It’s been about six months since I knew I would be working on oils rigs and during that time I’ve heard or read a lot of stories about how brutal, extreme, all out, exciting, dull and generally shocking they would be. I tend to ignore such predictions, after all, Jakarta wasn’t as bad as advertised, Cambridge had fewer geeks than advertised, I got less action at Pony Club than advertised and Winchester had less buggery than adversities; as a general rule (quite predictably) the extreme isn’t quite as extreme as the story teller would have you believe. Oil rigs, I have to admit, buck that trend, not all the stories are true (expected as most of them directly contradicted each other) but the general sense of brutality is just as advertised.

The noise from eight large capacity diesel engines dull one’s hearing; the smell from tens of millions of rice beetle corpses decomposing in the sun dull one’s sense of smell; the food which has to be hot enough to disguise its origins dull one’s taste; gloves sopping from the layer of mud which coats everything dull one’s touch; the arc welders who fight a losing battle to keep the rig operational though the night keep you constantly slightly blinded; and 24 hour operations engender an atmosphere of permanent sleep deprivation. Effectively sensual overdose renders one numb to everyone and everything, rather like the machines which surround you. The whole thing is gloriously inhuman.

Anyway, to be rather more matter of fact about things, I’ve been on the rig for 10 days, we spent the first couple of days setting up our equipment and most of the rest of the first week waiting for parts. Now we’re drilling I enjoy a relatively relaxed 14 hour night shift, it is spent in the main watching a screen waiting for something to happen. Sometimes, that’s waiting for something interesting to occur on facebook, sometimes something to happen in the hole. One of the unexpected side effects of a night shift is that it seems to be more tiring than a normal working day, normally I guess I sleep for between 6 and 8 hours, however now I seem to sleep solidly for my 10 hours off.

The accommodation is a bunch of portacabins in the middle of a field with bad toilets and very little else except a multitude of vicious insects. Essentially the same as pony club camp with fewer water fights and less giggling and much worse food, not to say the food is that bad, but I’m duty bound to observe how good the food was at Pony Club Camp.

Amongst the torrent of testosterone and diesel of the rig, someone (no one seems to know who) is keeping three small kittens, they're just starting the playful phase and very cute (that said it still occurs to me every time it sit down to eat that they would almost certainly taste much better than the KFC style chicken which normally accompanies our rice). Anyway, the other morning before drilling began, we were woken early as apparently the company man wanted to talk to us urgently, we rushed over to the rig just in time to sit and wait for 40 minutes for everyone else to turn up to a meeting at which we were told nothing was going to happen until the evening. So there we were, the previous company man, his replacement, the toolpusher, my colleague and myself, all sitting on a bench watching the sun come up behind the pilot flame and the mud pits, and thinking that the rig looked almost elegant at that moment. Well I presume that's what everyone else was thinking since I don't know the bahassa for "What a beautiful morning." and I wouldn't have said anything even if I had. At that point the kittens came out and started playing on the bench, it turns out that even the oldest, hardest, toughest oil man can be reduced to a simpering child by 3 small kittens playing hide and seek in all the pockets of his overalls.

Any women or people who don’t approve of sexual metaphors (those two demographics have a habit of overlapping a lot in my experience) should stop reading at this point.

To understand the physiology of an oil rig, you need to understand the following: the whole drilling process (excuse the phonetic pun) is equivalent to male attitudes to sex. Basically everyone worships a deep but tight hole and puts every last effort into penetrating it as hard as possible, all together, 24 hours a day. They stick a long, hard, but ultimately surprising bendy pipe into the hole, a thick, viscous and annoying stain prone fluid gushing from its end. The pipe is driven to the end of the hole, where it is moved in and out for no apparent reason, before eventually being removed. You hope that system failure doesn’t mean you have to remove the pipe prematurely. Most people performing the operation have absolutely no interest in the end result, they’re from all over world: linguistic differences are nothing  with has such a strong common aim. If you’re lucky (at this point the metaphor breaks down for most of us), about nine months after you start the whole process the net mass flow rate will switch and you will get back ample reward for your initial effort, hence enabling mankind to continue on its merry path to destruction.  We all know we should probably stop, but there are just too many reason to keep going.

See here for pictures.