Spy in the cab

The driving in Saudi is notoriously bad, they drive very fast, with no regard to others and usually while smoking or on the phone. After 3 years of driving in Libya, it was no problem for me to adapt and I find it harder to drive in the UK now.
However my current employer is very strict on safety and everyone must pass a defensive driving course before being given a company licence and being allowed to drive here. There's a driving test in a vehicle fitted with cameras to assess your use of mirrors and accelerometers to judge the weight of your right foot. There's a day in the classroom and some written tests to reinforce safety and better driving techniques. Despite my initial scepticism, I do believe it is a better way of driving rather than the slightly aggressive tactics I'd picked up in Libya. I'm now quite happy for the local idiots to squeeze between my car and the concrete barrier at 180kph+ with barely inches to spare on each side. I drive a nice big 4x4 and whilst they may cause some damage to the paint if they ricochet off the wall into me, I have as much faith in the car's air bags as they do in their chosen deity to believe that I will be the one walking away.  
All company vehicles are fitted with a GPS & personal I.D. key thing so that our driving is monitored -  every month they publish the top 10 best/worst drivers. Serious violations and multiple minor infringements will mean you lose your licence and therefore your job. If I speed, my boss gets an e mail before I get to the office to receive my warning.

I'm not sure of everything it measures but believe it includes:

1. Speeding (110 kph+)
2. No seat belt
3. Harsh braking
4. Aggressive accelerating 
5. Listening to Shania Twain  
6. Passengers adjusting the a/c when driver has told them not to touch it unless they want to walk
7. Dark thoughts

As good a system as it is, it cannot measure:

1. Driving at the right speed for the conditions
2. Using your mirrors & indicators
3. How close the local is behind you, flashing his lights because he's in a hurry to get somewhere to do bugger all

(S)training

The latest focus at work is the drive to ensure that 100% of our workers have completed the mandatory on line safety training courses in topics such as “working at heights” and “hearing protection”.

Each course takes about an hour and there’s a quiz at the end of each, requiring a score of 80% or more to pass. As all of the courses are in English, we know that many of the local guys are just clicking through the slides quickly and attempting the quiz so many times that eventually they will pass, although they won’t know why they passed.

I have to do the training as well, so attempted one of the subjects the other night, not really paying attention and hoping I’d be able to work out the answers.

By question 12, I’d got enough wrong to know that I’d fail overall, so there was no point in continuing.

But in my defence, the questions were designed to trip you up and were all along the lines of:

Which of the following is not a false statement ?

(a)    Mechanical guards are not a primary safety barrier

(b)   Isolation of equipment is not the first step in the lock out procedure

(c)    A written permit is always required prior to securing a machine

(d)   None of the above

So now it’s a logic game: a not false statement = a true statement, so  (d) none of the above,  means none of the above are not ‘not false’ and so all are false .

I think.

I still have 10 of these courses to do in the luxury of “my own time”. 

This is the short period of time in the day when I’m not at work, not working at home, not driving to/from work or sleeping. My days remind me of the minister in the program “The Thick Of It”, who looks forwards to his daily ablutions as it’s the only bit of "quality time" he gets to himself.

Luckily the wireless connection works in every room.

Cloning

My cloning experiment has been sabotaged. I came home from work last night to find all of my efforts destroyed - all biological material had been removed from my house.
When I first walked in, I thought I'd been burgled. There was the instant feeling that things weren't as I'd left them in the morning. Then I noticed stuff on the table had moved and some of the furniture wasn't in the exact same place. Some of the curtains were half open and the fans were still on in the bathroom. 
The most obvious sign of an intruder was in the kitchen, where there was a large mess of plates and pans that had been cleared up. Washed and dried. 
In the bedroom, someone had gone to great effort to rip the sheets and pillow cases and throw them all into the washing  machine.
The bathrooms and shower room were pretty dirty, no effort had been made to clean them.
Until yesterday, when my the cleaning wallah paid a visit and transformed my bachelor pad back into a family home, smelling of pine, zest and other stuff I had in unopened bottles under the sink.
So after months of painstakingly gathering enough genetic material over all surfaces in my house, an over zealous houseboy has ensured that my clone will never rise from the dust.
And he came again today, I think I've now got a regular cleaner.  I'm putting my laundry out tomorrow to see if the washing & ironing wallah come along too.

Safety First

Every month, managers are expected to make a visit to a rig where we have operations and conduct an audit . The aims are to make sure that our field staff are following correct procedures, that the rigs are safe and that a manager still knows what a rig looks like, whilst getting their pristine coveralls dirty. Although it means a long day of travelling and a backlog of e mails to return to, the rig visit allows the manager to achieve their required number of hazard observation cards (HOC).

The Road Side Cafe: Good Nescafe, huge open toilet area

Everyone in the company is required to submit a minimum of 2 HOC  a month, where you report an unsafe condition or act and record any action taken or suggested. For the field guys, this should be easy, but for the office based manager it can be difficult to observe anything that could be classed as unsafe, except maybe a particularly irate Egyptian.

As well as being a chance to increase a personal HOC count, a safety audit is good fun. You wander around a rig and look for ways in which people could get hurt or where rules have been broken, it’s a chance to be a safety detective. Another bonus is that the Company Man, the big boss on the rig, the man who used to make your life hell when you were a field hand, has to be really nice to you, give you coffee and thank you for pointing out all the defects in his operations. And he has to smile while he does it.

I’ve done two rig visits so far and on each one have found 20 things to raise a HOC card for, so even if I submit no more until November, I’m still on target. But I’ll keep going, as one of my engineers submitted 154 last year and we gave him $500, so now it’s a competition.

Play along and spot the hazards from a recent rig visit, (answers at the end, no cheating):

1. An electric lamp on the cement tanks

2. The chemical loading area

3. Electrical cables

4. Wilden Pump

5. One of the water pits

6. A Compressor 

While taking the photos, the Rig Safety Officer came and asked me if I'd got a permit to use the camera, a fair cop, I hadn't. I asked him why he wasn't wearing any safety glasses...

Answers:

1. Insulation & armour of cable broken
2. No safety barrier across lifting area
3. Cables insulated with plastic bags 
4. No whipcheck cables
5. Child's toy substituting for a life belt
6. A 'guard' you can put your fingers through isn't a safety guard

All quiet on the Eastern front

I've spent the last 3 days cycling around Bahrain and to be honest, it's a dump. No matter how far you go,  it is non stop highways, wasteland and industrial buildings. Alot of the time was spent going up/down curbs, cutting across dirt & sand, trying to find a route to avoid the 8 lanes of death. The cyclocross bike was perfect for navigating the streets and making tracks where none existed.
Each day I saw plumes of black smoke on the horizon and assumed they were the results of some of the car crashes I passed. Then whilst bimbling around Sitrah today, having a pretty crappy ride and fighting against a head wind, I came across burning tyres in the road. Freshly lit, security personnel only just on the scene, I rode past a short way before taking the photo. If there's one thing trigger happy riot police hate more than having to put out burning tyres, it's camera happy cycling tourists.
About 10 minutes later when I got to the top of a nearby bridge, I could see several plumes of smoke from different parts of town, presumably coordinated to keep the security bods busy.
Syria might be making the headlines, but Bahrain is still on the back burner.....

Interview Bingo

Interviewed another batch of 10 locals last week. Played bingo with the other interviewer to keep us awake.

We each had 6 items to spot:

1. Baseball hat at jaunty angle
2. Sparkly writing on t-shirt
3. flared jeans
4. English so bad he can't understand being asked to leave
5. too much after shave
6. slicked back hair

and 

1. Hat (non baseball)
2. Sparkly writing on jeans
3. chain wallet
4. argues about money
5. B.O
6. sunglasses on head

I lost by one point.

Countdown

78 days until the next proper holiday.
Having a goal helps.