The next day he gave us to a lift to the facility and we started to set up our equipment; by Friday everything was pretty much done and he drove us back to Southampton :-) The next two weeks a few different SLB people came to France with me to "get involved". Unfortunately the big problem with having so many senior people involved is that they argue all day about what to do, and then when it comes to actually doing the work they disappear. This didn't turn into a particularly nice two weeks in France due to all the stress of management constantly changing the plan and the long hours which I was expected to work. Being France I expected decent working hours but Technip had a French intern who they got to work all hours and one of the senior managers also decided to work constantly. This often ended up with 11 hour working days then back to the hotel to try to get some food. During the 4 weeks I was in France I stayed at the two hotels in Caudebec-en-Caux (A town near Le Trait). The better of the two was La Marine hotel (2 star), the other hotel I stayed at was much more pokey and called Le Normandie. The restaurants in the hotels both served very expensive dodgy French food and I really struggled to find anything on the menu which I could eat. The most normal thing on the menu in La marine was Duck... There was also a pizza place but the other people I was with didn't want to eat there much. On the few times we tried to go there it was shut or pretty much empty. To make matters worse every weekend I had to go back to the UK as there was no laundry facilities in the hotel / area. One person from SLB arrived in France on a Sunday and everything was closed so he couldn't even get anything to eat! Caudebec-en-Caux is a very small place and in Winter the whole place seems to shut down. Due to the confidential nature of this project I am unable to put any of the pictures I took when on the Technip Site. None of the technology being tested had been commercially released View from my hotel room |