Vacation Training - Vietnam

I was sent to Vietnam. It was quite exciting for me to travel abroad alone at the first time. What I knew was there would be somebody coming to pick me up from airport. I found him, he took me to the office. I met the manager and discussed with him about my objectives as vacation trainee. It was questionable, I had to stay safe all through out the training period. I achieved that. Besides, I had to learn life of Schlumberger engineer, basic tools. I spent 6 weeks in Vietnam, 8 days offshore and luckily came back in one piece, on my birthday. Company provided my hotel accommodation, food and transportation plus pocket money which I spent on some 30 pirate CDs in Ho Chi Minh.

Signed The Contract - Singapore

I submitted application formed and was offered for the job. I went to Singapore to sign the contract. Life started to change. Lots of farewell parties from my friends and relatives. Life in Vietnam taught me to prepare myself well enough for the wild world. I flew off Bangkok with my luggage weight of 55Kg, almost 3 times as the airline allowance and was fined. Nevermind, Schlumberger paid for it. Luckily I got the hotel name that was booked for me because nobody picked me up from Shangi Airport. I headed to the hotel and gave my name to the reception. I got the white envelope contained the instructions to follow, like playing an adventure game. After sometime I found more and more strange people arrived to the hotel with same manner, looked confused, no destination and got the white envelope. I signed contract on the next day. After that I spent a week in safety training course. It was a lot of fun as I attended fire fighting, offshore survival, helicopter underwater evacuation, swimming, H2S and so forth for the occupational risks.

Pre-School Training - The Philippines

I was appointed to go to Manila for pre-school training. This is the period to learn and see the job before going to training center. I saw only one job which was the geothermal well. We ran the tool to identify the fracture that producing hot steam. That was the only job I saw before I went to training center.

Training Center - Indonesia

This was the most enjoyable time in my life with Schlumberger. The training center was located in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia. Medan is the second largest city in Indonesia. I was trained there for 12 weeks. Life was unbelievably fantastic. Like studying in university, going to training center everyday but stay there til late at night because there were sooo many things to learn. Some day we managed to finish the things early, then it was the party time! I miss that moment I was in Medan. 12 weeks went away so fast. I went back to Thailand for 10 days off with the luggage weight of 72 kg from books, plus I put on myself 5 kilos. See how good life was?

Transfered to Qatar

What a surprise! I was transfered out of South East Asia unit to the Middle East Asia unit which I never ever imagined before. Now, I'm based in Qatar, the world's 3rd largest gas producer from the largest gas field in the world. Qatar is a Muslim country. It's a good place to work actually. I came here as the post-school engineer which means still had to learn more and more until I broke out to be on my own. I spent 6 months to breakout with lots of exhaustive breakout tests. One thing I learn from jobs is 'Any thing can go wrong, WILL go wrong'. Schlumberger engineer has to be 100% confident in what he/she is doing before sending the tool into the hole.

Life in Qatar

I am assigned to Ras Laffan LNG project which has Mobil as the big shareholder. It's the project to produce gas from North Field gas reservior. The services they require are very challanging, comprising various kind of services. I spend about 2 weeks offshore in a month, the rest of the month I spend in city life, Doha. I was spoiled by Ford Taurus which I drive in town. Actually nice car should come with pretty girl but unfortunately this is Qatar which is very hard to find one, especially when I work with Schlumberger. Anyway, amongst the engineers, we set up BBQ party quite often.