Our RV Adventures

Todd, our SiteWatch supervisor, and JM, the SiteWatch maintenance guy, showed up about 5:15 this morning to close down our gate and tow the shack and the generator trailer away.

I still wonder about all the equipment left on the pad. There is no physical gate to close along the way, so I guess they’re hoping the pad’s isolation will protect all their stuff.

But it meant that I was back home at the rig about 5:45am, 30 minutes or so earlier than normal. Nice.

Jan was already up, but I went right to bed, trying to stay on our night sleep schedule. I don’t know what our next gate will be, but I think Jan’s even coming around to liking night shift. Day shift sounds nice until you consider that a 5:30a to 5:30p shift means getting up around 4 in the morning. Even she’s not crazy about that.

I forgot to mention in last night’s blog that about 6:30 last night, Cole, of the father/son duo that own SiteWatch, showed up at the gate. He wanted to drop by to introduce himself, since we’d only talked by phone. He said we should have another gate ASAP.

While he was there he also went in to talk to the Marathon Company Man, I guess hoping to drum up some more business.

I was up about noon, and soon after we were off for lunch and shopping. Our lunch stop was another visit to RJ’s Burgers, a local place with great burgers. Unfortunately it’s only open for weekday lunch. So we get it while we can.

And as is usual with us, we find something we like and stick with it. So Jan got her Cheddar Mushroom Burger, this time adding Grilled Onions, as well as an order of their great homemade onion rings.

I stuck with the Grilled Ribeye Sandwich with a order of their hand-cut fries. Love their grilled buns.

While we were finishing our burgers, I looked up and there was Cole again. He’d been having lunch with a Marathon guy, and came over to say Hello, so now Jan got to meet him as well as me. He again said they hope to get us on another gate very quickly. I gather that SiteWatch was surprised that the gate closed so abruptly.

Like  us, they had been led to believe that the guards would stay until the next crew moves in.

Our next stop, of course, was the local Wal-Mart for some supplies. Jan also wanted to see if they carried the steel-toed sneakers like the Wal-Mart in Huntsville, TX that we saw a couple of years ago. But they didn’t stock them, and neither did the Tractor Supply that we also checked on the way home.

There’s a big place here in Kenedy called Cadillac Jack Boot City that looks like they might be a possibility so we’ll check them out soon. Of course, we’ve still got the Sketchers we can get from Amazon, but Jan would like to try them on first.

So we’ll keeping looking, Of course it all depends whether she actually ends up needing any to start with.

We kept waiting to see if we’d get a text from Todd about another gate, but nothing so far.

But soon.

If two wrongs don’t make a right, try three.

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She got the day off.

And it looks like we’ll both have the day off tomorrow. And we’ve been told that it will probably be a couple of days before we’re reassigned to another gate..

Todd texted me this morning that I was to come in, but Jan had the day off because he had a couple of other guards he wanted to run through her gate for training. Then about 6pm he texted me that this gate was shutting down as of 6am tomorrow morning, i.e. the end of my shift. He said he hopes to have us another gate ASAP.

We already knew they were rigging down from flowback here, but there was some talk that the gate guards would stay until the completion crew came in because of all the equipment still here. But it seems that’s not going to happen.

Well, it was a nice gate while it lasted. On to the next one.

It has only taken me a few days to figure out that the person(s) who wrote this eWatch Gate Guard Logging program have never worked a gate with it. If they had it wouldn’t be written this way.

In some cases, it’s just small things. Like when you have a vehicle come in, you click on the Entry box and the Entry screen comes up. So we tap the Tag# box and the keyboard comes up. But it comes up in Alpha mode and not numeric mode. So it’s another click to get there. And with the 100’s of  vehicles I’ve entered in the last four days, not one of them had a Alpha character in the last four digits of the tag number.

And it’s just a single command string in the Open Keyboard code to make it work correctly.

Yeah, it’s a small thing, but when you’re  entering dozens (or more) vehicles a day, and the driver’s are wishing you’d hurry the hell up, it’s annoying.

And it seems to sometimes lose track of people. For example, earlier this evening I had a truck come in with Antonio driving and Sergio as a passenger. Then about 10 minutes later, the truck leaves, but now Sergio is the driver and he’s left Antonio behind.

And the log shows this correctly.

But then a couple of hours later, Jorge, Jose, and Brian leave in another company truck, the same one they all entered in earlier, and now they take Antonio out with them. So on the Exit page I add Antonio as a passenger and then Exit the whole bunch.

And the log shows that Jorge, the driver, and Jose, Brian, and Antonio, passengers, all left in that vehicle. But when I now look at the Personnel log that shows everyone supposedly still onsite, Antonio is still here. And I can’t find anyway  to manually get rid of him.

Then about 9:30 all 12 of one company’s trucks left in a convoy, one after the other. And there is absolutely no way to handle this on the iPad.

To Exit a vehicle, you first have to wake up the iPad (it goes to sleep automagically after a minute or so of non-use), then slide the graphic on the screen to unlock it, and then click the Exit box.

Next, from the list of everyone on site, you click on that truck, the data of which is then populated into the form. And this point you can now click Submit, the system asks “Are You Sure? You click Yes and they’re gone.

But now you’re back at the opening menu screen. And it starts all over again. Of course by this time 8 of the 12 trucks are already through the gate and off down the road. The only logical way to do this is with a pad and a pencil, and then enter it into the iPad.

But we’re told to do everything on the iPad.

Right!

Thought for the Day:

“Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.” –  Mae West

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