2 - Hardly Working - Dax and Castets

After a long arrival day, it was time to face the music of my first week.  Fortunately, the guys at the plant had sent me a message saying that I should rest in the morning and plan to arrive on-site around noon so they could take me to lunch and show me around in the afternoon; an offer I was more than happy to take up.  

Monday: November 13, 2023

I was wide awake at 3AM but after a break to browse the internet on the couch, I managed another 1-2 hours to wake around 8am.  I had breakfast in the hotel reception/lobby (accueil), it had a decent spread and attentive staff; not a bad deal for ~10 euro.  Still, I don't really intend to eat breakfast most days, aside from a few pastries and what not, I can save my calories for fancier meals out and about.

The commute to Castets was an easy one and wasn't more than about 20 km, which is frankly an amazing distance to do for the electric vehicle.  I personally have no issues with roundabouts and understand that they usually help traffic self-regulate well, I just need to get acclimated to them and checking for cars and pedestrians.

On-site receival was great and the people are very welcoming.  The office has changed a lot since I last visited in 2018, there's now an open office concept where most of the people are.  Guess I should have brought a headset for taking calls at my desk instead of occupying a conference room for 1:1 calls.  Oh well, nothing that can't be fixed.   

After I was taken to lunch at the local restaurant (immediate options are McDonalds or a sit down place called La Tchanka featuring a menu du jour), I had a tour of the reactors and received an ATEX (explosion proof , but not indestructible) phone.  I brought my own safety glasses and safety shoes, I was given protective bottoms and a lab coat, though I think by next week I'll have a matching top like most other people.  

17:00 saw most people leaving the plant for the evening, including me.  We wrapped up the site tour, which included bumping into one of the engineers from AIGP (the engineering firm used for the design and install of the new equipment) and learning that most of the AIGP engineers are staying in a hotel close to me!  Once I made my commute back to the apartment, I had a slice of leftover pizza and lounged for a bit while checking messages/chatting

I had dried myself with a dish towel (un torchon) the previous night.  In hopes of avoiding such a move of desperation again, I made a run to the hypermarché  just before it closed.  It was a short 10 minute walk and I managed to get a few groceries (pain, carrots, endives) and most importantly: un drape de douche et une serviette.   

Oh, almost forgot: the parking lot at the site in Castets has a charging station (borne de recharge), but it's a low flow power outlet.  The car dashboard will inform you how quickly the charging process is going; in the particular case of this charging station, it's just enough for somebody doing a short commute once per day.  

Tuesday: November 14, 2023

I skipped breakfast, opting instead to make coffee in my cafétiere and got into the office around 8:30am.  Most people arrive on-site for an 8 - 8:30 daily meeting, I hope to make it on-site in time by the end of the week.

Today's big project was a meeting with the site manager to review the interlock list (grille de sécurité).  This matrix indicates what happens in the automated system when we detect specific conditions.  For example, if we detect the level is too high in a tank, we should close the valves on the lines sending stuff to the tank so it doesn't overflow.  What made this a real exercise for me was that every instrument and valve has a name consisting of ~7 digits, but while everyone here counts in French, I've fallen into the habit of counting in English.  For number 1 - 10, that's usually not so bad, but when the instrument tag number is something like quarante trois, soixante douze, trois cent quatre-vingt-dix-sept, it gets a little trickier to keep up 😅

After two hours of that and taking lunch, I completed the site safety exam so that I could walk around without an escort.  With this freedom, I made a self tour of the distillation equipment in the afternoon; it seems like the distillation equipment is taking up a large amount of the work effort on-site in terms of mechanical & instrumentation rework.  Maybe there was a disconnect or language barrier between the French teams and German vendor the equipment was purchased from (and manufactured in the Netherlands).  Regardless of the issues, I will make a note that the layout of the site here is much cleaner and clearer than at my site in Newark, NJ.  There's a big difference in the kinds of products done at each site, which certainly plays a role in how things are layed out, but it's still nice to see open spaces with shiny new steel equipment and squeeky clean aluminum cladding.

I received an invitation via message on my ATEX phone to join a couple of the AIGP engineers for dinner at Chez nous.  One of our party didn't have much English, so we spent the evening in French, which was a good exercise for me.  Of the three AIGP engineers working at this site (all young guys), two are automation engineers and one is a process engineer.  The process engineer grew up in this area and seems like he'll be an excellent resource for restaurants in Dax and Toulouse (where he currently lives).  The restaurant itself, Chez Nous, was set back really far from the road, but inside was lovely and I think the place offered activities every night of the week: language exchange cafe, board game night, live music, etc.  The food was great and dessert was a huge rhum baba; and I mean size of my fist huge.  Its a good thing they'd cooked off basically all the alcohol in the rum or else I wouldn't have been able to drive home after...

Wednesday: November 15, 2023

I was given a key to the office this morning.  At first I was unsure if the key would actually work, the guy tasked with ensuring its fit spent about 10 minutes at the door using screwdrivers to get the key back out of the lock; but eventually he was able to not only free the key from the lock, but also unlock the door to let himself back in for the handoff.  What sorcery is this thing?  

I'll add a note here about how it took me by surprise that some door handles around here require the handle to be lifted up to engage the lock.  This instruction given to me with the office key would have saved me a good 10 minutes of playing around with my apartment door on Sunday.  

The site manager organized a lovely welcome meet up for everyone at the site on my behalf; a specialty Landaise cake was served and I put out a bunch of Reese's cups as a a representative specialty from les Etats Unis (j'espere que personne n'a des allergies).  I hadn't warned anyone the Reese's cups had two wrappers so that caught some people off guard, oops haha.

I thought I'd almost had this jet lag thing licked but an afternoon meeting made it clear that I'm not out of the woods just yet.  TBF the room turned into a sauna as the sun set but I'm still not pleased with how quickly I succumbed to nodding off in my chair.  

Dinner was with the two automation engineers of AIGP, at La côté à l'os.  It was another meal conducted in French; I can understand one guy much better than the other (a combination of voice pitch and rhythm) but we had a great time.  The restaurant was only a 10 minute walk from my apartment and the weather was splendid that evening.  The restaurant features cuts of aged meat from various breeds of cow.  I took a piece of Limousine, which I'm frankly shocked to learn is a breed of cow in France.  Makes me wonder if the Texas Longhorns should have been named Hummers...

For me, the funniest part of the conversation at dinner came while talking about how one of the guys had to drive to the restaurant.  I didn't quite catch everything, but I felt like the he had mentioned an animal sleeping next to the side of the road so that it could jump across when somebody drove by.  I actually don't know the French word for deer, but I had seen such a deer curled up on the side of the road during my commute to work the past few days (likely indicating it'd already met a 70 km/h passerby).  So I asked if there was a French word for animals killed when struck by cars on the road, in English we say "roadkill".  The guy goes "bof, non.  We just say unlucky" 😂

Thursday: November 16, 2023

I managed to stay awake for most of the work day even if I had my first deer in the headlights moment in the weekly progress meeting.  I'd gotten a little lost in the conversation so was shocked when all eyes turned towards me: "désolé, je suis un peu perdu..." 

Some bunnies on site:

It's hard to believe almost a week has gone by.  It feels like I've hardly scratched the surface on what's going on in the plant; I'm not sure how I'll be able to help in the coming weeks as most of the work effort is being spent on mechanical repair and completion.  But, I'll find something to keep myself busy with that will hopefully provide value here; I think I'm supposed to lead a meeting next Tuesday on the path forward for the startup...

I did a load of laundry at the apartment to experiment and actually wash the towels I bought.  Turns out room service is tomorrow for the linens the place came with.  Machines were decent and 3 euro per machine, well, it costs three euros to buy the token / jeton used by the machines.  It was a little annoying that the motion sensor light in the laundry room kept cutting off while I was opening/closing machines. 

I had dinner in Dax at Cafe Mojo with the automation engineers.  The tapas orders there were pretty big, especially the fuet sausage.  I ordered rabas, having no idea of what was going to show up; turns out it's calamari.  For my main plat I had duck breast in a duck liver sauce, very delicious but super rich.

Finally got my European sim card sorted out: I'm doing a data only Esim which should cover the whole of the EU, 5gb per 30 days should be more than plenty for my needs.  An Esim slot was one of the reasons I opted for my Google pixel 7 when upgrading the phone in August, that and a total lack of battery life on the iphone 8.  With the explosion proof phone I received from work (which doesn't have data), I'm now ready to tackle bigger challenges.  

Friday

Uh oh, what I'd thought was inability to sleep warmly last night turned out to be a fever.  I'm not sure which of the things I ate did it, but I'm informed that food poisoning and a stomach bug are identical from a medical perspective.  Regardless of how I became sick, the result is that I drove to work thinking I had slept poorly but would manage, my first meeting of the day (thankfully only 15 minutes) gave me a new perspective on this topic.  

So I canceled my afternoon meetings and returned home to sleep the rest of the fever off.  It's a shame because the engineers for AIGP had invited me to join them for lunch before they returned home for the weekend; I also ended up canceling the bi-weekly call I have with Partners in Food Solutions about a project to improve the extraction of lemongrass oil, I actually haven't had much of a chance to think about this project over the past two weeks given the whole "move to France" thing, but I did feel bad for canceling last minute.  

As I type this, I'm feeling much better thanks to an extra 5-6 hours of sleep; I'm just hoping it doesn't reset the counter on my jet lag progress... Spending a day indoors here has made me super appreciative of the European-style blackout shutters: they're very effective at blocking out the light.  If not for them, I would have been hard pressed to get the amount of sleep I did between the hours of 10:00 and 18:00.  A day indoors also had me thinking a bit about the pandemic days; today was a bit isolating but I know that I'll pull through and rebound this weekend.