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Carousel ’80-‘86

After the semi-permanent nature of work and life in Abu Dhabi, events now seemed, in retrospect, to move much more quickly. I arrived in Manhattan in Summer 1980 to work in Mobil’s head office on the fabled 42nd street. The first advice I got was to never go near Times Square because so many muggings were happening there. The city was not in a good space. In fact it may have been about then that the US president said NY should be allowed to go bankrupt. It didn’t, of course.

After scouting out Times Square (of course) for myself, the next task was to find accommodation. Found a house in Old Greenwich which was acceptable, Liz and the kids arrived and I began the daily commute into Grand Central. The work was peculiar. Primarily only very senior managers worked in NY. Most people were out in the regions in the US and around the world. The manager whose team I was on was responsible for half the world. He had 2 very experienced oil men each of whom had a junior like me. The job primarily entailed writing letters to the many people who wrote in to the office with weird and wonderful ideas. Every letter was answered. I suppose the other benefit was getting to see up close how the work flowed and how decisions were made. One of the more interesting aspects of the work was the opportunity to travel to the regional affiliate offices in Denver and Houston and New Orleans to review their annual budget proposals. As it happened, the GM in Denver was Bob Mills who had been my boss in Libya 10 years before!

In the Summer of 1981 I was sitting, sweating on an un-airconditioned train heading home when a big boss tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to see him next day. I was to go to Indonesia as Area Operations manager of Mobil’s most profitable asset and I was to go soon. We were barely settled in the NY area! I don’t quite remember how we got to Indonesia, but we had a 4year old and a 3 year old and it wasn’t easy on anybody.

The original main Mobil office had been in Medan, a good sized town in Sumatra, but had recently relocated to Jakarta on Java. The result was that there were very few families left in Medan and worse, the work was on a week on/week off schedule in the gas field an hours flying time away. Indonesia had been going through a hard time economically with the result that there was very little by way of food to be found in the market. The jungle was all around and provided prolific varieties of fruits and veggies for the inhabitants.

Coincidentally, yesterday (2 August 2021) I looked through a booklet of photos from Indonesia. They had surfaced when I helped Liz clear the house in McLean. I also acquired the Garuda carving which is the best example I’ve ever seen. Anyway, the photos must have been taken on some special occasion, because i was wearing my best safari suit (standard business attire for all) and there were 4 layers of my bosses up to the General Manager in attendance. Also, the secretaries from the office were all dressed in traditional costume. The Arun gas field was far and away Mobil’s most profitable asset anywhere in the world. In the 3 years before I went there it had suffered 2 catastrophic well fires. Before I left NY I was called up to the highest exec and told to be sure there were no more! During my 2 years there we built facilities that doubled production and had no alarms. As you can imagine, being solely responsible in the jungle, distant from any supervision or assistance, was both a burden for a 35 year old but also character building! In Medan we lived in quite a big colonial-era house. We employed a driver, a cook ,a maid and a permanent baby minder. We had an above ground pool and the kids learned to swim. I think Pierce also learned to cycle without training wheels. They went to a 10- kid school taught by an English woman. There was very limited shopping or foodstuffs in Medan, so from time to time Mobil’s aircraft would fly us to Singapore where we could stock up. We also took mini-breaks to Bali, Lake Toba (an enormous extinct volcano) and Penang (very Colonial remnants). In 1982 Liz was pregnant, and with lack of maternity facilities in Sumatra, would have to fly to the necessary health care. We decided that it would be best to go to Dublin. So in September Gavin was born in the Coombe! This occasioned the incident on the KLM flight back to Indonesia with the 8 week old baby that a very large Dutch air hostess told me to stop smoking at once near the baby! I think we were back in Indonesia for less than a year when I got a call to say I was to go to a new job …in New Orleans! So the carousel turned again…..the third new job in 3 years. Head spinning. But hey, New Orleans! That was exciting!