Daily Archives: December 25, 2011

Getting to the Plant from the Office – What are you complaining about?

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In Richmond, there was a lot of complaining when we had to move people from the field offices to the Admin Building, moving people away from the process units they work in.  We had even more complaining when we had to move the Capital Projects and Drafting Department folks to the off-site building at Marina Way.  I tell people it could be worse but they did not hear me – moving to the new locations made it more difficult / more time consuming to do their job.

Well let me tell you how much worse it could be.  In Tengiz it takes ~45 minutes to get from the office to the process units.  The average engineer and supervisor takes the bus to the process units.  It takes little less than 10 minutes to walk to the bus stop from the Designs Enginering offices, and then just over 30 minutes on the bus to the process units.  If you have a meeting scheduled at the top of the hour in the plant, you must leave about 40 minutes before, and then you are a few minutes late for the meeting.  The buses are on a schedule (leave every 30 minutes for one plant, every 60 minutes for the other) so you need to time your site visits, and pay attention to the time.  There is a canteen out at one of the plants so you can grab lunch there if you have several things to do.

You can take a taxi but need to schedule in advance.  This usually works if you have several folks needing to see something in the field or all going to the same meeting.  You sometimes can arrange for the taxi to wait for you but they are so busy that many times you get the taxi out there and then take the bus back.

One thing I have noticed is that most people sleep on the bus or taxi.  I have a natural tendency to want to talk to people that I might not normally see, engage them in some work discussion.  For those that know me, I don’t handle silence well.  But now that I have been here a while I can see for those working 12, 13, 14 hour days, a little down time on the bus is to be expected.  So I bring something to read, or shut my eyes as well.  My problem is I just start to drift off when we arrive at our destination.

It’s So Cold My Eyeballs Hurt

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Returning to Kazakhstan in mid-December I expected it to be cold, but it’s really cold.  I continue to walk between the living accommodations (SV) and work location (TCOV) each day, but when it is cold AND windy my eyeballs hurt.  I wear a sweatshirt, heavy jacket with hood, beanie, and gloves.  On a couple days I even wore my insulated coveralls (that you use to go into the plant with) home.  But you still need to see where you are walking.  I have resorted to wearing my safety glasses when I walk, to keep the wind from driving into my eyes.  I guess I could bring some ski goggles, but that would seem pretty nerdy.  So instead, if it is really windy, I take the bus.

Another Schedule-Driven Project

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We had an unplanned shutdown of a propane dryer skid earlier this month – several pieces of equipment, piping and instruments damaged – have another “schedule-driven” project that I am involved in, if you know what I mean.  Not the biggest incident I have been involved in but we still need to go through all the steps of incident investigation, assessment, demolition, purchase materials before you know what is damaged, develop design packages before you know what needs to be replaced, and build everything back as quick as possible – just the way some of us like it – all phases all the time.  A couple small pieces of equipment will take 6 weeks to fabricate, and we will cut back some home run cables and install some intermediate I&E junction boxes; should have it all back together in early March.  Makes the time go fast.  What is different is no need to figure out who is working this weekend, who needs a day off – everyone works every day here.  But you do need to pay attention to who is rotating in and who is rotating out, need to make sure the various action items and work move forward.

The other interesting aspect is facilitating a daily rebuild coordination meeting with Reliability, Engineering, Operations, Maintenance and HES – lots of people, various perspectives, and two languages.  My solution is to use a conference room that has two in-focus machines and two tranlators.  I facilitate and scribe the meeting in English, have a translator handle the verbal translation, and then another translator who is following my meeting notes and converting it to Russian during the meeting.  It seems to be going well with this approach; I can see that the Russian speakers are reading the notes in Russian and are bringing up issues for clarification.   It also makes the meeting go faster because people can read the agreements in either language and we do not need to meticulously translate verbally between the two languages.

Christmas Dinner

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I had Christmas Dinner with the Maintenance Manager and Process Engineering Supervisor tonight in dome 3 canteen.  Not many of the locals here celebrate Christmas but they do like holidays because it means people getting together and having a special meal.  So they decorate, and have a nice spread on the holidays here – there was shrimp and lobster, ham and turkey, and some good cheeses.  I usually eat my dinner in my room at night but it was a pleasure to socialize a bit, particularly on Christmas.  But now it’s back to my room, as tomorrow is another work day.  I worked most of the day on Christmas – facilitated a meeting, did some follow-up, wrote the meeting notes.  Just another day in Tengiz.