What I Get Paid to Do

I had a request from Matt to explain a little more about what I do for a job here...



My job title is QC Seismologist. I work in a camp of about 200 people in the middle of the desert. Our company specializes in seismic geophysics. We use sound waves and the concepts of physics to get information about subsurface geology.

Every day, the majority of the crew drives out from camp, into the field to aquire data. We have many-ton trucks called vibrators that make loud sounds at specified locations. Each time a vib "shoots" there are 2050 geophone stations planted in the ground up to 7km away that listen and record what they hear. We get more than 2000 shots a day. This is quite an operation, with over 150 people directly involved. There are laborers who lay down and pick up geophones, mechanics, drivers, coordinators, etc. At the end of the day the result of all this work is one 4" x 5" LTO tape.

The QC department consists of me and one other person. We are responsible for checking the data, reformatting it and presenting it to our clients, PDO (Petrolium Development Oman). Because there is so much data, and so much data about the data, this is a complicated process. We have an enormous library of scripts and procedures that have amassed and evolved over the years. When I mention "data coming in at night", or "doing the morning data checks", this is the data I'm talking about.

We process a separate batch of data each day that comes from our uphole crew. This crew is only 15 people and they are in a completely different location. They collect data using only one noise source, and one geophone which they lower into a 100m deep borehole. A day's data from this crew consists of 100 separate recordings, or "traces". A day's worth of data from our main crew will consist of over 4 million traces.

I also sometimes mention "preplanning" on chat. Our department helps the survey department plan out the coordinates of each and every shot and reciever as well as the order of the shots, and which recievers will listen to which shots. Preplanning of a site happens weeks or months before the actual shooting.

Most of the stuff I do here is very routine. It can be painfully tedious. The interesting part of my work is 1) trying to improve a process or 2) figuring out what happened when something goes wrong. That is what requires actual understanding the data and what we do to it.

I also spend a lot of time reading books and updating my online "facebook" profile and writing this blog. And making oragami elephants.

So that is my job. There are lots of computers. Lots of computer programs written and rewritten by a multitude of people who quit years before I started. Pages of coordinates and times and vibration specifications. Millions of traces. Gigabytes of data. Fun fun FUN.

My Disguise

This is in response to Georgia's comment.

"You can do it! Maybe you can just duct tape your boobs down, throw on a turban and draw on a mustache. They will never know the difference. Or just wait for another strike and start shouting what they shout :) Either way, I look forward to you speaking to me in some sort of arabic when I next see you. Make sure you aren't practicing at the airport though...very suspicious behavior. 'But I swear Mr. Officer, I work for an oil company...' "



Mr OracleofMumbai, I will get back to you later...

Trying to Learn Arabic

I finally started to begin to try to maybe learn a LITTLE bit of arabic last night.

Most expat's here who know arabic learned just from talking to people. I have a very hard time learning new words from hearing them. Also I have pretty limited interaction with Omanis because of the nature of my position, my shyness, and my boobs. So that won't work for me.

I can learn things pretty quickly when I see them. That's something I found out when I was trying to learn Spanish. So instead of learning to speak thank you's and hello's and how are you's, I decided to start with the alphabet.

There are 20 some basic letter shapes. Less than English even. Simple right? NO. There are also dots, one dot, two dots, three dots, dots above letters, dots below letters, circles, dashes, hatches, hicksas, maddas, sukuns, etc.. Then come the vowels. There are two different kinds and half the time they are not even written. Also everything is written in a cursive style. Because of that a letter may appear quite different depending if it is alone, beginning a word, in the middle of a word, or at the end of a word. Once I memorize my little letter flash cards, I still won't be able to pick out half the letters in a written arabic word. Then when I figure all that stuff out, and I can distinguish written sounds, many of the sounds are totally different than anything in english (or german or spanish). They may sound like phlegm or like gaging or like a mentally handicapped person speaking . The cherry on top, is that it is all written backwards...that is you start on the right and move left. Ahhhh!

Well I am making a little progress. So far I've memorized about 12 "letters". And I think I made a leap by recognizing that words are more readable if you think of them as a compilation of syllables rather than "letters". That's because the vowels are either not there, or they are an accent on the preceding cosonant...usually.

Wish me luck!

A Discovery While Running

I went running yesterday and made a spectacular discovery: a 30 ft change in elevation!! less than a mile from camp!!!! If you've seen pictures of this place you understand my excitement. Today I went running again to explore, this time taking a more direct route and my camera.

You can hardly tell this elevation change exists untill you are 100m from it. As you approach it, the setting goes from - well - ugly, to one of the most beautuful I've ever seen. It's like a playground of strange rock formations. The rocks have a distinct texture. Jagged swiss cheese is the best descriptor I can come up with. I had an excellent time taking tons of pictures of landscapes, rocks, textures, trees, plants, camel poo, and myself. And I have plenty more pictures to take. The dropoff rambles northwest and southeast as far as I can see in either direction. To the northwest the elevation change looks like it gets deeper and more dramatic, AND to the southeast there is what might be a small village huddled against the edge. So I have material for further exploration, and for pushing myself to run longer distances.

I'm just so happy. This made my day. I never knew how exciting a 30 foot drop in elevation could be.

Beginning of 2nd Hitch

I'm finally going to send my blog out. I'm a little embarassed to assume that people want to read about my every day life, but 8 bizillion other people have such blogs, and I am in some country named Oman. So there you have my disclaimer.

That said, I made it back to Oman yesterday for my second hitch after a nice chill 20 day vacation that included visiting PA and TX, cleaning my wonderful room, petting cats, doing taxes and reveling in all the green.

I suffered through another 24 hour trip to get here. I made the trip with only two flights. I flew Lufthansa Houston to Frankfurt and again Frankfurt to Muscat. I thought I was getting the flu in Frankfurt. I spent a miserable five hour layover on a cold tile floor near the interterminal train trying to get away from people and smoke, and trying to cool my throbbing head on the tile floor. Pitiful.

Thanks to a healthy dose of Nyquil, I slept on the next flight. I woke up in Muscat at 1am and the flu had mysteriously dissapeared. Thank god. Maybe I was cured by flying over the holy land. As Matt put it "god only cares if you're on the projection plane of the earth". Nerd.

After 4 hours of sleep I got picked up at 6am to catch the domestic flight to the crew. It's these domestic flights where the passengers might consist of 50 omani men in traditional dress... and me.

I had a very nice first day. Nothing special. Just a lot of nice greetings and friendly converstations. And then I slept for 13 hours, from about 1pm to 6:30pm and 9:00pm to 6am.

A side note: On my first flight from Houston, I got seated between two big guys. I struck a conversation up with one who was headed to Bulgaria to work on a drilling rig. He was from Mississippi, rural Mississippi. The guy on my other side overheard this and piped in. He also worked on a rig, and he was from super rural Lousiana. Real-life french-speaking cajun Louisiana with swamps and bayous and alligators and shot guns. They both had delightful accents. They ended up talking to eachother about raisin' crawdad's, buyin and sellin goats for 10 a head, huntin' copperheads, the merits of red clay, etc.. This could be the most interesting cultural experience of the entire trip.

not so fun

This is my written statement that I gave to the head of the camp about an... incedent, that I had the other night.

15-Mar-07
At about 1AM this morning, I was woken up by a man opening the door to my room and looking at me. I asked him what he was doing and he told me "I see you walking around camp" and "I love you". I told him, I have a boyfriend in the US and I'd like to go to sleep. He just stood there, I don't think he understood me. Then I said "please leave" a few times, and he did. I hadn't locked my door at the beginning of the night, but I locked it then.
I can't remember very clearly what he looked like. What I do remember - he was dressed in white, and wearing a hat, not a turban. He was a pretty average build. He looked pretty young, not a lot of facial hair.

Camp Move in Oman

***** 14 Mar 2007 *****

Hi,

So i experienced a camp move today. We loaded the entire camp onto huge trucks and drove about 20km to a new location. Watching them load the "skids" was impressive. They are at least the size of double wide trailers, maybe bigger. A trucks front wheels would lift a good 5 feet into the air while loading. Then they had to transfer the skid from one truck to another truck. When a skid was finally loaded it stuck out on either side, it was more than three times as wide as the truck, and it would slowly wobble back and forth perpedicular to the truck. And by seeing how just how slow it wobbled you could get a feel for just how frikin heavy it was (physics!), and that made you really hope it didn't fall. Actually, one skid had some trouble when it was being tranfered from a loading truck to the driving truck. A cable on the driving truck broke, and the skid got pulled sideways and almost fell off the truck. Exciting...but then it took almost 2 hours to fix. And that was just one out of 20 some skids. And then we drove to the new campsite and did it all in reverse. So it was a long day with a lot of waiting.

While waiting I learned how to tie a turban properly from an authentic Omani while sitting in a truck waiting. I heard stories about how this Omani's mom got mad when his dad married a second wife...because people do that in Oman sometimes. I took a nap on a pile of reciever cable, and because i was so tired (from waking up at 4am) it was the most comfortable bed I've ever slept on. I fed a camel several apples...I got to see its tounge. It was wearing either a jock strap or a bra, depending on whether it was a woman or a man. Some piece of fabric was wrapped around it to protect its underside. AND I got to drive one of the trucks... off road! I never thought i'd get to do it so soon! I only got to because I had to go to the bathroom horribly bad, and there were no bathrooms, so Keith the head mechanic lent me his truck to drive out in the desert and pee. I'm so glad I learned too drive on a stick shift. And then when I peed, the pee landed about 6 feet down wind of me because it was blowing like a @$#%@$!

Finally we are back in the office, with lights and computers and air conditioning. We managed to unpack everything in an hour or two...a lot quicker than it took to pack it all. It's been a pretty exhausting day, but interesting. So i thought I'd share.

Love,
Selah