I Hate Oil Movements Duty!

It's now been 25 hours since I last took a bath.

The nature of my work requires me to render supervisory and coordination roles of the Oil Movements area of the refinery where I work in every 7 weeks, for a duration of one week. The tasks involve preparing all the daily instructions for the refinery to ensure supply and availability of fuel products across the nation, addressing any emerging items for critical maintenance and managing abnormal refinery situations related to production. The Oil Movements area is composed of more than 70 tanks (about 3 BILLION liters of hydrocarbon) and all the pumps and piping systems needed to transfer, blend and deliver them. And some paperwork.

That is a short description of an Oil Movements Duty officer. The OM Duty Officer is expected to be able to address any emerging issues ANY time of the day, no matter how ungodly the hour is.

Unfortunately for me, on my first day of OM Duty for 2007, there are a lot of emerging items. So many items need to be addressed last night and today that I was late for the 7 am meeting today, skipped lunch and any trace of freshness from my anatomy is nil. I was planning on going swimming or visit the gym early this afternoon but I had to forego that too.

Still, I did try to cook a decent meal for dinner today and relax a bit while doing it (heck no!...cooking under limited time is actually stressful, I found out. and it's not easy doing it if you have duty calls every 5 minutes or so). Thank goodness for technology that I was able to chop tomatoes and onions while having my mobile phone on 'speakerphone' mode to talk to whoever needs to be talked too in the production/supply chain. Thank goodness too that my sense of smell was sharp enough to notice that my beef stew was beginning to get burnt while I was on the radio talking to the operations supervisor and I was still able to salvage the stew. And thank goodness that Jake and Anne found my cooking tolerable despite my crazy cooking conditions, task-wise (buti na lang masarap yung appetizer ko, hahaha).

I'm beginning to think that for all the hardships for rendering Oil Movements Duty, do we get enough incentives to continue on with this kind of work? One incentive was removed recently (duty meals -- bachelor duty officers are entitled to company-paid meals during the weekend) and I seriously think that THAT was a bad and inconsiderate move by management. I see that and the responsibilities for an OM Duty Officer as unfair.

Now don't get me wrong. I recognize that the world is not fair (otherwise, we won't build character). But for starters, I would like to be on the NOT-receiving end of the 'unfair concept' occassionally. It makes living more tolerable, like sugar in bitter tea.

Now that I'm done ranting and released my tension somewhat, I can now go home and take a decent bath. All phone calls will have to wait.

Getting some decent sleep is another thing.

I hate oil movements duty, and I'd like to own a shirt which says just that.