Peeps,
I am, in fact, alive.
Storytime, briefly.
The flight here was alternatingly awesome and crappy. Whole row to
myself from Houston to Moscow. Two former bearkats on my flight.
Wasn't tired, watched tv/movies the whole time. House of Lies and
Newsroom are amazing shows. From Moscow to Singapore I was surrounded
by butch Russians whose English was limited to "vodka with ice." I
was actually tired. Couldn't sleep. Lame.
My hotel is nothing short of opulent. Breakfast is like the one at
BeiJing - all 7 continents. Why wouldn't you have Dahl Curry for
breakfast? Duh? Also this place serves something called "Chicken
Ham." Haven’t touched it yet, but I will. It's on Orchard Street,
which is identical to Nathan Street in Hong Kong. You close your eyes
and ignore the tranny hookers (more on that later) and basically
you're in the same place. There are 3 Rolex stores on my end of the
street (that I've noticed). Every 100 yards is a Seven Eleven and
another fortress of shopitude. A NorthPark or a Galleria on every
corner. Not kidding. Shopping is king – Christmas decorations and
sales already. The sacred Hindu holiday of Deepivali (Punjabi for
“Buy More AeroPostale shirts”) was today and even in Little India
there was no sign of anything special aside from a few banners. Shop
shop shop. Dolla Dolla Bills yall.
Work was chill. As I expected, I'm not actually required to do much
while I'm here. I spent the morning getting a facility tour -
everything here is more compact than in Carrollton (surprise?) and
perfectly clean. The office itself is 30 minutes from Singapore
proper, and most of the employees are bussed in at 730 and bussed out
at 430. Like my home office it's a 3 - story affair with Technology
on the third floor, sustaining and manufacturing support on the
second, and the admins/labs/manufacturing on the first floor.
Everyone here is brilliant on paper but not a soul has any field
experience. All the engineers have two left hands when it comes to
assembly and seem to be terrified of or allergic to grease. Not hard
to figure out my niche here.
This particular Halliburton location houses Wireline and Sperry tools.
These tools are, among other things, responsible for the little
squiggly lines people refer to as “logs” that tell you whether you
have oil downhole or not. Wireline tools do this after drilling, and
Sperry stuff does it during (Measurement While Drilling/Logging While
Drilling are common terms for it). Other engineers and myself refer to
these tools as “CSS,” or “Crazy Sciencey Shit.” Lots of them use
nuclear energy sources and throw around words like “dielectrically
determined porosity matrix” like they know what they mean. One, a
Radioactive Densometer, was explained to me as “It’s basically just a
giant nuclear-sourced megaohmmeter. Duh." Fucking Asians, man.
This stuff looks straight out of Minority Report and I fear that one
of the parts at manufacturing is going to turn into a giant mechanical
spider and attack me at any moment. Worse yet they could combine
Voltron-Style. This stuff makes my projects look like tinker toys and
a Mr. Potato Head by comparison. Humbling.
However, as typically happens when lots of smart people design
something they won’t actually be using, the tool they brought me in to
work on is a total nightmare. Overly complicated and horribly
user-unfriendly. It’s like a band-aid on the problem they’re trying
to solve, rather than a serious permanent fix. I will begin working
harder to get promoted just so I don’t have to deal with the field
guys bitching at me about it.
Monday night I went out (hard) with Russ’s friend Anders, the
adequately-monickered PartySwede. I’m not sure what I was expecting,
but it was not a 6’4” 250 pound ginger with a mustache and huge
sideburns bordering on chops. He picked me out of a crowd in front of
the pub we were meeting at and the first thing he says, in deep
sveedish accent, is “This is Asia, finding you is easy”.” We had 64
ounces of beer each and 5 kinds of sausages each and it wasn’t gay at
all, somehow. There were pitchers of long island iced tea involved
and much mockery of thai lady boys. I was dead by midnight, I think,
but my drunkdialing records may say otherwise. Pleading the fifth.
This email is longer than I intended it to be, but there’s no one here
to talk to who won’t bill me by “rong, rong time.” In the next
episode I intend to offer sweeping generalizations about this place,
because being here for a week really makes me an authority on the
subject.
Email me back to confirm I didn’t bore any of you to death with this
message. Love you fools.
Hugs and Handpounds,
Short Haake
