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5 Days of trouble in Germany As part of my Ops support roll I flew out to a small town in Germany called Vechta to help on a job for Exxon. The timing for this job was very tight; there had also been no real organisation to speak of as a new manager had just taken over at that location. To make things worse I was due to fly to Thailand the following Friday night for a couple of weeks of vacation so I wouldn't be able to do the post job reporting for it. This trip started bad and got worse. First of all Air France decided to leave my luggage in Paris CDG, and when I landed in Bremen, Germany, they said I was eligible for no compensation and they wouldn't even given me a toothbrush and toothpaste. I had to find a pricy shop in the airport and buy some essentials, I had hoped to buy some clothes as well but all I could manage was a Werden Bremen T-Shirt. I got my bag back at lunchtime the following day but it still stopped me from getting properly started with the work. As the job was short notice I only had a little time to check the equipment before being carted off to carry out an H2S gas course. Soon after I had to go see Exxon to discuss how the job would be run and what we needed on the well site. It was all slapdash with no proper procedures in place; not exactly how I like to run a job as it often ends in disaster. I would say 75% of a well run job should be the preparation and post job, with only 25% of the work actually on the clients' site... nothing like this job... As the job slowly ran into the ground with problem after problem I had to make a number of phone calls to try to get some support, but finally we left the well site with a half failed job at about 8pm and that was that. Once at my hotel I spent a few hour hours looking at the data, sending some emails and writing things up before going to bed. I flew back to the UK the following day and handed over all the data and analysis to a colleague before starting my vacation. Not really a nice way to have to leave some work for someone else. There is currently some talk of going back to Germany again to have another go, but that will likely be in a few months. |