The Mining Biz Archives - Page 2 of 8

The Conference Circuit

Normal service is resumed on the Urbancrows Blog. Lucky you.

October 2021 – the last day of the New Orleans Investment Conference. After 3 long days in the Hilton hotel on Poydrass Street I was into the home stretch. One more day and I’d be heading back to Raincouver and my relentlessly leaky kitchen roof. To maintain my laser focus on the job at hand -promoting my modest silver company- I decided fuzzily through drooping eye lids that a bucket of extremely strong coffee was called for. Off I went to the coffee shop.

*The Hilton on Poydras Street in NO. A design classic.*

Everything was going swimmingly. I’d been in the slow-moving java line for 30 minutes, sipping from a bottle of water, propped up at an alarming angle against a counter full of herbal tea boxes, chocolate covered beans and refillable mugs. I was drifting off into a terminal coma, convinced my time at the front of the line would never come when the man in front of me finally got to the counter. Leaning in close to the perspex-walled counter he uttered the words:

“I’d like a caramel frappacino with soy milk and no caramel. My wife doesn’t like the slimy feeling of the syrup.”

I snorted, narrowly avoiding spitting iced water all over his flabby, sweat-soaked back.

Local Justice, Bulgarian Style

It’s Bloody Grim

By the start of 1995, I’d been working as a geologist for Rio Tinto *boo hiss* in Turkey for about 18 months. I was unhappy with the terms of my employment -which were rubbish- and to top it off, Rio decided that year to “localise” a lot of expat contracts. This meant slashing salaries and generally being dicks to anyone who wasn’t a full-time expat employee under an existing contract. Hence, I was feeling less than 100% devoted to them.

And then the cavalry arrived. Some drinking buddies who ran Anglo American’s Turkish office *Yay! Huzzah!* offered me a job in Bulgaria. The offer was substantially higher than my my pitiful Rio salary, so after a quick nose scratch and some judicious chin rubbing -it would’ve been impolite to say yes immediately- I signed the contract and enjoyed a jolly nice dinner with my new boss Owen and his wife. A few weeks later I was across the border in Sofia, renting a grotty communist-era 3rd floor apartment. It was tastefully decorated, painted Moscow-approved peppermint green, offset by bright orange tiles in the bathroom.

*Anglo’s eastern European team, mid 1990s. Many of these people no longer have hair*. *I do.*

Post-communism Sofia was grim. It was grey and shabby, full of miserable people who’s social system had collapsed. There was no produce in the shops in the winter and only a handful of semi-decent pubs and restaurants to take the edge off the cold grimness. The gorillas of organised crime were everywhere; muscle-bound pricks in black leather jackets and heavy gold necklaces, driving shiny new western sports cars in a city full of ratty Trabbies.

Sweaty Geologists

Late that summer, our small team headed to the southwest of the country close to the borders with Greece and Macedonia to explore for sediment-hosted gold. We rented a house in the town of Ognyanovo, owned by the local mayor. An interesting character in the Borat style, he would show up at odd times in the evening with a couple of local prostitutes in tow who were offered to us gratis. His treat. There were regular heated but polite discussions between him and my Bulgarian colleagues as we declined the entertainment, but I will admit we were more than happy to accept his home-made slivovitz (plum schnapps.)

Never Judge A Book

God, I Feel Old.

This is the second of 2 posts on the joys of interviewing & hiring geologists and engineers. See also Arms and the Man.

I’ve finally admitted an awful truth to myself; it’s 40 years since I left high school. In my head, I’m still a spotty 17-year-old idiot, albeit one who’s wondering why he suddenly has moobs, grey hair and a large, malignant bum growth called a mortgage. Give or take the odd break for post graduate studies, I’m now 37 years into my earth science career; 37 wonderful, peripatetic years of travel, strange alcoholic drinks, and disturbing intestinal nasties.

At Grammar School, I excelled in one thing and one thing only. Mediocrity. Sports? Too skinny and uncoordinated. Academics? Nah. I was a shit study and didn’t exactly thrive in the Hogwarts-style red brick school environment I was in; my exam results made the attainment of slightly-below-average-grades look like lofty ambition. Healthy living? Nope. I smoked from 14 years old, and me and my mates were in the pub as soon as we looked old enough and had sufficient moola to buy a pint and a bag of crisps. To paraphrase the great soccer player George Best, most of my money I spent on beer, ciggies and girlfriends and the rest I wasted.

*Travel. And lots of strange alcoholic drinks.*

Arms & The Man

Or, how to interview a heavily armed geologist.

This is the first of 2 posts on the joys of interviewing & hiring geologists and engineers.

Recruiting geologists for a project is a tricky business. For all sorts of reasons, someone who comes across well in an interview can be an absolute antisocial nightmare in the field; hygiene issues, weird sexual proclivities (see Geologists Gone Bad), fucked up political or religious opinions, drugs… the list of transgressions is endless, but the end result is always the same; someone sitting alone in a corner of the cook house while everyone else plays cards and throws things at them.

I’ve hired nose combers to work in Pakistan, Iran, and Bulgaria. The biggest success was a team of young Bulgarian geologists we hired in the mid-90s for Anglo American’s exploration office in Sofia. The 4 guys we picked have all forged decent careers in the international exploration industry. When we hired them, starting on maybe $250/month -good money in post-communist Bulgaria- they were thrilled to be working for a major mining company that wasn’t owned by a Russian oligarch. Each of the guys had a different skill set to add to our group -prospecting, logistics, drill program supervision and so on; a competent and adaptable project team that we used all over the world.

Yemen

A few years later I was back on the hiring trail again for the same company, this time working with a Turkish colleague, Yasar, to hire a small team of Yemeni geologists from the university in the capital city, Sana’a.

Rude Words & Geology

I was back home in Brexit land in October and again in November. In between moping on the forecourts of sucked-dry gas stations, getting rained on in Wales, and being depressed in downtrodden Stoke on Trent, I had plenty of time to ponder the curious world of British place names (as you do).

The UK is full of wonderfully rude place names; there are so many that one intrepid individual, Paul Taylor, recently embarked on a comprehensive tour of the smuttiest ones perched on a rather dodgy looking 50cc moped.

Mr. Taylor started in Shitterton and ended up -fittingly- in the pleasant hamlet of Bell End. Along the way he stopped in The Knob in King’s Sutton, Butthole Lane in Shepshed, Titty Ho, Cockermouth, and Minge Lane. Genius. I’ve been to Cockermouth, and yes, I admit I sniggered as we drove into the village past the name sign.

The disciplines of geology and mining are not without their double entendres, but remember, at best mining people are a beer-swilling puerile bunch not widely known for their intelligent, penetrating humour. True, there are plenty of words that will raise a chuckle from them, but it’s stuff that would make most normal people stare at each other in baffled incomprehension.

Drillholes, Magma & Megawatts

I bloody love Iceland

It’s full of rocks and puffins and volcanoes and ponies and geysers and more volcanoes and stuff. And it’s a geologist’s wet dream, although I don’t count sedimentologists as real geologists so you lot can stop nodding in agreement.

What right-minded nose comber can resist active volcanoes and recent lava flows still warm under foot? The Fagradalsfjall volcano, which has been erupting for a while now, haunts my erotic dreams at night – orange, fiery, sinuous rivers of lovely lava filmed in pornographic close-up slo-mo by kamakazi drones.

Scary Creatures

One of the joys of a career in geology is the opportunity it affords humble earth scientists to get closer to nature, David Attenborough style. Sometimes a bit too close. Here are a few stories on the nastier strains of wildlife that I’ve encountered myself, or stories that friends have told me. I’ve covered some already –tortoises, ostriches, polar bears etc.– so they won’t be rehashed here.

This list is NOT a top ten and it’s not arranged by level of threat or ability to cause painful death or injury. It’s simply a list of stuff that occurred to me after my mother-in-law (thanks Maureen) planted the idea for the post. If you have your own story, let me know via the comments.

Hairy Insect Things With Lots of Legs

In the field, anything with lots of hair, a bulbous pink abdomen and more than 4 legs should be studiously avoided, which is why I’d never vote for Boris Johnson.

If you ask me, the single worst insect nightmare is the camel spider, not actually a spider and not really a scorpion either. I touched on them in an earlier blog post. Giant sandy coloured fuckers with huge jaws, they lurk all over Africa and the Middle East, lying in wait to scare the shit out of arachnophobic people like me.

The Cherry Orchard

Thanks go to my colleague Polar Bear Dave for filling in the blanks and sending me his pictures from the trip.

“A hungry dog believes in nothing but meat.”
Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

Every so often, I’ve been privileged to visit a project that is SO woeful that I’ve started to think mid-tour that there must be a hidden upside; something I’ve missed that everyone else can see. A trip to Morocco years back springs to mind. We were there to visit a VMS project which wasn’t. It was a small, shear zone hosted base-metal occurrence. About 600 stream sediment samples had been collected in a 10x10km concession(!) looking for more “VMS” occurrences; enough geochemistry to spot a discarded AA battery 3 miles upstream, despite the total lack of hydrothermal alteration in the country rock.

*“In 20 years I’m going to a crap project in Wenatchee..ha ha ha ha etc.”*

I mentioned another travesty in my last post A Few Thoughts About Optimism in Exploration. This one was blind optimism on such a grand scale that I was actually in awe of the guys showing us around. The total lack of common sense was exceeded only by the hopelessness of the project. When it was over, my colleague Dave and I drove back to Vancouver alternately stunned into total silence or engulfed in hysterical laughter at what we’d just witnessed, checking our notes to make sure it was real.

Zombies Ate My Brain!

We’d done an office review of hundreds of zombie juniors on the Venture Exchange; companies with no cash that may have had a stalled project in need of funding. The work flagged a gold project in an old mine near Wenatchee in Washington; the self-proclaimed Apple Capital of the World by the locals, who’ve obviously never been to Kent in southeast England where I grew up.

*Wenatchee. It’s the apple capital of Wenatchee.*

A Few Thoughts On Optimism In Exploration

This slightly sarcastic piece was massively improved by contributions from 4 colleagues: -Brent, Owen, Neil & Mike- all of whom I’ve been lucky enough to know for years. Thanks chaps. You’ll be able to spot where I’ve used your stuff.

Optimist. noun

a person who tends to be hopeful and confident about the future or the success of something. “only an eternal optimist could expect success”

Bananas

A bit like a 99-year-old man with heart failure buying green bananas, exploration geologists are optimists. We have to be. A bad case of pessimism would be a huge impediment to building a geological career that survives past the initial 5-minute interview with the VP Exploration.

“Can I have a job please? I don’t think we’ll ever find anything, but I’ll give it a go if you pay me.”

“WTF? No. No. No. Who let you in? Piss off. I don’t need a depressed hat stand on my team. Please don’t slam the door.”

A wellness website I picked at random for its daft name, has this to say about optimism. “(it) is a mental attitude characterized by hope and confidence in success and a positive future. Optimists … expect good things to happen….. Optimistic attitudes are linked to a number of benefits, including better coping skills, lower stress levels, better physical health, and higher persistence when pursuing goals.” To which I’d add “poverty” if your optimism is directed at the junior mining sector, although strictly speaking that’s not really a benefit.

Kevin And The Ostrich Of Death.

Full credit to Kevin Broomberg for writing this down, sending it to me, giving me permission to publish it, and putting up with my simplistic edits.

*When I grow up I want to be an ostrich.*

Here in the urbancrows e-rookery we get a lot of comments about the blog. Granted most are spam bots, or messages from lonely ladies in Russia offering me pictures of themselves au naturale if I just click on a link (which is very nice of them), but every now and then something I write attracts real comments from what I believe are real people. Strangely, I got the most comments after I published the “Field Dump” story, which either 1) tells us something about the human obsession with the act of coiling a rope, or 2) highlights a worryingly low level of maturity in geologists’ humour. Or perhaps both.

To date, I hadn’t received a comment that was compelling enough to make me want to publish it as a full post. They’re mostly short anecdotes, or nice feedback that might add texture to a story, but they lack sufficient detail to make the cut.

That changed the other day thanks to my new mate Kevin Broomberg in South Africa. Kevin’s note pushed all the right buttons for me. He spun me a tale about what happened to him and a few colleagues when they met a rather ornery 8ft tall death chicken. The ripping yarn included dangerous wildlife with nasty big claws, misplaced avian sexual desire, and a remote field camp -how could I not publish it? The only thing missing was zombies (which I wasn’t able to write in to the tale, try as I might.)

*Full Patch Death Chickens looking for trouble.*

So, with his permission, a few of his photos and a bit of editing, here’s his true story about a randy ostrich that made life very difficult for Kevin and his crew. Full credit to Kevin for this piece. I’ve done some editing but it’s 99% his work. Sadly, he tells me all the photos he had of this poultry incident (sorry) were fried in a shipping container which baked in the sun for 4 weeks during a move from Dar es Salaam to Johannesburg so we’re having to make do with whatever pictures we could find.

Category: The Mining Biz

The Conference Circuit

Normal service is resumed on the Urbancrows Blog. Lucky you.

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Local Justice, Bulgarian Style