A Phone Call from the Boss

Not too long ago, somewhere in the UK, two Polish guys went to interview for a position in my company. The interviewer asked them, "Do you want to know a little more about what it is like to work on a seismic crew?", to which they replied, "We already know!. We saw this blog that described everything."

A few mornings ago I get this surprise phone call from my boss in Muscat. What could he be calling about? He says "Hi Selah. ...[pause]... I'm calling about your blog," to which I reply "Oh shit!"

My blog passed through a few HR departments and a couple of my bosses. It wasn't a big deal in the end. I agreed to keep the company name off the blog. My friend and fellow employee made a good point. Forget worrying about being in trouble. I should demand a referral bonus for those two guys!

It's awfully cool that in some other part of the world, two guys somehow found my blog and read it to find out what working on a seismic crew was like. That is why the internet is great. I probably tricked them into thinking it was all kinds of fun too. Ha ha.

Well in case any of you are still reading: Hi polish guys. Hi bosses. Hi HR departments from around the world. Thanks for not insisting I shut my blog down. Ignore that part about "sometimes I have to force myself to be interested in geophysics". Thanks for reading (even if its just for your job). I hope you enjoyed it.

Hello, It's Been a While

Hello. Its been a while since I wrote anything. Life's been pretty routine here - doing the daily QC checks - writing out tapes for clients - browsing the internet - reading. I haven't made good on the promise to myself to study some geophysics. I've been pretty good about studying Arabic though.

Right now I'm getting the hang of plurals. They are too complicated! In Arabic, almost all nouns are irregular in the plural, like the English "people" vs "person". Also, you have to pluralize any adjectives that describe your plural noun. Many adjectives also have irregular plural forms. However, for a given adjective, you may use one of 3 of its plural forms depending on the type of noun it is describing. And there is a whole other set of rules for the plural when describing two things, rather than several things. And I suck at memorizing. Ahhh!

Last night we had a barbecue to celebrate our 2 millionth LTI-free man-hour. LTI stands for Lost Time Incident meaning a significant injury, or significant equipment damage that causes us to stop production. Our client uses this concept to monitor the safety of the many contractors they have working for them. To celebrate this achievement, a couple bosses came down from the Muscat office, along with a few client reps who are involved in our project. At the end of the day, the entire crew gathered together and there were some speeches in Arabic and English. The client presented our crew with a plaque and pictures were taken... and then we got to eat.

I met one of the client reps named Mohammed. He was born in Zanzibar (east Africa) in a place that used to be a colony of Oman back in the 1800's when Oman was a big sea-faring power. He moved to Muscat when he was 8, in 1970 the year Sultan Qaboos took power. Back then it took his family 15 hours to drive from Dubai to Muscat. Today it takes 2 hours.

We had a nice conversation. We started out talking about me learning Arabic. That is always a good ice breaker with Arabic speakers. Carlos joined in. He is our Venezuelan on-crew client representative, and he's also learning Arabic. Our conversation took a left turn to the topic of "opinions about IM and text messaging languages". Carlos absolutely hates when his daughters email him with misspellings and shortened words, like 'u' in place of 'you'. I disagree that this is a bad thing. With the aid of a beer I passionately argued that misspellings and slang and shortcuts are how a language develops. All that matters is you get your point across, and hell, the more creative the better. Mohammed stood the middle ground. He mentioned some speech by some German leader (not Hitler) who speculated that complications in the German language my be holding German universities back. Mohammed also admitted he was a fan of texticons :0 ;). It was a fun conversation. As I mentioned, I was sipping a beer during this whole bit. I don't think I could have taken myself so seriously otherwise...lol.

On another note, Ramadan starts in a few days. That might be interesting. No food, water or cigarettes from sunrise until sundown for any of the Muslims for an entire month. As a non-Muslim, my only obligation is not to take consumable things outside of the kitchen where they will torture the hungry people. I wonder if everyone will be horribly cranky for a month. That's what happens to me when I don't eat.

Once, when I was in college, I tried to fast before Thanksgiving. I decided I would not eat for the three days leading up to Thanksgiving. I only lasted a day and a half before I rushed home from choir practice to stuff my face with noodles and butter. Fasting is hard.

Well that is all for now... although I have a few more posts brewing. A "history of Oman" post, a "bragging about my upcoming leave" post, and a post about some of the many people from Kerala, India that come to work here. So stay tuned.

Lift and Gummibears

I'm back for my fourth hitch in Oman. I spent the last three weeks in the US, a little bit in TX, but mostly in PA catching up with the family and friends.

I'm all refreshed from being on vacation. I'm inspired to learn lots of arabic, get to know more people, and be a good employee. Sometimes I have to force myself to be interested in things like geophysics and land survey design, but its worth it.

I got my first real case of jetlag this time. It's my third morning in Oman, and I still woke up at 3am, after falling asleep at 6pm yesterday.

On the way here, I got to experience the exclusive Lufthansa buisness lounge in Frankfurt. It was kind of crowded and a little ugly, but it had big comfortable chairs, free Gummi bears, free Lift apple soda, as well as coffee, tea, vodka, champaign, tasty whole grain bread with chive cream cheese, and more.

I bought myself three language books at an airport shop, Turkish, German, and Greek to prepare for my next vacation. I felt very international sitting there in the buisness lounge reading foriegn language books. I didn't get too far into learning the languages though. I spent most of my time giggling at the "romance" section that had vocabulary for hitting on and hooking up with greeks, turks or germans. "I like you very much" and "That feels good" and the like. Tee-hee.

'My' Latest Photos

I just posted many photos. Some of our camp move, and some of my trip to sand dunes at this prospect. Unfortunately my camera got ran over by a truck a week ago, so none of these photos are mine. They are from Andy, a coworker who also loves to take pictures. He takes a lot of good pictures of people, which I rarely do out here. So, you'll get to see some people. And that is good.

(If you click on the picture links using the right mouse button you will get an option to "Open in New Window". That will make it more convenient to look at the pictures. )

There are a few pictures here, here and here of Omani and Indian guys cooking outside in the middle of the desert. When we stopped for lunch the first day, I ate my packed sandwich and chips. The Omani truckers pulled out a carpet, a bench, a big pot, some utensils, lit a fire using generous quantities of gasolene, and started chopping vegetables. A lot of the truckers we hired for the camp move live in their trucks. The make for a strange/modern kind of bedou - nomadic, but no camels. I got to try some "camp move chili" (you can see here) and some Indian style tea. Both were prepared on the side of the highway, in the middle of empty desert, using gasolene soaked wood, in the shade of a giant tractor trailer. One of these guys could add a very interesting post to Georgia's blog.

I added some pictures of where we stayed the first night. We just stopped 20 some trucks on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere. We had a nice dinner and some beer. The beer helped us fall asleep despite the fact that there was no airconditioning, and we were in a location where a few hours earlier it had been 120F degrees.



This picture was taken that night. In it you can see some characters from the crew and put some faces to the names of people I may have mentioned.
From the left:
1) Andy the photographer. He's also Australian and the assistant project manager. He's from a town that is actually named "Surfer's Paradise"
2) Steve the Australian project manager - a real jokester
3) Keith british mechanic. He has a really excellent British accent, but it always seems a little out of place on Keith who's a mechanic and has tattoos and is a ladies man back home in the UK.
4) Selah the Philadelphian QC - she makes very nice origami pigs.
5) John Robison, the Australian client representative who, during his leave, goes home to Malaysia and runs a scuba diving company - no fair.

Here is another picture. From the left:
1)Ash the medic, not a hundred percent sure, but I think he's from India.
2)Ibrahim, or "Ibs", the camp boss and a very happy guy. He's from Oman.
3)Ravi a very nice and funny guy, although he really like to lecture me on the evils of America especially after a couple beers. Ravi's from India.
4)Hamish the senior QC, he's New Zealandish and he is a master of one liners.
5)The rest you saw in the previous picture.

And there are also some pictures of my first trip to sand dunes. Sand dunes are COOL! Here is me playing Golf.

That is all...thanks for reading:)

I Can See You

Although I try not to add random shit to this blog that is not about Oman, I thought this was cool enough to make an exception. If you click on the link it will map the locations of last 100 visitors to this blog. It will be embarassing when 80% of those visitors are me...but oh well.

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Golf on a Sanddune

Sorry I havn't written for a while. I've been destracted by other things.

We had a camp move a week ago. Picked the entire camp up and drove northwest for 2 days. Now we're shooting in the Hazar oil field, about 40mi from the Saudi border and right on the edge of 100's of miles of sanddunes. It's sort of close to the town of Bahja, but really it's not close to anywhere. The temperature reached 125 F the other day.

Today I got to visit the sanddunes for the first time. They are very very cool. The sand dunes around here are 40m high. Everyone feels the need to comment on how short that is, but I think that's pretty tall. The ground surrounding them is completely flat. It's also covered in white stones while the sanddune sand is pretty red, so that makes for a stark contrast. Looks like someone dumped a pile of dirt on the kitchen floor. If you look at google earth you can see them and how strange they look.

I wandered around with my coworker Andy, who gets to drive around all the time - I'm jealous. The best part was when we played golf. I think that is one of the coolest/strangest things I've ever done - played golf in a location like that.

Eating a Camel

Last night we ate a camel.

It was a small camel, only a year and a half. They walked it into camp alive the night before and they butchered it right there. You have to slit its throat in a particular way for the meat to be "halal" (the Arabic version of kosher). I didn't actually see all this, but I was told about it.

Camel meat is pretty good. It's stringy in a way that reminds me of a hunk of stewed corned beef. There is no marbling of fat, like on a steak, but the meat itself is a little oily (could have been the way they cooked it too). I was served mine from a giant stewing pot that served over 100 people. You ate with your hands. The meat was spiced lightly with cardemum. Tasted a little like lamb or deer, red meat with some flavor. There was a little piece of camel fur left on one of my pieces, it made me sad.

PS. While looking up halal, I found that the eating roadkill is also forbidden in Islamic law. Maybe if I order roadkill for breakfast they will have to serve it to me with a specially marked plate and untensils, like when I order bacon.