Rudy Yuan’s Streak oF BluE

“What do you exactly do for your job?”

That is probably the most raised question relating to my job during my almost one-and-half-year of employment (my mom actually asked me three times about this!)

“How much is your salary?” is probably the second one, thanks to the famed myth about high pay in oil industry. Well, it’s probably not a myth..
Well, these two questions I might try to answer here.

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My job title is called MWD Engineer. MWD is short for Measurement While Drilling. For people who have no experience in oil industry or oil-related education before might not know what that really is (actually, my out of experience statistic shows that 100% of those people doesn’t know what it is). This was also true with me.

— The call after the interview —

(this was spoken in Indonesia, but for awesomeness sake of my blog, I translate it to English)

The HRD: Rudy, congratulations, we are happy to have you joining us in Sperry department. The position offered for you is M/LWD Engineer, which is Measurement/Logging While Drilling Engineer. Your basic salary would be x.y00.000 IDR and additional bonus including housing and transportation are zy0.000 IDR both. There would be Medical Checkup coming sometimes next week, please keep contact with us. And there would be a dinner this Saturday in Tomodachi for all new recruits, you were invited to come. Is there any question?

Me: (Silent)…

I had several thoughts back then:

1. I had just gone to Tomodachi several days ago with friends… It’s not that good. Couldn’t they just choose something else?

2. The pay was so low ar!??!? I was expecting more like 7 or 8 mio. I told the interviewer before that I would be expecting 10 mio per month for a job that demanded 24 hours vigilance, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, with only 14 days of annual leave. Now this HRD lady told me I would just get less than half of it? I was ready to slam the cellphone shut (this was of course, not true, as I had the most patience in the world, and my cellphone couldn’t be slammed shut since it was not a clamshell phone).

3. WHAT THE HECK IS MWD ENGINEER? I’ll be measuring what, the pipes using measuring tape and ruler ar??? Or I’ll be measuring voltage and current with multimeter ar? (since I’m electrical engineer, and that would be a boring job as hell)

I opened my company’s website after that and searched for MWD. I forget what I got at that time but to me my job was as vague as the strange yellow crusty stain I found in my underwear one morning…

Strangely, a friend of mine, P, was accepted for same position, only by our biggest competitor company. I asked her about our job.

All she could muster was that it was similar to Wireline Logging (I thought at that time, I even didn’t know what it was), and that we might stay a longer while at site (this one, at least, she got it right).

– MWD: it’s all about survey, it’s all about information –

It took me two jobs to make me partly realize what MWD was.

This was the background of the importance of my job in Drilling operation:

Oil companies nowadays do not always drill an oil-well vertically. The fact is, most well paths are drilled deviated from surface. Some paths shape like the letter J, slim inverted S, and so on.

There are many reasons why they want to drill deviated paths like those. One of the most favorite reasons to tell newbie is this: imagine your oil reservoir is located below residential area. It will take too much problem (cost, mainly) to put a rig directly above the reservoir and drill vertically, right? So the possible solution is to put the rig near the reservoir outside the residential area and drill deviated path towards the reservoir. But this is not the most encountered case. It is just a newbie example. Hehe. Ask oil engineer for that.

(Quick flash: many people also don’t know what a rig is. I search my dictionary and it gives me this. RIG: a structure and the apparatus used for drilling for oil and gas)

So how do they make a deviated well-path?

Oil companies usually hire oil service companies (like the one I work with) to do the job. We would propose a well design that would fit the desires of both parties, then they would send several MWD and DD engineers to site to make that path into reality.

DD (directional driller) is the person responsible to guide the bit to build desired well path. He would put a ‘bent’ somewhere in the drillstring, so as the bit drilled the path, by maintaining the bent to face certain position, the drilled path would be turned towards certain direction according to the position of the bent.

And here comes our first task: MWD provides DD with realtime information where the bent is facing, so he would be able to turn the bent to his desires, so that hoping as they drill, the bent would guide the bit to drill the path we want.

So how do we know whether we have build the path according to plan?

Here comes our second task. MWD provides DD and the company with surveys of the well-path. By evaluating our survey data, certain softwares could create an estimation of the path and the shape of the drilled hole. 

By evaluating the drilled hole, DD then can determine where to direct the bent so it can go to the desired path.

Basically, MWD is all about giving information of the well path.

To acquire that information, MWD engineers have to install certain tools and sensors into the drillstring. Different service companies use different kind of tools, but ultimately they all give the same type of needed information.

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I tried explaining this to my mother several times. But it seemed like the concept of my work didn’t matter to her. What she wanted to know, what exactly do I do?

So what is that an MWD Engineer exactly do on site?

We come to the site, check on our unit and set it up (unit is a mobile working place where we would set up our workstations), prepare our tools, install various needed sensors, put in our tools, and sit comfortably inside our unit to wait for our tool sending information to us at the surface (by ‘comfortably’ I mean, often we put up music and movie with our laptop or computer, with snack and drink accompaniment, glancing occasionally at our terminal computers to check on errors and problems..).

Then my mother would ask: is that tiring?

Yes and no. Well, we have to work our muscle setting our unit and tools (pulling cables, heaving tools, etc). We have to work 12 hours per shift while drilling, which means we have to work night shift sometimes. Sometimes we have to work more than that. We have to be ready for problems 24 hours a day. We have crappy foods sometimes, crappy accomodation most of the times, and crappy location (so remote even cell reception was not available).

We also have to travel to different places around the nation (some people even around the globe). No definite place and no definite schedule (we have to stay on as long as they still drill or at least until they decide not to use us anymore). Some see this as challenging and adventurous, but all I could say is that I have got accustomed to it that I am not so much annoyed or bothered.

Tiring? But then agian, most of the time we are just sitting our fatty ass on our swiveling chair, sipping brandy (haha alcohol is prohibited during work). And we get our days off at average of one week per month. And you could see in my Facebook that we have pretty enough time to shoot photos for fun.
And the pay is kinda good… ;P

I dunno how it goes in another company, but in mine, we are paid with daily bonus when we are on site.

How much? Well, just say I could enjoy nice meals, nice clothes, and nice entertainment.

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That’s pretty much almost everything an MWD engineer does. Well, LWD is a enhanced version of MWD but I am not there yet. So maybe I’ll post it later on in the future.

Not satiesfied?

There is always comment box below.

I might have a bulging disgusting (it was adorable!) painful sty in my left eye, but that did not at all diminish the power of observation and creativity of my other eye.

Busway is a fascinating place where you can observe many fascinating phenomena (English tip: phenomena is the plural form of phenomenon. here i go condescending on you again. wahahha). Be sure to grab your camera readily l

I had always been astonished at news about child abuses and molestations that I often heard or read in paper or tv, but it had always been like a detached and distant matter to me, until I saw one that day. It truly made me sick to the level of making my sty burst with blood and pus (yaiks, it is disgusting!)

The kid was helpless with his sister’s hand pressing lying above his groin. He looked at me desperately but what could I do?? I liked the sight. Wahhahaah. But the kid wouldn’t feel anything anyway since his little supertiny manhood (anybody wanna confirm on the adjective? I have been always remembering mine as ‘awesome’…) wouldn’t and couldn’t be in any possibility of having such sensitivity to woman’s gentle touch (or hard, too, if you like, rough brush) of sexual desire deranged sisterly affection. I had to carefully tilt my handphone sideways to get the picture taken without suspicion¹.

And then there’s this.

 

“TIDAK DIPUNGUT BIAYA”??

What they wrote on that ad just was just simply confirming the common secret that you needed to pay quite large sum of money to get into the police academia. (well, sorry for friends who got into police force, maybe you have different opinions?)

And a little bit side dish for today main course: notice the contact email on the ad?

DIAPERS??? Did they choose the name because they had no idea what it meant or was it some Indonesian phrase or abbreviation I didn’t know? I thought we should consider telling them to change it before we became the laughingstock of foreign emissaries. Imagine a spy report writing this:

“About: Indonesian Police officers. Literacy and vocabulary status: super green, simply write all confidential reports in plain English when dealing with them (don’t even bother with encryption), apparently they still wet their pants, literally and figuratively, as can be seen from the attached evidence. You are entitled to LYAO²”

what a shame

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¹Okay, Jakartans, I know you love scandals, but that is truly not a fact. The sister was asleep and it was probably just a touch of protection laid in the wrong place (never put hands on groins, sister!), at the wrong time (the time a plot twister, sinister minded person like me was on board). But I am not responsible if there is actually something going on between the two of them. This footnote will not clear their sins. For that, that would be called forbidden (yet pleasurable) child-abusing incest, oh how I love the sound of it. Wakakkaka.

²This is, of course if you’re smart enough to guess, the third person version of LMAO. ;P. (if you still don’t know what it means, ASK GOOGLE, for my effing³ God⁴!)

³I just got this ‘effing’ phrase from the serial movie “How I Met Your Mother, 4^th Season” (Thanks R and T for that). I am not proud to say that I searched my Encarta dictionary to look for what it meant. My effing³ ignorance! (this “³” annotation indicator that just appeared would keep you looping in this footnote forever, so no need to reread the number 3 footnote from the start and just continue reading, for effing³ sake! ). ‘Eff’ was a UK slang to pronounce the first letter of F*CK (I put the C in deliberately so you wouldn’t be confused with the clothing brand FC*K I was so associated with recently). So in effect, “Effing” is similar to “F*CKING”. Did you get my effing³ explanation? (-End of Loop-)

⁴If you have got the clear idea of what note number 3 means, then ‘effing³ God’ is offensively rude. Calm down, I don’t mean to point to any religion. I am not particularly in any religion submission right now, so it’s definitely not your God who’s effing in my blog here.