Counting the days

It's a bit weird, actually.
When you work like this, being totally away from the rest of the world for four weeks, then going home to be where you really want for another four, time works a bit different than it will do for most of you. It has to do with your mind, and the way it plays it's tricks on the rest of you.

Take-off. This time from Kirkwall, Orkney, heading home. 

All your inner selves, alarm bells, human mind or whatever it is, is instinctively set on this day to go home, the crewchange day. The crewchange day should normally be set and decided a long time ago. Even so, you will never, or at least just rarely, leave home for a work period or the vessel for a period off, on the decided day. You will normaly be away very close to it, though.

On the charterplane. Some chats about more or less anything, others couldn't bother!

Not so this time!! There's trouble down below us, on the seabed, where we earn our money. Not only there, but also up here where you still can breath pretty well there's unseen (as for yet anyway) dangers lurking. Weather... again. I have been chatting about it before, and will probably do the same again. Anyway, it's the big thing to talk about these days. At least out here, where we got nothing else to talk about.
We should have gone home tomorrow, even though we came on board one day early this trip.
Because of the mentioned stuff... down below on the seabed, and the weather coming in, we will have to stay until saturday.
Ahhh... who's he, feeling the need of complaining about a couple of days, you might say. Well, yes, it's just a couple of days, and nobody is going to die or anything like that, but still it's about the days of my time off that I will never get back.
I just checked, and the shift going opposite of me had 14 days more time off than they should this year, and I have had 14 days more than I should on board. That's two weeks... taken away from my other life. Two weeks added to my life on board.
You see, you need to be in a kind of sceduled splitted personality state of mind as well, to be able to do this stuff. One life when at work, one life when you get home.

\m/

Then again, I still got a great job! I really like it, and it's my own choice to be here, doing what I do. Another thing I know for sure is that when saturday comes and I'm on my way back home, everything will be forgotten. I switch to "Home Mode" and off I go. On shore first, then into a taxi to take me to the nearest airport either it's Sumburgh or Kirkwall, then straight over to Norway on the small 12 seat charter plane. Then moving about in the old land for a few hours. Haugesund- Bergen, Bergen-Oslo, Oslo-Ålesund... and at some point late in the evening I'm back home, ready to have a few weeks off. A slow couple of first days off is the usual rythm, before energy starts to come back.

Waiting for that last flight... endless minutes!

Life smiles... at least from saturday :))