Smudger Snippets
Created | Updated Oct 8, 2008
I suppose it's because I have so much time on my hands these days, that all these memories come flooding back to me.
An Old Mate
I was going through my Emails the other night when I noticed one from friendsunited.co.uk. It was from one of my work mates from one of the sites I worked at back in the early seventies - a site I returned to quite a few times during my working career, as a staff member, and also as a subcontractor in several job positions. Of course I opened that email up first as soon as I saw his name! I had seen his name a few times while visiting that site, but I never thought he would get in touch again. Anyway, he mentioned another bloke's name in his email, saying that this bloke had written a book about his time working on that site, and that he had read the book and found it to be a good one. I was gobsmacked to say the least, because of all the folk I had worked with over the years, he would have been the last one that I thought would ever have been capable of writing a book. Of course this was jealousy kicking in on my behalf, as I have often been told that I should write a book about all my exploits during my 14 years in the oil construction industry. Over those years I had worked both on shore and off shore here in the UK, as well as overseas in Russia, Turkey and Egypt. Whereas this bloke, who had written this book, had only worked on one site during his whole career! Granted, he worked his way up through the ranks, as it were, but he had no experience of doing such work on any other site or in any other country.
Surprise was the other reaction I felt as soon as I read about it - as I mentioned earlier, he was the last bloke I thought would ever be capable of doing that.
My mate's email went on to tell me more about what had happened in his life since we knew each other from those days. About his brother taking on the farm after his parents had died, and how he was quite happy being away from it, and enjoying his job driving liquid gas around the country in his own lorry. He also mentioned a few other details in his Email about other matters, but I just could not take my mind off that book and the bloke who wrote it. I replied to his email, and went onto the friendsreunited.co.uk site (FRU), to check out the Post Message he had left in there for me, and replied to that as well. It's weird how things work out, as of all the people I saw on that FRU he was one of the last folk who I thought would ever get in touch, as we were not always the best of mates, if you know what I mean.
We first met when we were both welders working in the Pipe Shop, which was the place where all the top welders ( as we called ourselves) worked. The reason for that rather self important title we gave ourselves was because all the work we did was pipe work, which was tested one hundred percent by X-ray, along with other types of non destructive testing, as well as pressure testing. So we were a small group working close together, which of course comes along with the usual back stabbing that happens in such tight situations when a group of people are in that sort of work set-up. We made up what we called spools which were in fact sections of pipe work made up in sections, which would be welded together in situ on the actual module at a later stage of construction. In fact, that was one of the points I mentioned earlier about the back stabbing and so on: these welds were a lot more difficult to do, so they tended to put the top few out on the modules to complete them. This was for no other reason than the fact that they did not want a high repair rate: the cost of carrying out repairs in situ was extremely expensive, not only in money and production time lost, but in the high standard that the quality control department had told the client existed in that area of production. The welders' confidence would take a beating as well: once word had got out that a certain welder had to have a repair done on one of his welds, he could expect a lot of stick from his work mates. So looking at it from that side of things, if a welder was constantly out there in the modules, his work was good, but if he got sent back to the pipe shop again, that meant that his repair percentage was high and he was being sent back to lie low, as we called it. The reason being that once your repair rate went up, you could be sent back to re-qualify in that particular welding process, as being pipe shop welders we all had multi codings, which meant we could use more than one welding process. The rivalry was between the welders who were out on the modules welding the pipes in position, which was a lot more difficult since they had to be welded in whatever position they landed in, and the welders who were kept in the pipe shop, where they could turn the pipe work to make it easier to weld. The welds that were done in position were called Field Welds, and the piping engineer draftsman who designed the pipe work systems had no idea as to how easy the access would be when it came to welding these joints. So you could find yourself in some really tight areas when it came to these Field Welds, and on some occasions we had to make two field welds as access was simply impossible.
Anyway, I am drifting away from the point here. Here's the reason that I did not always get along with this bloke who sent me the Email. After I was promoted to welding inspector, this meant being put onto the staff, rather than being an hourly paid worker. Then a few months later, he himself was promoted to supervisor, which meant he had to submit inspection forms to me. I was made redundant a year later and left that site to work else where. Yet I found my way back there a further five times during my working career. Three of these were as a welding instructor, teaching trainee welders the art of welding, and qualifying them to ASME9 standard, prior to them being transferred down to the site as coded welders. The other two times I was employed as a subcontracted welding supervisor and inspector. It was during one of these times when I was desperately trying to get an opportunity to sit the exam for Certificate Scheme for Weldment Inspection Personnel (CSWIP) down at the welding institute in Cambridge, and I had been phoning regularly to see if there was a cancellation, as I had been promised a job with another company as soon as I had passed that exam. I had managed to attend the interview in London by flying down and back the same day, which I taken off as a day due to me from my holiday entitlement. The company said at the interview that I had the required experience, but their client insisted that all inspectors be qualified to CSWIP standard. The CSWIP people at Cambridge did not encourage folk just to turn up to sit the exams, as they preferred you did their two week course, which cost around two thousand pounds at the time, so you can imagine just how difficult it was to get the opportunity to sit these exams. To cut a long story short, as I have done this story in an earlier Snippet, I was not granted the time off to take this exam, but when a vacancy came up at short notice I went anyway, and passed it. This had meant me taking two days off work, and I was told by the company I worked for at that time that the client had requested the termination of my employment upon my return, for taking the time off. And this bloke, who wrote the book I mentioned earlier, was given the job of sacking me, as by now he had reached the position of welding manager. Yet on the night he came to tell me I was being sacked, I saw him coming through the cabin window so I hurried to pack up all my gear. Then I met him at the cabin door and told him I was quitting, saying that I had never been sacked before and he wasn't the person about to change that fact. He was at the time my boss, but on paper only, as we ran our own squads of men ourselves, and had no day-to-day dealings with the client's management, as we reported to our own managers. He was not amused and told me that he required one week's notice, but I informed him that I had been employed at one hour's notice when I started, so I was doing the same when leaving. This was in fact true, as I was at home at the time, and received a call from a person I knew in the personnel department. He told me that another work mate had told him that I was at home between jobs at that time and not working. When they contacted me that afternoon, they wanted me to start as a welding inspector on the night shift, that very day, about two hours before the shift began. That was a challenge to say the least, but the way things were at that time, it was not all that unusual, as I had previously done a similar thing for a job offshore on one of the rigs, as a welding supervisor for a two month contract during a shut down.
I started writing this, when I heard about that bloke writing his book, and it got me wondering if there was a way of connecting all my Snippets together and making them into a book. If it was possible I would need a lot of assistance from someone who had experience is such things. Although my initial response to the news of that book was jealousy, I must admit in all honesty that I admire his efforts and wish him all the best with it. He was obviously a lot more academic than I thought he was, and achieved something that I myself never could, but the fact still remains, he never got the satisfaction of sacking me!
PS. Thanks to all of you who gave me the support and confidence to carry on with these Snippets - this is the first one since I changed my mind.
Cheers, Smudger.
