Arrival, typical day, ID's and rig's

My first day in Abu Dhabi actually went amazingly smoothly. I landed and there was a nice bloke waiting in the airport for me with a car and the key's to my new (and amazingly pimped) flat. After this though things switched to what I now consider normal life, i.e. I seemed to have been completely forgotten about! I eventually spoke to someone from my base after having to call the regional personnel manager, on a Friday, which is the holey day here and the day off for everybody. 

Once I had spoken to my contact at the base I got to explore Abu Dhabi and was then off to the base the next day. The first week of work basically involved introducing myself to everybody and going on a whole load of training courses for fire fighting, H2S and the famous Underwater escape from a helicopter. After this point though everything slowed down, in Abu Dhabi you need approximately 1,000,000 ID cards, this meant I had to hand over my passport which disseapperared for 3 weeks before I chased up my friend from the base to discover he hadn't even bothered to send the stuff off for processing, in the same incident I found he had also neglected to apply for my PPE and a couple of other things. Standard. 

Once I eventually got all the appropriate ID's for working out here (apparently for the first month here I could have ended up in Jail!!!) I went to a rig. I basically got there with another guy after some delays to discover that the company man had not been told I was joining them so I was booted off it pretty sharp.

Rig 2 - I arrived here and the company man was way more chilled out and invited me for tea in his sweet cabin and we talked manly stuff about cars and motorbikes for a bit, the rig's here a pretty old and I think kinda lax on the H&S aspect, this was confirmed when some siren went off, I sat for a bit wondering what the siren could be for before deciding it probably was bad - so obviously went to see! This reason was not hard to miss, one of the 4 inch in diameter power cables had burnt out it's plug and caught fire right below the mud return line. The flames were pretty big and there was smoke everywhere! I decided to make a hasty retreat. The rest of the job went smoothly and I was back to the base in just over a week.