Day 4

Coming into this assignment, I was under the impression that I would be working 12 hour days, 7 days a week, which really didn’t concern myself that much. But recently I learned that on Sundays we only work 6 hour days! This was a nice realization. While it is almost a full work day back home, only working half a day makes all the difference in the world out here. So today I was able to sleep in all the way until 7 am!! Woo hoo! I went and had some breakfast and then we all went to the admin office and we were able to pick up our TCO badges and get our Chevron SmartBadges activated for use here at the facility. So now we are full fledged TCO employees. We’re able to get into and out of facilities without a special form and we’re able to get our meals now with just a swipe of our badges. It’s quite exciting!

The first half of my day was spent trying to take care of my travel expenses so I could get reimbursed for my flights. I know what you’re thinking; ‘they made you pay for your travel out of pocket?’ Well yes they did, but there’s a good reason for that. I was advised that I should open up a Delta Skymiles American Express Credit card (because most of our flights are with KLM, a partner of Delta). So I got 30,000 miles for opening the card and now I get to add all of the miles from the expenses of my tickets as well that I charge to the card and I merely get reimbursed by the company. So I’ll have plenty of miles to fly all over the place once this assignment is done!

The rest of my short day was spent just looking around the TCO website trying to familiarize myself with where I can find certain things like drawings, piping specifications and weld procedures. Pretty boring stuff so I won’t bother you all with the details.

Instead, I’ll tell you about my softball game that I got to be a part of in the afternoon. One of my other ex-pat engineers from our Mississippi refinery, David, has been out here for over a week now and he has made some excellent contacts, including one gentle from the States that organizes a periodic softball game that comes complete with a BBQ and few cold beers, all for the low-low price of 2,000 Tenge (about $13). So of course I’m excited for this opportunity to play a little ball and have some BBQ. I head out to the ‘field’ to check it out. Now I’ve played on some rough fields in my day, but this was a whole new experience. Yes it does have a turf infield (old school Astro-turf, almost like outdoor carpeting), but the outfield is filled with tons of brush, dirt mounds and ant hills. Game day conditions were a little rough as well. It was a nice, balmy 105 degrees, but at least we had some wind, of course that wind was so strong that no one could hit the ball any deeper than about 20 feet into left field.

Playing in many different softball leagues over the years has given me the appreciation that some people don’t really care about the score and about being competitive and are just going out to have fun. This game gave me a whole new definition of “just having fun”. About half of the guys that were out there were British. So needless to say, most of them really didn’t have a clue how to play the game correctly. But we all had a good time laughing a little at their expense.

The BBQ afterwards consisted of beef sandwiches on rolls. The beef itself had some good flavor to it, but it was a little too well done for my taste and I’m pretty sure the rolls were hard enough that we could have used them as pucks and played ice hockey with them. Of course I’m sure that the food was supplied to use from one of the cateens, so it’s not like we can just go down to the local grocery store and get some prime cut beef and fresh bread. We make do with what we have. All in all, it was a really nice day, and a little taste of home.