The flat is pretty ritzy. Views aren’t great but I don’t care. If I’m sitting on my terrace its because I’m reading the papers, so whatevers behind the papers isn’t important. I’ve inherited five planters filled with dead soil, I should stick some ferns or something in them but I’m not there yet. I had lots of fun trying to figure out why half my plugs didn’t work and half my wall switches did nothing (because the wall switches turn on the plugs across the room) but I got there in the end and bought floor standing lamps to be the ‘room lights’ for the study/guestroom. The rest of the people in the block are mostly little old ladies or women of a certain age so the under floor heating (centrally controlled) is set to furnace. I tend to come home and throw open the windows to purge the heat to a merely ‘stifling’ level.

Work has started to indoctrinate colleagues to cookies.

Guest capacity has been arranged; primary is study with fold out bed, lights and other reasonable comforts like curtains. Secondary is the living room. Where the couch folds out to a bed but there are as yet no curtains and the building across the road is a school. I’m getting fed up of people looking at me if I want to have my lunch on my terrace on a weekend; its a weekend; I’m fully dressed, its my balcony, y’all can fuck off. However, if you want to come visit and feel a compulsion to sleep in the nip; please let me know so steps can be taken.

The work is good, I was trying to think earlier about what I could be doing that would be better and honestly apart from doing exactly the same with a more awesome and sexy team, I can’t think of something; its very cool and interesting and the team is great but that they’re all up to their necks in kids so not much happening after hours.

It is the one thing I’m missing about PHC, the camaraderie and the age bracket of the peer group – there they were peers, here they’re a few years older and firmly on the ‘plus kids’ path. I guess its only to be expected, anyone who doesn’t have dependants has been packed off to somewhere grim. Life in the Village down south – everyone living with two minutes of each other – was also cool; genuine old school community. I can see how it’ll be like that here though once I get a grip on the language. Already I can recognise half the people on the bus in the morning, the staff at my local know my name, I run into people I know on the streets even though I know all of a half dozen people here. The French are somewhat like cats in this respect, they’re not very good with strangers but you just have to let them get used to you being there in the background and then they’re fine. Cats are an excellent reference for many things in fact. Hmm, there may be a lucrative self help book in there somewhere…

To conclude; have extricate myself from down south, Savage won the deadpool and am now ensconced in the land of fine wines and cheeses. Skiiing and Scuba are on the to do list after learning the lingo. Life is not to bad at all here.

Sure, if you’re not with La famiglia you’re unlikely to just be passing though – but Biarritz is just an hour up the road, Ryanair flies there too.

Effectively all her time since college has evaporated – she has no work experience despite being 6-10 years in (not sure exactly). Rumour has it she’s working these days in a field that requires no higher education and given that my appealing physical attributes are nil, this for me would be bad.

Thus, the ongoing embargo of truly interesting stuff goes on. Apologies to all. Invite me over some time and I’ll tell you a story but I’m not putting anything online.

“I know someones happy with what I’ve been doing – but not who – and thus not what it is that is pleasing nor what I should be doing more of.”

For anyone who’s heard me mention it only obliquely (or the very perceptive who have heard me not mention it but think about it while chatting idly about other things), I applied for a job as an analyst for CNA, a defence think tank. It would have put me in DC for two years, and probably Naples after that for as long as I could stand being away from Dublin.

And they send their analysts into the field to gather data. On aircraft carriers. I was faced with a dilemma: do I jump in with both feet, trying really hard to get this job, and risk sticking the Wanderer in DC, away from friends and family (and me, for 6-12 months at a stretch) for an extra two years? Or do I let it go by, since it’s not really what I’m looking for?

You might guess the opportunity to hang out on an aircraft carrier and sail the world wooed me sufficiently.

Alas, they are no longer interested in me, though they were kind enough to send me an e-mail telling me so. On the bright side, I can have all those braincycles back, I don’t have to go shopping for a suit, and I’ve had the chance to dust off my CV and go through an interview with no dire consequences of failure. Although I stood to gain quite a lot, I’ve lost nothing and gotten a bit of experience.

May I accept all my future failures with this much perspective.

This study – “Facing Hard Truths About Energy” is from the National Petroleum Council, chaired by none other than Lee Raymond, ex-CEO of ExxonMobil, a man who’s very name uttered aloud can drive Green campaigners into spitting frenzy. The significance of this report is that it’s been supported by ExxonMobil, Chevron, Marathon – well to quote the IHT: “The list of contributors to the petroleum council’s report is a roster of top industry leaders and consultants, including senior executives from Exxon and Chevron.”

This is the world from so far inside the tent it’s coming from backstage. These *are* the Princes of the Energy industry and they’re calling for increased fuel efficiency standards, development of alternative energy sources, carbon sequestration (acknowledging that carbon in the atmosphere is an issue!!! 0.o).

To say my jaw dropped is putting it mildly, I pretty much went straight to the site, pulled down the report and I plan to read it on the train over the weekend. Essentially, the oil majors have upped sticks and wombled in past the Bush administration, Detroit and King Coal to repitch their tents in the center, if not even a little past it on the green side.

Water flows uphill, seven headed serpents expected any day now…

To me, consultants are hired labour. They ought to work themselves bloody because we may as well be paying them in dancing gold bars. And most of them do at least pretend to take it seriously. They turn up, do the job we’ve set for them and off they go with a dragons hoard. Grand.

I mean sure, bonjour la paresse and all, and if you’re a genuine salaried member of the mega-corp you have to be carried out in a box, but if you’re just a fucking *contractor* then *don’t* pound on my godamn desk, act like you’re my goddamn *friend* and swan in at half nine before taking a two hour lunch. I don’t care if you feel you’re entitled because you used to be one of the good old boys, went to all the right schools, have the right passport and all that shit. You *were*, then you fucked off and now you can just eat shit and die, you leave la famiglia, you’re out.

Out. I’ve seen slack cut once, and I can cue a mass indrawn hiss of breath from any ranks of management by mentioning the subject (which I do at every opportunity just for the effect) but that one guy was cool, had people skills and when he came back, he came back, back on the payroll, back in the share schemes. I have *little* patience with the constant clutching of the hordes of subcontractors with their networking and relationship building. Get the hell away from me, I want something off you, I’ll pick up the phone. Otherwise, I want a sterling impression of Victorian children – in fact I don’t even want to see you. I have your card, kthnxbai.

I don’t think its too twitchy to get riled by the sheer unadulterated cheek of the phonecalls to arrange your own goddamn business off the desk we’re paying you to work off. I’m not stupid, I can tell the difference between the click-click-click of the work that supposed to be done and the high tempo typing of emailing new contracts, your mom, your fuck-buddy in Shell, I don’t give a shit who. I know no reports have been set, I know I’ve seen nothing of worth to match the time spent parked at that desk.

Tips to anyone whos going to go work for a big company – don’t piss off the natives. After a certain threshold, then they really do find it worth their while to make sure you can’t get work cleaning piggeries. Its got a certain satisfaction to it.

I have got to get off that desk, get the hell out of that office before I do something I’m going to regret.

Listening to: Happy Nation – Ace Of Base

On the other hand it struck me that the corp’s a lot tighter than it would seem for such a monster organisation… or maybe its just that the powers need pawns to game with. Its also as sign of the varying cultures within the corp – theres a big clique of the Old Locals, then theres the more cosmopolitan permanent staff, then there are the expats and the Management and then there are all the other subtraits – like which of the merged companies people used to work for, where they’ve served before.

The cross-department networks shift all the time as people rotate in and out and the lines of communication change – previously I was the front man for one of the assets with operations, I just handled it all, got orders from the Snr. Res Eng and took care of it all, then he shifted out and his replacement had previously served with one of the ops guys overseas so they shortcircuited that way… but also bypassed entirely the guy who replaced me so he never got a chance to build up the links I once had.

Lessons learned – there is no substitute for going and talking to people. Expect emails to be ignored unless someone can put a face to your name. You have to build a relationship with people (often you find all sorts of treasures when you do as a bonus – lost archives, unwritten reasons for things) and then you can flex them remotely afterwards, but you have to put in spadework up front. Both of my replacements (one more than the other) were ‘send an email’ people which doesn’t work. Its just noise if they don’t know you enough to attach a weight to the opinion/instruction expressed in the mail.

So I have kind of been buffalloed into a project which is.. hard to describe but is a kind of inhouse training diversification program – a sort of practical project management thing? The idea being that we get the chance to screw up managing a project on something where the damage is precontained rather than find out you’ve run out of budget while the pipelaying barge is still some three miles short of the platform – not something that happened to us.

This project-running project (ho ho) has led to me talking to all sorts of high-CR denizens of the corp that ordinarily I wouldn’t ever meet. The downside of it is that we’ve been maneuvered into this by one boss and now the Eye is upon us, and apparently the capo de capo’s doesn’t have much faith in the project as a whole… which is worrying. On the plus theres a large element of expendability to the whole thing – its designed so if we f^&* it up completely, the blowback will be minimal (I should be able to dodge most of any blowback by pulling the big red ‘Expatriation’ handle – worst comes to worst I volunteer for Nigeria and hide until the storms pass). Also on the plus is its really interesting.

On the minus, its more work, its a big deadline, and it forfeits all cover and AC bonuses for being tiny. One of the early draftees bailed out due to the risks and took comfort that she could probably fade into the crowd and never be associated with the potential flaming ruin of the project.

S’defnitely a thing about the corp – the toothed gears will catch you and haul you along, if you’re willing to actually follow the path then the future spreads out ahead of you for years and years. I could make a fair-odds guess at how the next ten years will play out, if I stick to the path, which involves the Big Red Expat Handle. Amusingly though, the surest possible way to crowbar *all* of that would be for the senior executive board member to work their voodoo and fix me up with someone – significant others tend to find compounds in conflict-zones even less delightful than the employees who at least have work to occupy them.

My future is a monovariable extrapolation. Insert a second variable and all bets are off.

Listening to: Song For Athens – Tavener

I told him fuck off, I’m actually doing an exam monday, but I couldn’t get out of tuesday. And the rest of the week, the weekend and a chunk of the week after, possibly out to that weekend too. So of course thats Paris the first weekend shot and quite possibly London the following weekend fucked into a cocked hat too. Arg. I was using that time to burn some of my ludicrous leave too.

Its the insane double-dip effect of offshore time; if I’m offshore I’m not in the office, not clearing my inbox and racking up leave. As soon as I’m back onshore I need to be hacking through the towering pile that squats in my inbox. Waiting for me. And while I’m doing that, trying to claw some semblance of order back, I’m not able to use leave. I’ve been in the office three days in November. Its going to be something in that order again for December, with just the last week being burned on hols.

See, the problem is that just any old time is no good for me; I need to sort people to go to, its not like I’ve got… its… I mean I’ve done the travelling alone bit. It got old. Almost everyone works office hourse too, which means non-weekends are little use to me.

Whine, whine, fucking moan. Christmas soon, but still, I was looking forward to Paris.

Bah.