After four months on my new project, I finally got the chance to travel beyond my cubicle. All the way to our refinery at ‘beautiful’ Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We’re implementing (among other things) a new dock management system, and I had to go and train some of the users on how to use it. The site is on Scenic Highway, but I think this must be an attempt at suspension of disbelief, because you’d be pretty hard-pushed to find a place less ‘scenic’ than this – it’s just a huge collection of tanks, pipes, and chimneys which takes up all the space between the highway and the banks of the (extremely muddy) Mississippi, a good mile away. Still, it makes a change from staring at my (two) cubicle walls…
Given my general aversion to air travel (not through any fear of flying, but just because it’s such a shitty experience these days), I decided I’d drive the 600-mile round-trip. It took me just over 5 hours to get there on the Sunday night, but that did include stopping for dinner at one of the six Cracker Barrels along the route. The drive itself was mind-numbingly uneventful, but thankfully I had my satellite radio to keep me company (new favorite station is XMU), and my radar detector to keep me out of trouble (unlike the many people I saw being pulled over). Driving also afforded me the opportunity to see a bit more of the U.S. countryside (at least the bits not taken up by the Gulf-coast refineries) and wildlife – I saw a dog, a coyote, a couple of armadillos, and a skunk (all roadkill, though, so maybe that doesn’t count).
One of the downsides of training at the Refinery is that it is a ‘no beard’ site. For safety reasons (and OHSA compliance) you need to be able to fit a respirator on with an airtight seal, just in case the whole place blows up. So after almost 20 years of rocking the goatee, I had to reintroduce my chin to the world (and was at least thankful to discover that I still only had the one…). Finn decided that my new look made me look “really ugly”, and the wife announced that it made me look “a bit gay” (not that that’s necessarily a positive or negative thing, just observing that the droopy mustache is a look that’s sometimes associated with that particular lifestyle choice; hey, whatever floats your goat…), so I’m not sure it will last. I would start growing the goatee back again immediately, but I’m due back on site next month, so by the time I’ve grown it back I’ll only be shaving it off again. So I think this will have to be my summer look.
But after going to all that trouble, I was pretty much scheduled to spend all of my time in a classroom just inside the front gate, anyway. Not quite the glamorous excitement of capping oil wells and mixing dangerous chemicals the (mandatory) safety video promised. That said, we had completed the week’s training by the end of Thursday, so to make all that shaving worthwhile, I arranged for a trip to the dock itself.
To get to the dock you have to go through the most complex arrangement of pipelines I’ve ever seen. It’s like that old ‘pipes’ screensaver you used to get on Windows. But with more pipes. How they ever manage to monitor it all is beyond me. I was even more impressed when I saw the dock ‘computer’ system, which looked like something out of a ’60s Open University video, with a ‘data entry board’ (with handwritten key names) instead of a keyboard, no mouse, and real actual click-switch knobs and dials on it. And despite the multi-million Dollar system we’re giving them, the actual assignment of vessels to berths is still done by moving magnetic shapes around on a big metal ‘map’ of the dock. Real high-tech!
The highlight of the trip, however, was the chance to call in at a Krispy Kreme store. (Houston doesn’t have them; Baton Rouge does.) I know, it’s absurd, but as soon as I saw the store, with the “Hot Doughnuts Now” sign lit up, my face just lit up, too. I could have stood watching that conveyor belt all day, were it not for the fact that the store isn’t exactly in the most ‘upscale’ area of town, and I was worried I’d get back to the car to find it up on blocks and the wheels missing. Still, despite being keen to get back to the relative civilization of Texas, I had to just sit in the parking lot and wolf back half a box of original glazed before I could even think about leaving. I saved a full box for the journey, in case I needed to bribe any state troopers that pulled me over, but I made it back unhindered (except for the lure of Cracker Barrel’s biscuits), so the kids had them. And piggling Gil was so sidetracked by the familiar green and white box that he didn’t even notice my beardlessness until mid-way through his second donut. Good to see that as a family our priorities are all aligned!
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