Death By Jetlag

I used to think that flying all over the world was great fun , seeing new places, experiencing different cultures, it doesnt have the same attraction after 20 years, the only thing i think about everytime i prepare for a trip is the fact that the more i travel the worse i feel with jetlag and nobody ever told me it was cummulative. It has taken me nearly two weeks to start feeling normal after i flew back home from Malabo to Costa Rica. It is a horrible feeling to be falling asleep at 6 or 7 pm and then wake up at 3 am and not get back to sleep, it usually takes a few nights of forcing oneself to watch some of the films i have copied and go to bed at 10 or 11 pm and hopefully not stay awake after the obligatory 3 am pee. I sometimes think that i could be the onbly one suffering like this but i am confident enough to think there are many. I have the two weeks getting back to normal and then the next two weeks dreading the forthcoming trip back to Malabo. This whole thing is also not helped byt the appalling legroom and useless seating they provide on all flights, I should be flying business class into Malabo but they seem to think that they shouldnt book my flights in advance but they only end up creating a nightmare situation that i have to fly economy and they pay top wack for the tickets, nearly $7,000, for my roundtrip ticket. extortionate is the only word for it, i have found direct flights into Madrid business class and with a qick hop to Paris and then onto Malabo for a whole $2000 less but it is of no use trying to turn the huge leviathon of my company into trying to get a bargain, so i keep flying economy and they pay much more for the tickets, so much for sophisticated money saving MBA accountant types in big business Print Article
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Copied the last DVD and started packing for home

Well the last day is always a happy event for every contractor whether he is leaving for good or just for his rotation. Today i am getting ready for my rotation home. The most important of the day is prepare the timesheet and expenses reports and get them signed and e-mailed to the office in Florence. Next is make sure you have copied all the available DVD's and music as that is critical for having something to watch on the way home during the 24 hours on planes and another 12 in airports during my unholy trip back to Costa Rica. On this trip the leaving is a little bit different as alot of guys are leaving for good and i willnot see them again. having grown accustomed to having a good laugh on the day shift with them all it is a hard trip to makeknowing i willnot have that same atmosphere again. So slightly sad times, but as normal a new project in the offing and i am going to meet many new and interesting and insane people also. Got a new pair of boots, a little bit like John Wayne with them on but they happen to be dark red colour , very fetching if i was going to do some stomping about in a gay bar in leather chaps and stetson but as long as they are free then i will be using them to cut the grass and maybe diggin, but i dont dig anymore, i try and do as little as possible when i go home as i am lazy and trying to enjoy my new found wealth. I also had a crazy afternoon with a good bunch of contractors who all wanted the latest bits and pieces of software putting on there unusable laptops, i agreed as it only took a couple of hours but i crashed one out with the blue screen of death and had him shaking in his boots, i did recover the situation and put the smile back on his feet eventually. So i have now taken my aspirin to prevent blood clots with all the sitting about i will have to do and i am going to bed early as i am not going to get much sleep over the next two nights travelling and will eat very little tomorrow so as tyo prevent any bloated uncomfortable feelings while travelling overnight to paris. This is a sign of a wearly traveller putting his past experience to good use. I was given a pack of biscuits from a guy who laptop i did a couple of days ago and he had lost his case somewhere in Amsterdam and eventually it turned up with a pair of sneakers missing and shower gell all over everything inside including the biscuit package. i didnt turn my nose up as it was the first chocolate biscuit i had eaten in 4 weeks, it was marvellous. Makes you wonder what long term prisoners dream about after a few years in prison, well perhaps lets not go there.

Lack of sleep and I feel like a nursing mother

One major problem with working on camp and working 12 hour shifts is the fact that your never really away from work, some times your on call so your available and most of the time your at work anyway. social life revolves around trying to have get two hours chatting or drinking and not trying to stay up late or drink yourself silly as you have to get up for a 6.00am start , and that is everyday for 4 weeks, i personally have to work 2 weeks of nights and then change to two weeks of days, i hate night shift as it leaves me alone most of the time with no one to talk to and i feel like a zombie with being awake during the dark hours of night. I have been sleeping pretty well over the last few rotations while on the night shift but when it comes to changing to days, my body clock is completely screwed up. i sleep very light and any noise at all wakes me and then that is it i cannot get back to sleep. this leaves me frustrated as hell tired all day and feeling miserable, depressed almost. then the next night i have a thunderstorm wake me and keep me awake with the sound of 2 inch diameter rain drops beating the roof of my block like bongo drums and i get 3 hours sleep, and i feel like shit again the next day, i go out for a drink with the guys and feel really tired and dont really enjoy getting drunk , i get back to my room and fall into a total dead blackout sleep, but have to get up because i am about pee myself and stumble into the bathroom at 2.30 and then spend the next hour trying to get back to sleep and convicing myself that i havent only got 3 more hours in bed, again i suffer. The remedy that most of the bitter and twisted old timers use is to take valium, this is bought legally from the pharmacy in malabo town, 30 tabs for only $5.50, a bargain, i was reluctant to go down this road as i was frightened about the side effects and addiction problems but i am a well balanced guy and thought i would try them, if you have never tried them before then it is remarkable the effect they have, withing 15 mins of taking a tab you slump into a great total undreaming sleep. i do this maybe 3 or 4 times per month trip and usually only during the shift changeovers. but when you awake from a valium sleep , you feel just fantastic, like you slept for a year in hyperspace. but you have to prepare for the sleep, dont drink too much before bed, or you have to get up to prevent peeing the bed, dont eat too much or you feel bloated in bed and go to bed early, sometimes 8.00pm, to take full advantage of your sleep. when this happens i just feel totally refreshed , something i havent experienced in many years of sleeping in strange hotels and distand lands with crappy beds and hot swealtering bedrooms. They are great for the temporary relief of a week of bad sleep, if they ever bring out a non addictive copy of then i think i would be tempted to try a go on them. Anyone who suffers bad sleep knows exactly what i am talking about, especially mothers with young babies, that need feeding and attention at night. I will never slight a mother with a baby for looking tired and worn out and for never wanting sex, they deserve a huge round of applause for taking all those sleepless nights and being proud of there babies Print Article
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The comraderie of turbine guys

Today i have been showing a fellow engineer around the gas turbines on our project, he is an ex Alstom commissioning engineer and he is interested in replacing me on my part of the project when i leave, as he wants the experience, we share a common bond of being intelligent while swimming in a sea of ingnorace, we also share a common interest in getting software for free, he did tell me a very funny story of how he powered up his new laptop at home and it said would you like to connect to the new network and as he didnt have a wire connected to the PC he was surprised to realise that the wireless card was picking up a wireless network, he rapidly found he was connecting to his neighbours wireless network and this allowed him to get onto the internet and do anything he wanted, including downloading music. he thought long and hard about whether to tell his neighbour who he new very well, his guilt lasted all of 10 minutes as he told his wife and he then he rang BT and told them to disconnect his broad band connection saving £20 a month and now uses his neighbours broad band and "very fast indeed" was his comment. The funniest thing is that the neighbour is the IT head for a local large manufacturing company, so it just goes to show even the great can make mistakes. Tonight i am starting to pack and think about going back to the blue skies, hopefully, and some laying in bed in the morning, My wife is wanting me to go to the gym with her for motivation, i agreed as i cannot expect her to work hard and me lay around like a walrus. She is also working very hard on her masters degree on Natural resource management course as well, so i have to show some enthusiasm, we are also looking at moving house as we seem to have moved to a spot where the clouds seem to accumulate at the base of a mountain overlooking San Jose, the capital. I cannot stay in a tropical country and not feel the sun on my back every day, so we are house hunting further down the valley where the clouds have dissipated, lets hope the prices havent shot up since last time we went , all of $120,000 for a 4 bedroom house in a condominium. Print Article
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Power of the Internet and Finally Conquered the Copy Protected CD

It took me a long time, maybe 10 years to realise the power of the Internet. I thought it was just for the perverts to leer at pornography, it took a shift in my understanding that if you ask the right question in yahoo or google then the right answer will jump out at you. But it is hard to understand how to phrase that question, as it doesn’t understand English, it just matches the words you type. So that leap took place some time this year as I had plenty of time at work to spend just surfing, I wanted to be a hacker and needed to break software, well actually I ended up with software that others have broken, or cracked to use the correct geeky terminology. I asked and was told how to copy DVD's. How to compress DVD's to CD and how to download music and software from the Internet. The learning process of learning how to protect yourself from viruses and worms and Trojans was a painful and hard one, with all my surfing I was trojaned several times but only with mild ones that give you endless pop ups, I have since been properly trojaned by bot worms that want to take over your machine and make it a zombie, to be used in blackmail attacks on websites. But I am now a reasonable user of the software to defeat them and remove them from my Laptop. In fact if you have read my other entries I am helping many others in this war of terror on the Internet. I am even thinking of messing about offering my services for money when I get back to Costa Rica to rich Americans. I am not mercenary but I like money as much as the next bank robber, and with this thought in mind, there was a crazy armed robbery in Costa Rica that went badly wrong with 9 killed and 2 dead robbers, well I can only say they deserved it but the rest of them certainly didn’t. This is the only problem of the paradise of Costa Rica is the travelling robbers from Panama and Nicaragua, they come and kill mercilessly for pennies, like taxi drivers and bus drivers even, rob shops everywhere, but now the shop owners fight back with armed guards inside and out, ordinary folk are pretty well ok but petty burglaries are common place stealing anything for cocaine money, and at $6 a gram is the drug of choice.
Well I finally cracked the copy protected CD and it needs 3 different pieces of software, first you have to copy it to your hard drive as an image file and then convert that image file into a Wave file and then convert that into an Mp3 file, but after 2 days reading the necessary information I finally did it but only by luck, I spotted the image file in my temp folder and realised what I had done, so even after all the reading it was a piece of pure fluke, this is where I love the internet, ask the right question and you will be rewarded with gold or sorts, I even managed to find out the API description of crude oil and condensate categorization, pure gold

Looking forward to travelling home to Costa Rica

As i work a 28 day rotation into west africa, the first two weeks are on night shift and i become a hermit. purely through being tired and hardly seeing anyone and not having the brain activity to think of anything, i ring my wife and try and sound normal but i am very fuzzy around the edges. but after week 3 i have been working 1 week back on day shifts and even though i probably get less sleep i am feeling alive and i start planning things to do when i get back home to Costa Rica. At the top of my list is reviving my wonderful relationship with my wife, close to the top is trying to get some sleep but having two young kids in the house that is hard and trying to enjoy two young kids without being too soft with them or too hard on them is a difficult balance to achieve, trying to do something interesting with my time off is also important , as living in a tropical paradise is fantastic to do things all year round. going to the beach as we get both the carribean and pacific to play on , and it is only a 2 hour drive each way from San Jose the capital where i live. we can go do walking in the mountains as it is a very hilly place with a huge chain of volcanos (Over 100) running down the length of the country, we can go bird watching with nearly 800 species to try and see, i have a hummingbird feeder on my patio and we have up to 6 birds buzzing around cackling at each other to try and get on the feeder, three different species all weighing in around 5 grams each. but i try and do little of each just for good measure. So i am in that "making plans" mood and with only 5 days to go i am getting itchy feet ready to hit the airport and all that nasty rubber food for two days on my travels back home to paradise

manic activities and interests in my future plans

As normal at this point in a large project the customer is pushing very hard to get the thing finished as they know the guys dont really give a toss and are thinking about their next job themselves , so it is all manic rushing about and wanting explanations about things not completed or things to be removed and when do all the spare parts arrive, the usual stuff, but for me the most important part of the week is putting my timesheets in and getting my expenses up to date, screw the job i need my money, well not as bad as that but not far off. i had a small disappointment, i copied my DVD ripoff to a disk only to find when i played the actions scenes it was all blocky and very bad watching, i now realised i should have copied it to two cd's making the quality far better, i did this for the Lord of the Rings DVD's and they came out fantastic, but at least i have access to the Gladiator DVD still before i end my rotation in Malabo. I have been working on the guys laptops whilst i am working on nightshift, just basically for something to do during the long lonely 12 hour night shift. usually removing trojans and setting up the software and antivirus stuff, just eliminating any problems they have, i am getting about 3 or 4 a week and one guy was so impressed that he brought his sons laptop all the way from the UK on his next rotation for me to see if i could sort it out, as usual they didnt have any Antivirus installed and it had a nasty one which was trying to let an outside agent takeover his machine, i removed all the offending crap including his sons Kazaa peer to peer software, which normally loads it full of Adware and was also slowing his machine down to nothing, after i had finished it was running like a dream and had some nice digital pics from Digitalblasphemy.com running as a screensaver, i took it back with pride to be offered a packet of biscuits and a a quick thankyou. so much for gratitude, if it wasnt for the fact i am learning lots by doing it i would have told him to stuff it up his arse and dont come back . but this is life as a contractor, usually they are all take take take and fuck the rest, their only concern is the money. Just another day in paradise
The fact that i have a project to go to has seaped out into the general populace and i am getting guys asking where it is and how long it is, they are not really interested in my part of it or what i am going to do they are picking my brains so they can find out if there maybe a chance for them to slide into it. All the guys are parasites living off one anothers contacts to get future work and that is another fact of life for a contractor. i was a little worried about Brazil as you here horror stories about murder and mayhem but i had one guy tell me that he spent months backpacking around the entire country and never had a problem with the locals only the police, 1 placed some cocaine on him and then demanded a bribe to let him go and he was relived that it was only $200, but i would have preferred to have shot him in the head and left him to die by the side of the road, corrupt police are as bad as one can get and deserve only the worst life can offer, worse than criminals who are probably stealing to survive. Life aint 'arf funny aint it Print Article
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Desperation for Company and Entertainment

I had some great news about my reassignment to a new project, my manager has agreed almost that i can move to another project in Brazil, i was delighted as you can imagine but once the euphoria had worn off, i was left feeling almost desperate about having to work in this tropical prison for the next 6 months or until the next project comes off. So i had to go and try and cheer myself up with some drinking and telling silly stories in the bar. I arrived to find everyone glued to the TV watching the man utd footy game, i did eventually get to speak to someone who was also in the same frame of mind as me .

Life at The End of The Project

Anyone who has worked as a contractor knows the excitement of working in the world of billion dollar projects, the dynamic nature of the work , the excitement of succeeding with your part of the project, trouble shooting, it is all great stuff, but the drawbacks are many and profound. Most of the guys who work in this game are doomed to marriage failure, many times over in a few cases, it is just inevitable with the long weeks away from home, one critical one is the out of work activities soon become as demanding as the work itself, the need to feed the excitement zone in the brain. Most of the guys take drinking as a fairy vigourous activity and suffer physically and mentally from it, alcoholism is fairly common as is the pot belly of a regular drinker. A previous manager of mine went AWOL, as soon as he arrived on site and it turned out that he had a drink problem and had believed a girl in town loved him, her being 25 and a prostitute, he being 58 and ugly and an alcoholic, he drank himself into a stupor and locked himself and the girl in a hotel room for 3 days until he could drink no more and then returned to site, only to be fired from the job as you would expect. Most of the guys earn a great deal of money, and spend it at an equally great rate, beer, lots beer, silly toys to stimulate the excitement zone in the brain, laptop computers that they cannot use and only ever play DVD's on. and alot of time prostitutes. the later being another reason they get divorced, the wife is looking after babies at home become fat and unkempt from being so busy looking after babies and when a fantastic looking girl(prostitute) shows any interest in a guy telling him wonderful things he hasnt heard in 15 years of marriage he swoons and thinks he is in love with the most wonderful girl in the world, and gets divorced. I heard a terrible story of a guy taking a prostitute home as a wife from Malabo, and when they entered a bar in Aberdeen together she was confronted by one of her ex customers, who greeted her like a long lost sister, to the horror of her new husband. Anyhow getting back to the story line, as we all approach the end of the project for most of the guys, we work as a team and the groups of guys who spend days working and nights drinking together then realise that they are destined to be seperated and may not see each other again it all become like being at an extended wake. people talking about the next project and where they are going and where they are going to live to avoid paying tax, but hardly anyone is expected to be working with many if any of the guys again. We were given a party to celebrate achieving a milstone for the operation of the plant, all the jokes were flat and dead and not much fun was had , most guys stuck to there little groups, mostly along country and regional lines, brits, Yanks, texans, and amongst those , Geordies and macams, the older shipyard and north sea construction crews. only when the beer had been flowing long enough did the atmosphere lighten up a little, i have aligned myself with the guys who work here regular and willnot leave at the end of the project, they dont feel the misery of the deadline for leaving, i grew friendly with a guy who was one of the funniest i have worked with in a long time and i did his computer and he made me laugh, and last week he left and i was left feeling lonely and miserable and probably prompted me to decide to leave this place, there isnt enough funny people here to make life worth staying, i treasure fun and laughter more than money, i cannot stay with the miserable old farts who have been through the marriage mill several times and are bitter and twisted , and whose only humour surrounds insulting someone and being a grumpy old bastard.

Life as a travelling engineer and wondering what normal life is

During this rotation into Malabo Equatorial Guinea, I have been pondering the meaning of life. What is it all about and why am I doing it. I took this job for several reasons, mostly because I had spent all my money after I quit the engineering giant GE after a long and distasteful trip to Turkmenistan, I picked up a nasty bowel parasite called Giadia Lamblia, I had Ghandi’s revenge and the most horrific farts imaginable. Anyhow I was short of money and touted around for a job and was offered some contracting in Brazil, I was hopping up and down with excitement thinking I had hit the jackpot. Well after a couple of days I was offered what they called an equally important job in the West African democracy of E.G. I didn’t mind, I had been to work in Zambia and thought I could handle this place. The rotation was very good, 28 days about and all flights paid for to my new home in Costa Rica with my new wife. That was also part of my reason for quitting GE; they had refused to let me move to Costa Rica. So I was set for my new job as controls engineer working on a gas terminal in a dictatorship in Africa. I arrived to find the progress on the plant was well behind schedule and can only be described as organised chaos. The accommodation was OK and we had great air conditioning everywhere to protect the sanity of all the guys working here, as the usual temperature is 90 and 90% humidity. To my horror I found out that I was expected to work 12 shifts for the entire 28 day rotation and I had determined 15 years previous to this that I would never work shifts again as I love my sleep at night and become a tyrant on night shift, I really detest and hate them with all my heart and soul. I also found out that I wasn’t really going to be working as a controls engineer but just be operating the gas turbines that I normally install and commission. This means I have basically nothing to do, I get to work and see if there is anything to do and then chat with the guys and then walk around and chat a bit more and have coffee, chat more and check the units and as usual they are running like a dream, should do for the 1/4 million dollars the control system cost. And then try and surf the net to keep me from falling asleep, I do anything to prevent my brain from seizing up. I have been here for 10 months and have just decided that I cannot continue here anymore and asked my manager in Florence to relocate me to a job or project where I will actually have something to do and use my brain again. I cannot deny that I have enjoyed some of the time here, with 200 British contractors who are building this site; we have had some good nights in the clubhouse they have on site and made some good friends. I have also had to learn much about computer viruses and Trojans as I suffered an attack of Trojans after surfing some music download sites, so I have become the unofficial IT department for removing Trojans and setting software to prevent attacks and removal of the offending crapware. I have also learned how to copy DVD's and make MPEG4 copies and very good quality they are to. So all in all I have made some good money, all paid in Euros as my payment office is in Dublin and as I spend in dollars I have had a 15 % pay rise effectively. I have learnt some new computer tricks and had an easy time. I do have to take malaria medication and it does have an affect on your bowels but other than the jetlag I haven’t had too much trouble.
The terminal and compound sit on a peninsular and overlook the Bay of Guinea, we have many tankers lay up and see drilling platforms on barges travelling past to move to distant oilfields, huge structures all lit up like 300 foot Christmas trees, and don’t mention Christmas as I was here for the whole thing and pretty miserable it was to, on night shift for the whole two weeks. The island of Bioko is basically two large volcano’s and when the cloud clears the scene is very nice quite spectacular actually. I am winding down the last 8 days until I fly home and on the day shift trying to recover from the night shift. The food is OK but has been shite for the last few weeks for some reason we don’t know but we have been promised better food so let’s hope it is on my hopefully last trip here in April.