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August 2005 Newsletter 
 
Aberdeen Veterans

I received the following request from Caroline Kinghorn in June:

Please be advised that Aberdeen (not specifically Schlumberger) are celebrating with an exhibition of Thirty Years of North Sea Oil & Gas. This exhibition which will be called EvOILution and will start in August 2005 and run for several months. The exhibition is being sponsored by Shell, BP and Chevron.

They are looking for renowned "veterans" who participated in the early days of North Sea O&G developments, to invite along to special events, and perhaps even do some talks/workshops for adults and children on what it was like in the "good 'oil' days".

Does any of your current members hail from the North Sea around 1975, and do they live locally to Aberdeen, or would they be prepared to travel to Aberdeen for 17/18 August or subsequent dates (yet to be arranged) at their own cost?

If yes, please could you ask them to get in touch with me.

Additionally, if they know of other non-SLB O&G veterans from the same era, same place, I would also be interested in getting contact information for those people.

Thanks
Caroline


Of course the long delay in the production of this newsletter has meant that I am rather late in letting you all know (and I owe Caroline many apologies) but I feel sure that we must number some of the great pioneers of the North Sea here among our members – please get in touch with her (she has all her contact details on Brothers)
Wireline in China – 25 Years

On a similar note I received the following from Khem Mengrai:

Later this year, Schlumberger will have done 25 years in China and as part of the celebration I am trying to seek photos of our activities from those earlier days. There are some photos in our Beijing Office of those earlier days and unfortunately the majority of them catalogued the various maotai banquets only - nothing to do with wellsites, etc.

I have used the BrothersReunited website to seek our people who were in China prior to 1990 - very interesting list of names. My question to you is whether there is any way to mass-email these people in one go? What we would love to have is simply 2 to 3 photos of our Schlumberger Logging activities from the years prior to 1990 -sent in before 1st October 2005?

People can send the original photo(s) to me or a scan of the same - highest resolution preferred; all original photos will be returned to contributors (pls be sure that name and address come with the photo(s).

As before, contact details for Khem are available on the site. I would greatly love to see some of those images myself – perhaps we could upload them to members profiles?

WFDD: An Apology

In my last newsletter in February I made some rather ill advised criticisms of the Schlumberger WFDD wireline depth console (and was thoroughly reprimanded for my sins). I would like to apologise to those of you who found my comments unprofessional, unwarranted or just out of place.

However you may be interested to know that shortly afterwards I was notified that a new engineering project was being launched to redesign the WFDD software and I was invited to forward my suggestions.

Who knows – maybe in some small way the BrothersReunited newsletter may make a lasting difference after all!

Humour: Communism

Communism

You have two cows. The villagers share the cost of upkeep and split the milk between them.

Dictatorship

You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you.

Facism

You have two cows. The state confiscate the cows, makes the villagers do all the work then sells them the milk.

Democracy

You have two cows. Your neighbors decide who gets the milk.

Naziism

You have two cows. The state confiscates the cows, shoots them, then shoots the villagers.

Capitalism

You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

Schlumbergerism

You have two cows. Make them to do the work of four cows until one drops dead of a heart attack. Act shocked and ask the other cow why 2 cows were needed in the first place as it's obvious that one can do the work. Then, transfer the cow to Algeria to do the work of a horse, but tell the client that it IS a horse, not a cow, and is a very experienced horse which has been employed as a horse for many years. Charge a lot of money for the cow and pay the cow nothing. Lose the cow's furniture. Just before the cow is due to retire, lay it off.

Low Cost International Phone Calls
Increasingly everyone is talking about VOIP services (Voice over Internet Protocol) in general and Skype in particular. Still in many countries the internet bandwidth is insufficient for quality telephone conversations, or Skype wont accept your credit card (living in Jakarta I have both issues!).

In such a case our low cost international callback service BroTel may be just what you need. You can be called with a low cost US dial tone on any number you nominate and dial internationally at rates as low as 5c/minute – best of all there are no upfront charges or deposits, and you can specify a monthly limit on your account to prevent abuse by family members.

The BroTel link is still available from our new look Home Tab, but we also have an external site that you can refer to expatriate friends who are not BrothersReunited members at: http://www.brotel.net

Membership Count: Brothers passes 14,000 Members

It has been almost 6 months since the last newsletter. I always tend to think that, rather like a garden, BrothersReunited needs careful tending, weeding and words and encouragement to grow and prosper, but it seems that the site grows quite well whether we nurture or not…Indeed in the year to date we have seen membership grow by over 2,000 and it seems certain that we will pass 15,000 members by the end of the year!

That count of 14,000 does not include the 149 Deceased, 285 Lost or 24 Offline profiles, created and maintained by members. The offline category is new and lets you record the details of older Brothers who do not have the internet access to maintain their own profile, but nevertheless wish to maintain contact with old friends.

New Look

Those of you who have been members for longer than 6 months will immediately have noticed the new HTML format newsletter - as always your feedback is welcome. We have also redesigned the Home Tab online in a similar vein - login now to take a look.

We also added a third party Oil and Gas news feed. To be frank I have not been all that impressed with the quality of their news items so far so we might find a new one, but if you find it valuable please let me know.

Gold Membership Status

I am extremely grateful to all of you who have taken the time to make a donation to help support the costs of hosting and developing the site. Without you BrothersReunited could not have survived in the face of such unexpected success. Still with membership nearing 15,000 I have been evaluating the way that the site is managed and the services we offer you, our membership.

I am itching to develop the software further to explore some of the great ideas I have for enhancing the site (many from you of course) – to make it much more than a handy address book and more of an active online community.

At the same time I would like to more directly reward those of you who have contributed, for your trust and support. Currently (including those who so generously supported our Aceh Tsunami Appeal in January) we have 218 sponsors which means that 1.6% of the membership is supporting the site for the benefit of the other 98.4%.

I am creating the concept of 'Gold Memberships' which will be awarded to all those who have ever supported the site with a donation, who supported our Aceh appeal or who were among the first 1000 members of the site (founding fathers!). Otherwise to become a Gold Member all you need to do is make a donation (no matter how small) or ask a Brother to make one on your behalf (if you live in a PayPal embargoed country).

Gold Members will benefit with special features available just to you, while the free members may have some of the more advanced site functions restricted.

To make your donation (and be front of the queue for Gold Membership) just login and go to the Donation tab!

Life After Schlumberger

Many and varied are the paths trodden by Schlumberger Alumni after leaving the company but few can compare in daring or achievement with the group of Schlumberger Brothers who banded together in 1995 to build submarines! Not only was the company staffed with a motley collection of "Lost Boys" but most of the initial capital was raised from their other Brothers in Schlumberger...I vividly remember sitting in the living room of the Schlumberger staff house in Pondok Labu, discussing their (slightly optimistic) business plan with the now Vice President Charlie Kohnen.

Today SEAMagine is 10 years old. The company designs and manufactures mini 2 person and 3 person submarines with depth ratings of 150 feet to 1500 feet deep for scientific, commercial, and tourism purposes. SEAmagine just delivered its sixth submarine which is a 3 person model rated to 1500 feet (457m) deep. The maiden test dive was performed by two ex-wireline engineers, Ian Sheard and Charlie Kohnen, who came back from the depths with tales of strange sea creatures glowing in pitch darkness and giant red medusas.

We present here a selection of photos from the trip and of their amazing submarine - more on their website at http://www.seamagine.com


Schlumberger Oilman Puts the Wind up African Office
By A Scotland Correspondent

A SCOTTISH oil worker has caused a stink after colleagues lodged an official complaint about his flatulence, labelling it “hazardous”.

The Schlumberger employee, who has not been named, was sent to work in one of the company’s offices in Gabon, West Africa. But the man, from Aberdeen, could not stop breaking wind and soon ran into trouble when it offended his co-workers.

Disgusted employees filled in an official “hazardous situation report” to company chiefs. The report, filed under “biohazard”, suggested that a closed office could not cope with the problem and that the health and performance of other workers were being affected.

The Aberdeen employee defended his actions by claiming that it was normal behaviour where he came from.

Health and safety officials were drafted in and issued a warning to the worker and suggested that the problem stemmed from cultural differences. Their report stated: “If this behaviour is normal where you come from, you should know you are on international ground and should respect other people’s health and culture.”

The worker was then asked to discuss his problem and company chiefs assured him that they would assist in helping him to understand the “intercultural environment where we work”.

Graeme Anthony, Schlumberger North Sea operations manager, said: “We work with many different cultures and in some of them certain things are unacceptable. Some people say that passing wind is offensive, but the guy from Aberdeen obviously thought it was a joke.

“In some countries it’s offensive to take off shoes. We don’t list everything that can and can’t be done in every country. I doubt it would be acceptable behaviour here either but he was probably just being a normal Aberdeen loon.”

The report has since been closed but new employees in Africa will now reportedly be warned that flatulence will not be tolerated in the office.

This news was also reported here. Wellwishers have also provided me with the name of the offender and a copy of the original RIR but on reflection I think that they should remain private.


Our sister site OilfieldHands continues to grow and is about to pass the 3000 member mark. I know that quite a few BrothersReunited members have taken advantage of our easy profile migration tool on the Home Tab to jump across onto the OilfieldHands site and may be wondering about our plans for the sites.

  1. BrothersReunited will remain a primarily social site - any commercial ambitions (such as job opportunities, consulting etc) we will base around the OilfieldHands.com website.
  2. Having resolved a protracted legal dispute with the Halliburton group over our site name (we had to rename from halliburtonreunited.com to bigredreunited.com) we will implement a similar profile migration facility – expect to see a bit more red to balance the blue in the coming months.
  3. Recognising that many of you are consulting (I know I am not alone) we will provide support for CV upload and display.
  4. We are in talks with Brother Guy Wheater to license cutting edge CV parsing technology that would allow intelligent skill searching etc across the whole database.
  5. We plan on folding our existing Wireline consulting businesses (www.wirelinewitness.com and www.wirelinevets.com) into OilfieldHands so that we can offer a wider selection of skills and people. If you are interested in joining us, just reply to this newsletter.

If anyone has any suggestions on other ways that we could make ourselves more useful to you please let us know.

Rgds
Ewan Makepeace
info@brothersreunited.com
http://www.brothersreunited.com
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