No, not my new one. Old School Confessional’s experience with a totaled laptop reminded me of something.
A little over five years ago now, I was working in Duncan, OK, for the Halliburton field camp. A customer wanted to push all the fluid out of a wellbore with a method we call nitrogen displacement. Pump enough liquid nitrogen through a heater, and the expanded gas will shove anything out. In fact, that was the main problem; pump too much gas into the well, and the hydrocarbons get shoved back far into the rock and stay there.
My mentor, 30 years in the oldfield business, recognized that then-current design software couldn’t predict the correct amount of nitrogen to pump if well conditions changed. He devised a method that accounted for changes, but it involved graph paper and a ton of calculations made in advance. When we both looked at it, I explained how it could be converted to a spreadsheet that graphed on real time on my laptop. He gave his blessing, and I wrote it up and demonstrated it for him. We took it to the customer who approved it for his next well.
Ready to go at the well site, I don’t remember what happened, but I think I was bumped. The old Compaq laptop fell, the fall borne by the top half, breaking the screen. Dejected, we were about to pull out the graph paper when I noticed that the bottom inch of the screen still worked. I called up a DOS command window in the Win95 toolbar, made it full screen, and there was room for one C:\ prompt. I was able to copy the spreadsheet to a floppy, and we used another laptop. Happy ending.
Last month I got an email asking about a different spreadsheet I had written around that time frame. There were so many changes to it that I hardly recognized it. It wouldn’t surprise me if the old nitrogen displacement spreadsheet still lives on some engineer’s laptop in Oklahoma.
