Geologists Gone Bad

Sex, lies and phone calls.

Geologists aren’t born deviant. We usually start out as normal people. But prolonged isolation – weeks and weeks in the field without a break- can do strange things to otherwise normal people.

I used to work 6 weeks on, 2 weeks off. I did it for a couple of years. My longest shift stretched to 7 weeks which is a long time when you live somewhere nice, with a fiancée you miss. Three weeks in, with 3 more long weeks to go, it’s hard not to let the mind wander off to contemplate the finer things in life. A fine cup of coffee and a newspaper perhaps. A good British comedy on TV. Sex. A juicy steak paired with a robust glass of red. Sex. Did I mention sex? (Yes. get on with it. Ed.)

Most of us bury these things away in the back of our heads. It gives us something to look forward to when we get back to civilization; that special feeling when you can finally sit down in your favourite bar, with the paper and a glass of the local brew, or maybe with friends at a dinner party.

But some people, including the odd geologist I’ve known, have trouble controlling their more aberrant urges. It doesn’t take long when they’re in the field for the demons to surface. And when they finally get home, back to the candy store of fleshy pleasures, normal behaviour takes a back seat to full on hedonism. Booze. Drugs. Hookers. It’s all on the menu as they thrash weeks of frustration out.

Which brings me to the Ukraine. (Don’t worry, there is a link…)

It’s been in the news a lot lately. Rudy Giuliani’s one-man crusade to dig up dirt on the Bidens and the constant torrent of political sleaze it’s unearthed have been hard to ignore. But I confess, I know very little about the country other than what I’ve read about the historical importance of the strategic Crimean oil fields in WWII. And during the Crimean war in 1854, Great Britain indulged its taste for colonial adventures there; part of the 19^th century colonial struggle with Russia for dominance in central Asia known as the Great Game. I know that half the population of Alberta are apparently descended from Ukrainian émigrés with surnames that end in “chuk” or “yuk”. And I’ve also heard good things about the capital, Kiev, from friends who’ve travelled there to watch Champion’s League soccer games. Maybe one day.

The first time the Ukraine and I crossed paths was on a remote field camp in the 1990s. We had a satellite phone to call or fax head office, and for emergencies. The particular model we used had one major design flaw. When the temperature dropped to around freezing, the antenna stopped working. One of us would have to lean out of the portacabin office window and place a warming hand on the bottom of the antenna to get it working. You’d have a minute or two to call or fax before it needed warming again. A pain in the backside.

It’s software, honest.

The phone came with a certain number of free talk time minutes a month. To avoid excessive overage charges and preserve our budget, I checked the minutes regularly by printing out the call log.

One weekend, I was rotating back into the camp for a 6-week stint. I went through my usual routine of checking the log, but this time something stuck out like a sore thumb. Multiple calls had been made to a Ukrainian number. Who the fuck was calling Ukraine from our remote location and why? I asked around the geologists in the camp and one of the guys, I’ll call him Bob, said he’d made them.

After a brief pause to collect his thoughts, Bob told me he’d been working with a Ukrainian software developer to design some geological software to potentially sell. The calls were to iron out issues with the algorithms and coding. I bought the excuse, but diplomatically suggested to him that he shouldn’t be wasting our precious phone minutes on personal business.

A few years later, I was swapping stories over beers with a former colleague -I’ll call him Steve- and the mystery of the Ukrainian calls came up. Steve looked surprised and muttered “So that’s who it was!”

Meanwhile, back in head office.

He’d once been called in for an urgent meeting with someone in Human Resources in head office. Mr. HR was rather annoyed and wanted to know why he’d been racking up large phone bills calling a Ukrainian number from his office, sometimes calling it multiple times a day. HR had investigated and called the number, which was a pay-by-the-minute phone sex line. I have no idea what flavour the phone sex was – bondage, straight, gay, who cares- but this was at best a career-limiting event, and at worst a dismissible offence.

Eww, quick, sanitize the phone.

Mystified, Steve asked to see the call log. They were made when he was in the field and out of the office. He could prove it with expense reports, air tickets, cell phone records and so on. And besides, when Steve was in the office, there were no calls to Ukraine from his phone. It wasn’t him. They concluded that somebody had been sneaking into his office when he was away and er… indulging in whatever it is you indulge in when you call a sex line. My recollection of Bob’s calls from the field camp was the common link to both stories. He had a history of calling Ukraine and had been in head office when Steve was away, but I hadn’t clued in to it being a sex line habit.

Heavy breathing

I’ve never been sure why people call phone sex lines. It all seems rather seedy. Heavy breathing down a phone line to someone thousands of miles away, who’s trying to sound enthusiastic while they titillate you with cheesy porn-talk.

My wife once rented her basement suite to a woman who worked for one from home. She had a silky-smooth voice and could talk up a filth storm. It was a plain vanilla sex line – hetero men indulging in some er..ego stroking (“Gosh, I bet you’re a big boy aren’t you?”) and fantasy chats. What the clients didn’t know was that the woman behind the voice was a rather large middle-aged lesbian with a shaved head and tattoos. I like to think her Ukrainian equivalent was dealing with Bob’s calls.

They call it bookending

Bob had other less-than-savory quirks that I had picked up on. One field rotation, he left the camp to head home which involved a couple of flights, usually connecting through Frankfurt, and the best part of a day travelling. Three days after he’d left, his wife called me at the camp on the sat phone to ask when he was leaving to come home. I resisted the urge to tell her he’d been gone for 3 days already. To say I was pissed off at having to cover for him when he was obviously AWOL would be an understatement.

I mentioned it to my boss. Ah yes, he said, he’s “bookending” his field stints, a common enough thing to do. Tack on a few extra days to your field trip, claim you were working, but bugger off somewhere else and get up to no good unencumbered by the spouse. Blow off some steam. Drink some booze. Hire a hooker or two. The wife is none the wiser because she thinks he’s still at the camp.

There was nothing we could do officially, as Bob had claimed leave for the missing days, and it was really up to him how he spent them. It was a geologist behaving badly. I’ve always wondered if he went to the Ukraine.

Names have been changed, and locations omitted blah blah blah.

Don’t Forget

Don’t forget to regularly disinfect your phone. Once you’ve wiped it down, you could salvage what dignity you have left by subscribing to urbancrows.com via the minimalist subscription box that I artfully placed near the top of the page. I’ll be sure to email you more boring drivel from time to time, and I’ll even take requests for articles. Weddings, parties, anything. What I won’t do is recommend phone sex lines, although I think I know someone who could.