Lessons Learned...a life in Engineering (part 8)

Now then, we’ve taken seven episodes to cover the first ten years of my working life...I’m not sure how long it’s going to take to get the next twenty or so years finished, so please bear with me for a bit longer...

So, Service and a Commissioning is over for me and I’m now employed as a Project Engineer (the formal job title was Projects and Systems Executive...not sure where that was aimed, if I’m honest) and I now find myself in a technical role, engineering systems based around Variable Speed Drive applications. The first problem I have to get over is that I’m surrounded by people who call all power converters by the term “VSD” which has been a pet-hate of mine since day one (but I do find myself using the term more and more these days...and I hate myself for it), along with the rating of said power converters by the kilowatt (whereas we all know it should be by Amps or kVA)...but anyway, I’m so mature now that I don’t get hung-up or annoyed about it anymore...honest !

So, once the Damietta and Guangzhou trips are out of the way and I start to get into the new role, I start work on some converters for a DuPont site in the North East and I’m dealing with an EPC in a place called Sugar Land in Houston, Texas. It had to be the slowest design stage I’d ever known for something so simple due to the approvals process which involved us, the end user, their UK consultant and the UK office of the EPC, however the guy calling all the shots was this “big-gun” cowboy in Texas, and getting to him was like getting to speak with JR Ewing himself (you’ll understand that if you're my age...). Well, we had a manufacturing schedule to meet and no decisions on what we were actually supposed to be building so I decided it was time to jump on a plane and make my first ever visit to the good old US of A.

I traveled out on the Sunday and made a right arse of myself at the car hire place when picking up the hire car in Houston...I had specified an automatic when I booked the car, not realising that all of their cars had automatic transmission...felt a bit silly at that point, but not as silly as I felt when the young lassie behind the counter started talking about filling up with gas. At this point I'm wondering if this is a new-fangled way of powering cars that they have here ? Is it stored in canisters or pressure vessels in the boot...errr, trunk ? How do you fill it up ? Is it like the Calor Gas heaters that you get in caravans ? What's wrong with good old petrol...? So, when I start asking questions she looks at me like I've just landed on the first spaceship from Mars...and I eventually realise "gas" is "gasoline" and she is talking about petrol...

So, this was long before the advent of satellite navigation, even in the USA, so after about three hours of following a really poor map where everything is square, I eventually find the hotel and retire to bed expecting an exceptionally hard week ahead.

09:00 on the Monday morning and I stump-up at the EPC offices in Sugar Land, and sit waiting for this "big gun" Texan cowboy, with his leather chaps, ten-gallon hat, spurs and a couple of handguns holstered at the hip, but I reckoned he probably wasn't there yet as I hadn't see his horse in the car park. What turned up was a short, fat, hairy Mexican who really had his head screwed-on the right way, and by eleven o'clock that morning we had bottomed everything out and had agreed the whole scope...result ! This wasn't to be the last time that my mind completely misjudged the person I was dealing with, and threw up an image that was way off the mark...for some years in my next role I would deal with a Columbian chap based out of Nuremberg, and every time I spoke to him (almost every day...but never having met him...) I pictured the famous Columbian footballer Carlos Valderrama, with a massive mop of curly hair and a big droopy mustache. When I eventually got to meet him I was shocked to find that he was about five feet tall and totally bald...not even a mustache, still...I digress...again !

The long and the short of it is that I've done in two hours what we've been trying months to sort out, and it was so easy when I was sat with the guy who was responsible for it. Lesson number forty-three...a face to face meeting with the right person - the decision maker - is infinitely better than trying to make agreement by e-mail, especially if there are things open to interpretation, and someone is doing it in their second language...don’t let anyone EVER tell you otherwise...it is often a false economy to persevere with the e-mail ping-pong !

Anyway, it's now Monday, 11:30am, I'm back at the hotel, job finished with a flight booked home on Thursday night...it's sunny, and there's an outdoor pool. As you can probably guess, sunburn got me again...same sun as Newcastle is starting to become a really poor excuse...more beer please !

Fast-forward to mid 1999, and we get wind of a potential project win where we may well be supplying the complete electrical scope for the conversion of an existing ship into a pipe laying vessel, which sounds pretty interesting however I’m conscious that we don’t have a whole lot of Marine experience in the department. We are talking about something like 36MW of generating plant, 26MW of propulsion power, MV and LV switchgear and distribution, integrated vessel and power management systems, emergency generator, the lot...all designed to fit into an existing hull and rated to move it around in defined sea current, wind and wave conditions. Typically for the kind of project I get involved in, the end customer decided, once all the electrical kit had been ordered and manufacturing had begun, to change his mind about the conversion and to get a brand new hull designed and manufactured in Ulsan in South Korea. Obviously this new hull was going to be a completely different shape and size to the original conversion meaning the propulsion equipment wasn’t going to be man-enough to meet the original specifications and, of course, the customer did a really good job in making out that this was all our fault...

Anyway, we contract some Marine specialists from our Centre of Competence in Hamburg and embark on a journey that will take about two and a half years and will bag me hundreds of thousands of air miles...

We have drives designed, built and tested in Nuremberg, motors from Nuremberg and Berlin, generators from Augsburg, transformers from Kirchheim, automation / vessel management systems coming from Kongsberg in Norway, HV and LV switchgear coming from Derry in Northern Ireland and we are interfacing with the end customer in Aberdeen (and HQ in France), the shipbuilder in Ulsan in Korea, the topside manufacturer in Rotterdam in Netherlands and a variety of consultants, specialists, surveyors and such from all over the parish. This is a truly worldwide effort and it is really interesting too, from an Engineering point of view.

We make such a big thing these days of the ability to have video conferencing and it was on this project where I first came across it, although we didn't always take it as seriously as perhaps we should have done. I'm sure we've all played the game whereby you have to mention the titles of as many Beatles (or some other band) songs during the video conference and the winner gets the prize. Well back in 1999 we had just been introduced to "Roger's Profanisaurus" which is effectively a swearing dictionary spawned from the pages of Viz Comic which was something I held very dearly to my heart in my youth...I modeled myself on the Brown Bottle for many years...and clearly we had to get as many words or phrases from the good book into the video conference as possible.

I was quite good at this, as I remember, and managed several "crowd-pleasers"  at every attempt.

The trick, though, was keeping a straight face during and after delivery which was never easy. I remember we used to have a five-minute random reading from the Profanisaurus every dinnertime in the office and laughing so much that I couldn't speak. The phone rang once, so I composed myself and picked it up, at which point I just snorted and fell about in hysterics again, completely surrounded by people wetting themselves. I just had to apologise to the person on the other end and put the phone down, hoping that they would ring back...that one was because of the definition of the word "sideburns"...I don't find it that funny these days, but at the time it caused some pain. Lesson number forty-four, then, don't read that book in public, or at work...more Profanisaurus stories to follow, if I remember...

My first trip to Korea starts well but goes downhill rapidly...I get to Heathrow in good time but the Korean Air flight from London to Seoul is delayed by about six hours. I would normally travel in Business Class on a long haul flight with the intention of sleeping all the way but there were only cheap seats left on this flight, and when we eventually board the plane I’m totally surrounded by about thirty big blokes most of whom have bleached blonde hair...I recall Paul Gascoigne having a similar hairdo around this time and it’s not long before I have struck up a conversation and find out that this is a rugby club just setting off on a tour of New Zealand...Seoul just being a stop-off on the way. The alarm bells start ringing about twenty minutes into the flight when the captain switches off the seatbelt signs and the immediate requests for alcohol begin, and given that I’m not a small chap, it is assumed by one and all that I’m part of the touring party as well. 

Eight hours into the flight and half of the squad are passed out after all the fun and games, singing, etc., but I’m being talked into having my hair bleached in the plane toilet by the club captain who’s sitting next to me. My get-out-of-jail card here was the state of the toilets...the lightweight rugby players in the squad have thrown-up all over the place and the toilets are in such a state that nobody wants to go in for any longer than is absolutely necessary. Long before the flight ends, the stewardesses have told us that there is no more alcohol...I don’t know if that was their way of saying “enough is enough” or if we really did drink the plane dry...however, by this point I’m not bothered and just as I shut my eyes, we land with a bump...and one almighty headache...in Seoul.

The hop to Ulsan was uneventful but I'm surprised I can remember anything about it. I eventually get to my hotel and meet up with the customer's people and off we go for something to eat...

This was my first exposure to Kimchi, a dish for which every Korean mother apparently has her own recipe...and, at a guess, appears to be made from a jar-full of cabbages mixed with some spices, the placenta of her latest offspring and three pints of horse piss, all sealed up and left to ferment for God knows how long. You’ll forgive me if I don’t sound over enthusiastic about this stuff but I reckon it would taste better after it has been through the human body...

There was one banquet we had during this Ulsan trip, and I remember this like it was yesterday, where there were ninety-nine dishes (and I use that term “dishes” very loosely...) because only the Emperor is allowed to have one-hundred, apparently. Anyhow, I’m not particularly squeamish when it comes to food and I’m happy to have a go at pretty much anything, but some of these were pushing the boundaries a little, even for me. I consider this kind of ordeal a challenge and I often think that our Asian hosts (whether that be Korean, Chinese, or wherever) also consider it a bit of gruesome fun to bait the westerners and try to make them feel sick by eating foods that will freak them out.

So, some of these dishes...fish eyes, fish heads, whale blubber (a bit chewy that was...) garlic cloves, many different meats, brains, intestines, offal, and loads of stuff which I couldn’t recognise or put a name to...and lots of bowls of what resembled a variety of bodily fluids that should never be spoken about again ! Lesson number forty-five...if you don't know, don't ask what you are eating. If it's nice you will like it, and if it's not you won't...just eat it and smile.

Some of the food in Korea was excellent and some of it was horrendous...but I do remember the Pot Noodles we bought from the shop in the shipyard being the most amazing things ever...spicy as hell, and really tasty, but I can imagine nutritionally not being the best things in the world. 

There are (or at least, there were at the time...) two Hyundai shipyards in Ulsan, HHI (Hyundai Heavy Industries) which was a building yard and was massive...at shift-change, the personnel movements in and out of the shipyard was something to behold...and HMD (Hyundai Mipo Dockyard) which was much smaller and focused on repair and refits, although they did build, but on a much smaller scale than that of HHI. We were in HMD which was a bus ride from the hotel...which was also owned by Hyundai, along with almost everything in Ulsan. We did manage a tour of HHI whilst we were on this first visit and that was something the likes of I have never seen since...the way in which they build these huge ships in sections, and join the sections together like giant three-dimensional jigsaws. I could have just sat there, on the top of the hill in the middle of the shipyard, and watched all day as the ship hull sections slowly moved into position and the welding started to join them together. Lesson number forty-six...don't under-estimate the weights and dimensions on Marine equipment, especially if the equipment is going below decks...once the design of the ship is done, it is done, and any late changes will cost you a fortune as the whole process has to stop...You can appreciate this once you watch one being built, fortunately we were fine with ours...until they came to connect the cables...

The HMD guys had been really good at protecting the equipment during the installation, they had made protective jackets and covers for our medium voltage drives, which were excellent and kept all of the dirt and dust and stuff out from the sensitive electronics and power sections. This all failed miserably when they unzipped the covers, opened all of the cabinet doors and pulled in the cables on the same day as they shot-blasted the machinery spaces...which left a metallic residue all over the insides of the drives...not what you want when you have voltages of 6kV and above inside the panels. I'm sure the humidity didn't help as this stuff adhered to the insides of the cabinets and you couldn't just hoover it up, everything needed to be completely dismantled, stripped down and specially cleaned by a team of specialist cleaners that we had to hire from Germany. We still had a few issues on start-up (and over the lifetime of the drives to be fair) but it was nowhere near as bad as it could have been had we not brought these specialists in. The other alternative was to rebuild the drives back in the factory but that would have taken six months or more and would have had a disastrous effect on the project end date. 

Anyway, we get the equipment installed and commissioned by the programmed dates and the ship sails to Holland to get its process topside installed. Then it's off for sea-trials and first operations in the Gulf of Mexico. By the time this is completed and she sails across the Atlantic I've been poached by our Large Drives division to join the Sales team and come January 2001, I have started back in Manchester in this new role. As happened when I last changed jobs, my past came back to haunt me almost immediately and this time it was to fly over to join the ship in Corpus Christi, Texas to commission the generator under-excitation protection as during the Atlantic crossing somebody had realised that nobody had done it. I hurriedly did a bit of research the day before I left and grabbed a couple of my old college textbooks (maths and machines) and hoped I could work out what I needed to do during the flight...the internet wasn't that much use in those days.

So, I land in Corpus Christi and it's 1st April, 2001. I remember this because the flight attendants played an April Fools trick on the passengers...just after landing the stewardess came on the tannoy and said "our sensors tell us that six people have already released their seatbelts, please fasten them" as we taxied towards the gate. There were a couple of clicks as people re-fastened their seatbelts...then she said "there are still three people who have unfastened seatbelts, please fasten them...". A couple of clicks and then "there is still one more seatbelt that needs to be fastened, please don't embarrass yourself by being the one arrested as you leave the plane" and then went on to spout a variety of Federal directives that would baffle anybody. One final click as the plane pulls-up to the gate where the stewardess announces that it was an April Fool stunt...excellent !

So, next thing I find myself back on board our deepwater pipelaying ship with a brief to commission some kit that I've never seen before (they weren't Siemens protection relays) and to cap it all, the Siemens US guy who was supposed to be helping me by adjusting the generator AVRs had cried-off and sent someone from a contractor company who hadn't been briefed on what we were meant to be doing. It turned out that this guy was brilliant and as a reward I introduced him to Rogers Profanisaurus and turned him into a right-old Pottymouth ! 

I had six generators to check and set-up and the first one, totally chosen at random gave me some results that I was just not expecting. I was plotting a characteristic based upon the voltage and the reactive power that this created and during the flight I had calculated what I expected to see. This was absolutely nothing like what I expected so at this point I started to get a little worried. We spent almost a day on this first one, and I had expected to pretty much get them all done in a day, so I wasn't confident about finishing this at this point. Just before the end of the day, I decided to move on to the second one, just to compare the two... to see if it was my method or the kit that was wrong...and to my amazement it went exactly as expected. It turns out that the one that I picked, at random, had a CT installed with its polarity the wrong way around. So, the next day, we managed to knock the next four off, all fine and dandy, with just the reverse polarity to sort and re-test. The only problem was that the ship was now sailing off into the Gulf of Mexico for further sea trials and I can't get off until we come back into port, about ten days later...that was a bit of a bugger, as I was only supposed to be away for a couple or three days, and I'm not getting any overtime.

To pass the time we had a competition to see how may references from the Profanisaurus we could both get into our reports for that trip...I'm pleased to say that I won that easily, but probably only because I knew the book so well...and this is the only visit report in all of my working years I still have, and refer to it every now and again when I need to show people what happens when you get marooned on a ship in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico with nothing to do.

Lesson number forty-seven...if you don't get what you expect, move on and try another one to check if it's the method or the equipment. This was a bit similar to the issue I had at Stormont Castle in Northern Ireland in episode 6 where two UPS systems had the same fault...that time I proved it was an external influence, the phase rotation being wrong...this time it was an external problem on one system, but I proved my method was good. 

This was the absolute last time that I had my tools out in anger, and with the move from an Engineering role to a Sales role in 2002 my days of getting my hands dirty were finished...or so I thought. I would still find myself crawling around in the muck and the filth in the future, but not on overtime...

Next time, the life and times of a traveling salesman in our world of Power Electronics and Rotating Machinery. Let's speak again soon...