Here I am, in my chosen profession, staying up all night in a gas plant in the southeast corner of New Mexico. How did it come to this?
In 2014, I joined up with the manufacturer of the hardware and software that I had spent the last 20+ years getting familiar with as a customer. It was a godsend, really, since I had spent the previous year working for a third-rate outfit that was essentially a cult of personality of the person who founded it, doing crap work with crap people for crap customers who treated us like dogs. I only took that job because my previous previous company was trying to relocate me to Salt Lake City, which is, in the most charitable description I can come up with, a city.
So, anyway, coming to my current employer seemed like a good idea at the time. My first project, which I took over in the middle, was being run into the ground by the project manager and ended up making him something other than a project manager. None of that was my fault. I worked very hard to deliver that project and it came in on time, albeit way over budget because of all the freebies the customer extracted from the no-longer-a-project-manager due to his incompetence. Again, none of that was my fault.
However, I think I somehow got the reputation of not being able to lead a project, because I haven't led one since. I keep being given this flotsam and jetsam of tasks that nobody else wants to do. Most of this detritus involves gas plants. Gas plants are little cookie cutter collections of tanks, columns, compressors and other equipment that some licensing firm designed 50 years ago. They sit in the middle of nowhere (Helllllooooo, Hobbs, New Mexico!) on various natural gas pipelines. Their purpose is to distill natural gas into its component parts, namely ethane, propane and butane, which is then sold either in trucks or sent back into other pipelines for use in other plants.
These plants are dirt simple. And I do mean dirt. Once they are built, they require only a handful of people to run them. Most of the people involved are support people, and since there is little support needed, the people are rotated among anywhere from five to ten gas plants in a 500-mile radius. This fact makes it incredibly frustrating to work with them. They will call us to accomplish some task that they can't quite handle, but for which a person like me needs only a few days if that to complete. The problem is that since the technical people are so scattered and nomadic, their ability to create professional documents is minimal, and the time they can give to support whatever task they want us to do and answer our questions is equally scant. They will usually hand us half-completed or practically illegible piping and instrumentation drawings (P&IDs, which are the lifeblood of any project and need to be complete and correct for a successful job), and then maybe a Word or Excel file that explains (poorly) what needs to be done. We are told to show up at a certain date and time, and when we do, we'll have a quick meeting where they try to explain what they want. Then, in almost every case, the contact person jumps in his truck and drives to another gas plant somewhere, leaving me there to fend for myself. The sites themselves are nasty, with old buildings that haven't been updated in at least 30 years, dirt parking lots (did I mention the dirt?), stray dogs running around, and highly variable weather. They are arduous to travel to and the nearby towns where I stay the night are not exactly tourist havens (Hellllllooooo, Midland, Texas!).
This particular job is a bit different, as this plant has decided to do a proper project and upgrade their control equipment. This is the kind of job that really pays our bills, and our supervisors pay a lot of attention and throw a lot of resources at it to make sure it gets done right. That's where I come in. The lead engineer designed the upgrade and went through the staging and testing at our office and made sure it all worked properly, and then was sent out here to turn it over to the customer. For whatever reason that I can't fathom, she begged off having to stay through the start-up, and the customer asked us to provide another resource. C'est moi.
I showed up last Thursday after getting a call from my boss at 7:30 am to book a flight at 12:40 pm that day (good planning, assholes!), and when I got here, they threw a curveball at me by telling me that the hardware they had tested in the office and tested again here suddenly wasn't working properly and that I might have to completely redesign part of the software as a workaround. Again, why the fucking lead wasn't here doing this, I have no idea. If I was the lead, you can bet your ass I would stay with the job, but nobody asked me to be the lead. In any case, the service guys fixed the hardware problem and I ended up just sitting there watching. Then, the next day, I found out that the lead simply didn't bother to complete a task during staging and I was forced to dig into it and try to figure it out. I fought with it for hours, telling the customer geniuses that have swarmed this job from various gas plants that the damned thing looked like it wasn't hooked up right. Six hours later, they finally decided to go out in the plant and check, and what do you know? The damned thing wasn't hooked up right.
Somewhere in there, the customer decided that they had enough of their people to cover days, and I needed to come in at night. FUCK!!!! I hate working nights. Nothing happens and your sleep schedule gets all fucked up for a week. Which brings me to now. They e-mailed in a panic at about 5 pm saying that their software licensing wasn't working. I was supposed to go in at 7 pm, but I called our company technical support to get their advice and then came in a little early to check out the problem. When I got here, suddenly everything was working fine. I don't exactly know what happened, but I'm sure it was some stupid thing they were doing. I also determined from the service guys that the software license they thought they had on one server was never there and didn't belong there. Geniuses.
Three more hours to go, and then another night of uselessness tomorrow. I need a new job. Again.
In 2014, I joined up with the manufacturer of the hardware and software that I had spent the last 20+ years getting familiar with as a customer. It was a godsend, really, since I had spent the previous year working for a third-rate outfit that was essentially a cult of personality of the person who founded it, doing crap work with crap people for crap customers who treated us like dogs. I only took that job because my previous previous company was trying to relocate me to Salt Lake City, which is, in the most charitable description I can come up with, a city.
So, anyway, coming to my current employer seemed like a good idea at the time. My first project, which I took over in the middle, was being run into the ground by the project manager and ended up making him something other than a project manager. None of that was my fault. I worked very hard to deliver that project and it came in on time, albeit way over budget because of all the freebies the customer extracted from the no-longer-a-project-manager due to his incompetence. Again, none of that was my fault.
However, I think I somehow got the reputation of not being able to lead a project, because I haven't led one since. I keep being given this flotsam and jetsam of tasks that nobody else wants to do. Most of this detritus involves gas plants. Gas plants are little cookie cutter collections of tanks, columns, compressors and other equipment that some licensing firm designed 50 years ago. They sit in the middle of nowhere (Helllllooooo, Hobbs, New Mexico!) on various natural gas pipelines. Their purpose is to distill natural gas into its component parts, namely ethane, propane and butane, which is then sold either in trucks or sent back into other pipelines for use in other plants.
These plants are dirt simple. And I do mean dirt. Once they are built, they require only a handful of people to run them. Most of the people involved are support people, and since there is little support needed, the people are rotated among anywhere from five to ten gas plants in a 500-mile radius. This fact makes it incredibly frustrating to work with them. They will call us to accomplish some task that they can't quite handle, but for which a person like me needs only a few days if that to complete. The problem is that since the technical people are so scattered and nomadic, their ability to create professional documents is minimal, and the time they can give to support whatever task they want us to do and answer our questions is equally scant. They will usually hand us half-completed or practically illegible piping and instrumentation drawings (P&IDs, which are the lifeblood of any project and need to be complete and correct for a successful job), and then maybe a Word or Excel file that explains (poorly) what needs to be done. We are told to show up at a certain date and time, and when we do, we'll have a quick meeting where they try to explain what they want. Then, in almost every case, the contact person jumps in his truck and drives to another gas plant somewhere, leaving me there to fend for myself. The sites themselves are nasty, with old buildings that haven't been updated in at least 30 years, dirt parking lots (did I mention the dirt?), stray dogs running around, and highly variable weather. They are arduous to travel to and the nearby towns where I stay the night are not exactly tourist havens (Hellllllooooo, Midland, Texas!).
This particular job is a bit different, as this plant has decided to do a proper project and upgrade their control equipment. This is the kind of job that really pays our bills, and our supervisors pay a lot of attention and throw a lot of resources at it to make sure it gets done right. That's where I come in. The lead engineer designed the upgrade and went through the staging and testing at our office and made sure it all worked properly, and then was sent out here to turn it over to the customer. For whatever reason that I can't fathom, she begged off having to stay through the start-up, and the customer asked us to provide another resource. C'est moi.
I showed up last Thursday after getting a call from my boss at 7:30 am to book a flight at 12:40 pm that day (good planning, assholes!), and when I got here, they threw a curveball at me by telling me that the hardware they had tested in the office and tested again here suddenly wasn't working properly and that I might have to completely redesign part of the software as a workaround. Again, why the fucking lead wasn't here doing this, I have no idea. If I was the lead, you can bet your ass I would stay with the job, but nobody asked me to be the lead. In any case, the service guys fixed the hardware problem and I ended up just sitting there watching. Then, the next day, I found out that the lead simply didn't bother to complete a task during staging and I was forced to dig into it and try to figure it out. I fought with it for hours, telling the customer geniuses that have swarmed this job from various gas plants that the damned thing looked like it wasn't hooked up right. Six hours later, they finally decided to go out in the plant and check, and what do you know? The damned thing wasn't hooked up right.
Somewhere in there, the customer decided that they had enough of their people to cover days, and I needed to come in at night. FUCK!!!! I hate working nights. Nothing happens and your sleep schedule gets all fucked up for a week. Which brings me to now. They e-mailed in a panic at about 5 pm saying that their software licensing wasn't working. I was supposed to go in at 7 pm, but I called our company technical support to get their advice and then came in a little early to check out the problem. When I got here, suddenly everything was working fine. I don't exactly know what happened, but I'm sure it was some stupid thing they were doing. I also determined from the service guys that the software license they thought they had on one server was never there and didn't belong there. Geniuses.
Three more hours to go, and then another night of uselessness tomorrow. I need a new job. Again.