I have been keepin' it real this week. I have been doing one of the most grass roots tasks of pipeline engineering this week, and that's analysing pipeline failures. Hardly a spectacular failure granted, more like a tiny pinhole leak, but a failure enough to put some oil to ground which had to be subsequently removed. Once the contaminated soil was out of the way, I could go and analyse the failure and try and work out why it happened. In the interests of keeping my job, that's as much detail as I'm going to put on the internet, but below are some amusing pictures. The first is the innocent little tag on the shutdown valve on the pipeline which so elloquently describes why I spent two days this week in the middle of the desert, 700km away from the nearest capital city. The second photo is for those people (you know who you are!) who think that I am a soft cock office boy. There I am, in a hole, scrubbing sticky oil off a pipe to find the hole in it. There you go... recorded evidence of me engaged in manual labour.


The tag on the shutdown valve that landed me in the desert 


Me keepin' it real in a hole