Brazilian Shorthaake - A Second Helping

Eating salad helps you lose weight.  This is well-known. What may be news to some readers is that eating a salad in a third world country weaponizes the digestive track with greater efficiency than any known Uranium-enrichment process.  If the North Koreans discover this, say goodbye to Seoul.

So I'm sick as a dog thanks to my subtle effort to be healthy, and Macae's unclean public water system.  Rather than do anything daring, like go outside or shave, I'll respond to some FAQ's.  Shorthaake, mailbag edition.  It's worth a shot.

Have you tried this you crybaby?

    No. The line at the Brazillian Walmart is too ridiculous.

Are women in coveralls hot?

                Yes.  It’s an automatic +2.

That garment is called a “cover-all.” It does exactly that. Why is that hot?

                No one knows.  Might be the buttflap.

What’s the demographic make-up of your survival school?

We represent 5 continents  - the roster contains 3 Englishmen, 1 Scot, 1 South African, 2 Indians, a Singaporean, a Malaysian, a Venezuelan, a Mexican and myself.  The English level varies, with the Scotsman obviously offering the least prowess.

                Not surprisingly, my class is entirely male.  I could nearly replace the word “class” with “industry.”  There are a few women engineers/operators in town. I’ve met them both.  They’re quite pleased to be here, as they are treated like royalty when spoken to directly.  They just gradually learn to be treated like raw steak the rest of the time. 

What do they actually teach in survival school?  Do you think you’re cool/tough now?

                In reverse order, no I’ll never be as cool as either of my brothers.

                The course material alternates between the painfully obvious and the undeniably practical.  The course exists merely to cover the collective buttflaps of the various bosses we serve, and to pad the pockets of local businesses at foreigners' expense.  It also involves 30 minute coffee breaks and 2 hour lunches.  This would be fine, if not for my actual work to handle here.

                Topics range from general employment policies, employee rights and other political hoopla to First Aid and proper job planning.  Mouth-to-mouth CPR is no longer recommended, which means I'll need to rethink my seduction of Wendy Peppercorn. Survival swimming is taught in a giant pool and we familiarize ourselves with life-saving equipment and practices.  A firefighting practical and exam conclude the training, and certify us all as adults in some way. We got pins.  Sounds legit.

When are you coming back?

                No one knows.  I embark (take a chopper to the rig) on the 19^th.  The rest is up to god, which is Portuguese for Petrobras.  They run this joint in a gangster-ey way, and I mean pinstriped suit old school gangsters, not Fifty Cent. It's crazy to see a whole town so clearly under the thumb of a single entity not called Walmart.

Do you miss me?

                Of course.

You’re so handsome.

                That’s not a question

Will you return married?

                No, but hopefully engaged.  The Tinder scene here defies description.

How’s your hotel?

I am in a palacial single-bedroom bachelor pad.  This was given to me as a “no hard feelings” after the Corpulent Hooker Chronicles.  This does not help get the noises or visions of the CHC out of my head but it’s a start. 

My employer’s logistics group asked what time I’d like to be picked up by our in-house transportation people.  This was so they would know exactly when not to come.  The bus has been late every day, and my cab bill is thusly huge. The gym doesn’t work and neither does the laundry service.  This forced me to go to a Brazilian Wal-Mart to buy shirts, marking the third continent on which I've Wal-Marted. 

                A bottle of water here costs $4, and they add a $13 corkage fee to it.  Orange juice is $5.  Wifi is a monthly $60 charge.  How does this robbery go unpunished?  Oil money.  Sheraton got wise to the fact that the army of commuters here don’t care what it costs, and the various employers of said commuters learned that trying to reduce overhead by nickel-and-dime-ing their people simply wasn’t an option.  This results in the Sheraton Macae being one of Sheraton’s highest-revenue operations, and in my losing track of how much a bottle of water should cost.

I live in (anywhere in the USA but Houston or Lafayette) and don't know what oilfield people are like.  Could you educate me?

                With extremely rare exceptions, expats and commuters here are a bizarre, enormous family.  Many traits are common among this group of men from all corners of the world. The pressures of being far from home, especially during the holidays, are universal.  Everyone likes working for the same clients as everyone else.  Everyone hates working for the same clients as everyone else.  Shell and BP are constantly appreciated for their spare-no-expense, take-your-time approach to offshore work.  National Oil Companies are widely derided for their nepotistic hiring practices and unrealistic performance expectations. 

A strange sense of worldliness without formal education prevails here; a sense of having explored without reading the map or the wiki.  I wish more of these people took the time to publish stories from their trips, instead of just recanting them over a standard Brazilian 45 minute coffee break.  The material is there.  The experiential learning and global empathy these people possess decries the rough first impression the tattoos, piercings and gruff ambience create.  Looking through these people comes naturally to many highbrow white collar folks.  They don't know what they're missing.

The safety culture is nearly universal, and as the industry moves toward global standardization cases of exploiting lower level workers become rarer and rarer.  Drilling safety into Drillers’ heads has been a generations-long process, and it results in vertical integration of the team and peripheral crew (myself).  The reduction in hazing and general harassment is something I’ve personally witnessed – I broke out (petroleum for began a new position) as a roughneck/roustabout (entry level grunt) on a land rig in Northwest Houston.  I was 18 at the time and utterly green, both to the industry and to the world at large.  My coworkers were ex-felons with criminal records longer than my resume, and multiple ex wives and children to support.  My boss was called Timberg, and could possibly have invented oil, he’d been in the business so long.  He was an old-school tyrant. I was miserable – menial labor, tasks which had no conclusion, insults, verbal and (one time, then they learned) physical abuse.  My position during rig floor operations was “the wormhole.”  Pipe Dope, a foul lead-based grease which ruins all that it touches, kept finding ways into my ears and clothes.  You get the picture.  This contributed to an unsafe workplace, and towards that company losing my services eventually.

None of this is tolerated in the offshore world these days. Which is a good thing.  The increasingly technical nature of the work requires constant cooperation, and as distance to port increases so does the time for each embarkation.  14/14 lifestyles are becoming more and more rare, giving way to 28/28 and 35/35.  This is too much time to put up with detrimental people. There just isn’t a place for the BS any more.

I hope you feel better.

Thanks, Mom.

Shorty Out.

A Few Brazilian Thoughts

People,

           I can’t talk for long – I’m in Brazil for work. 

           I’ve wanted to say that all my life, and am not ashamed of the obvious brag-plaining. This one-liner snippet is ripped directly from callsign Ricktown’s facebook two months ago.   I missed writing, which is an extension of missing travel.  It’s been a minute, so let’s get into it.

Where am I?

I’m in Macae, the Petropolis of Brazil.  The city is simultaneously a triumph and a tragedy.  Macae is a triumph in that the town has experienced 600% population growth in the last 15 years, and its population currently enjoys double the national per capita GDP.  Those directly employed by Petrobras or its service companies enjoy the benefits of this new work, and many for the first time have proper health insurance, dental care (lots of 25 year olds with braces here), literacy and hope for advancement.  Millions more otherwise poor Brazilians have been lifted out of poverty into only-kinda-poverty, complete with downtrodden vending machine-esque apartment living from which my 23-story hotel is visible at all times.   They share this accommodation with a diverse array of prostitutes, criminals and drug dealers who move from bar to bar to accomplish commerce as if trick-or-treating.  They don’t typically have to make a long journey, as the supply of expats and commuters with ample money, minimal pee-in-a-cup concerns and pliable morals never runs dry.  Aloof, decided corrupt politicians have turned a blind eye to this for generations with no end in sight - one of the few things all Brazilians I’ve spoken to agree upon.  Despite all the money coming into this town, there is no serious hospital or police station.  The local schools are awful and the roads are typically congested, occasionally flooded. Streets 100 feet from the restaurants and hotels are no-go zones, even for locals. This makes it uncertain whether when so many dinos decided to die in the Campos, Victoria and Santos basins, they offered the future population a warm embrace or a collective Falcon Kick to the gonads.

            But let’s take a step back from the day to day of Maca-hell, as my friends here refer to it, and look at the parts of this experience which represent Brazil as a whole.  Doing so hurts the mind and soul much less.  In the same way that Parisians make Paris less desirable than it could be, Brazilians actually increase the value of whatever real estate they’re standing on.  From the two I shared an aisle with on the flight to Rio, to the team of field engineers I’m here to support, I am constantly impressed by the sincere warmth, fun mindset, all-in-this-together mentality they share, as well as the girls’ butts.  I’ve only met one Brazilian I don’t like.  He’s my survival training instructor – a self-proclaimed racist, homophobe, sexist, card-carrying ignoramus, gainfully employed as a local pastor when he isn't fumbling through teaching unimportant things like survival training. 

            To describe the people here requires anecdotes, because adjectives alone don’t cover it and tend to make for boring writing.  In my current home office, it’s no secret that the gang took a long time to warm up to each other, and that out-of-office interactions are not (for most) a daily occurrence.  Incidents of partying or any fun which is not company-approved are kept hush-hush, and corporate smiles prevail consistently over any honest display of emotion, be it positive or otherwise.  The complexity of human interaction is muffled for fear of the potential negative consequences of individuality.  Not so here.  On my first day, any thought of self-concealment to maintain my corporate stature was vacated, as no such efforts were ever extended on the part of my superiors here or my fellow grunts.  Instant honest optimism was coupled with the finest of oilfield profanity.  Tales of weekends past and profession of goals for weeknights soon to come flowed freely. I immediately learned Portuguese words for gender-specific body parts and their potential interactions.  Drinks were consumed, soccer riots were watched in real time, and concerts were attended in the first week of interaction.  I like it.  I like it a lot.

            Language here is a fascinating thing, and it’s my duty as brag-plainer/traveler to dispel a common rumor detrimental to all who believe it.  Speaking Spanish is NOT sufficient for living in a Portuguese-speaking place.  I succumbed to this belief after hearing it so many dozens of times, and planned my (lack of) studying Portuguese accordingly.  I am so screwed.  This theory sounds great and lets you sleep well at night only until you perform the smallest amount of research first hand.  Like the geocentric model of the solar system, the anti-vaccine lobby, or pull-and-pray.  Portuguese borrows syntactically and grammatically from Spanish, being a romance language along with French and Italian.  Several words are cognates.  The convenient similarities end there.  The written version introduces 3 new accent marks and 2 new letters.  The word for I or me is “Eu,” pronounced “you.”  The word for pull is “puxe,” pronounced “push-ay.”  R’s are pronounced like H’s, making my name Hoo-sell.  Or Hoosty.  When spoken aloud, Portuguese does not resemble a familiar Spanish base with some Italian slipped in.  It resembles Sebulba, the antagonistic pod-racer from Episode 1.  Furthermore it resembles Sebulba with a mouth full of live insects, angrily trying to explain something quickly to someone beneath him. 

            What are you doing there?

            This trip, much like my Singapore venture, represents in clear fashion the pros and cons of this industry.  My trip is all expenses paid, and I’m holed up in a 3 star hotel, which is surrounded by vast stretches of unfortunate poverty-stricken brownish people of some kind. Much like the Singapore trip, I was informed of it only 3 days before my flight was to go wheels up.  MLS, I do not yet have a return trip scheduled.  I may leave before Christmas, I may not.  We don’t get holidays in this world, we get projects.  And that’s ok.

            I’m here for the field trial of [SCIENCE WORD, DELETED], which my group designed to replace an existing [SCIENCE WORD, DELETED].  This [SCIENCE WORD, DELETED] [DOES SOMETHING BETTER THAN] its predecessor, by [ECLECTICALLY IMPRESSIVE QUALITATIVE COMPARISON]. Which is pretty sweet. The Brazilian group will be using this tool here in roughly 1 week.  Until then I am responsible for training locals, undergoing “intense” survival training (today our beloved instructor defined an “Unsafe Act” for us on the board.  He informed us it will be on the test.).  I will also be medically vetted and certified (this involved pooping in a cup), and performing a failure investigation for a different [SCIENCE WORD, DELETED] which has the potential to cost us millions.  

           In my spare time I’ve been woken up by my Venezuelan roommate bringing home hookers at 3am. Twice.  The second girl looked to have not missed many meals lately, and my subsequent inquiries of who paid whom for services rendered weren’t received with the same humor they were delivered.  I’ve also played soccer with the department here, which I liken to banging on pots and pans with a wooden spoon while Boston Pops Symphony plays.  This allowed me to continue my streak of injuring myself playing pointless rec sports; a proud family tradition.  Trying to emulate my coworkers I played shoeless.  Turns out Brazilians play soccer, like, a lot more than I do.  The blisters on my feet are repulsive.  Use your imagination. 

Are you going to end with another sweeping, unqualified generalization?

            No, and you’re a jerk for asking that.  My aim in this documentation was merely to set the stage for what is to come.  Sweeping generalizations can only be produced after the journey has sufficient time to ferment.  Still to come on this trip will be an offshore visit to a science project rig, where our client has given us the green light to simply try a ton of new toys simultaneously, mine among them.  I have yet to conclusively prove me theory of the failure mechanism of [SCIENCE WORD, DELETED], and when I do I’ll self-glamorize so hard Kanye will come to me for publicity advice.  The beautiful beaches of Buzios still awake my presence this weekend.  There is so much still to learn on this trip, and my excitement for learning how much I don’t know yet is palpable.  Thanks for the emails, to the few of you who have emailed.  For now, Shorthaake out.