It was a scam to bluff Petronas.

All the above plans sound so very impressive and plausible at the time. I was completely fooled! However, Shell had no oil rigs of its own in Malaysia. We faced many problems being trained on contractor owned rigs because, to start with, their insurance policy did not cover Shell personnel! After passing our round one exams we could not progress any further because the contractors refused to use any of us as drillers. They have trained their own already! Aji and Maga Ratab on the Jumbo and Johnny Tan and Michael Ting[5] on the Trident. We became mere observers and were not allowed to touch the brake or anything else on the rig floor. Although it was easy money for us we could not progress further. We were moved from rig to rig every 3 months. Jan Martijnse, our trainer claimed that was for exposure to the different types of oil rigs being used; but we all knew better. It was more like marking time actually. Since we have 8 rigs at the time, two more years passed quickly and we did not make much progress at all. We were very angry and frustrated with our training. There were rumours of resignations from Shell to join the contractors, Reading and Bates or even Carigali as drillers! Our frustrations grew. I was suffering from gastric ulcers, kidney stones, schizophrenia, delusions and also developed a very severe persecution complex! Every time on my days off from the rigs, I went to the head office to kick up a big fuss with personnel dept. for not doing their job. Patricia Chapman and William Ng wanted the drilling dept to do something quickly with all the trainee drillers.

The next thing I knew, Ben Frietmen (my drilling boss) and Dr. Jaya, the Shell medical officer, ruled that I was too sick in the head to work on the rigs.[6] I was told to stop going out to the rigs; but to report immediately to Jan Verloop in the materials warehouse in the Miri Supply Base! Patrick Lee the material graduate trainee kindly gave me a table and a swivel chair in the warehouse. My colleagues were Hassan Aton and Quek Chong Seng. There was no telephone and no IN tray on my table for a long time![7] I was given free run of the Miri warehouse and marine yard for about a year. It was certainly less stressful and I slowly recovered from my afflictions whatever it was. Dr. Jaya never gave me his medical dianogsis. The fact is this. My career to become a driller in Shell has ended. Later after I have recovered, Christine, my wife told me that during that period I was behaving very badly to her at home and that she almost left me on that occasion!

I believed at first that I was only temporarily attached to materials department and that I would return to work on the oil rigs one day. I was feeling bored with my job with no responsibilities. I saw all the surplus materials returned from the Bintulu LNG projects: flanges, elbows, and tee joints and weldolets. They were of all grades, sizes and pressure ratings just sitting there in the rain, rusting away.

After two months of doing nothing, I saw a way to fight my boredom. I asked Jan Verloop, the warehouse supervisor, to let me do something about the Bintulu project returns. He was very pleased and said: go ahead! It was the signal he had been waiting for![8] I was on the road to recovery. However, the job was really a can of worms! I found to my dismay that most of the project materials were one-off items, not standard Shell stock at all. The stock analysts for steel products, Abang Ahmad and David Suckling refused to accept them back into their stock in the warehouse. I had to follow protocols to get each item coded into their correct mesc numbering codes,[9] raise the proper documentations (MRV), process them through the EMA2000 system[10], and then physically place each item on the shelves in the warehouse! Mesc are ten digit numbers which identify all equipment and spare parts used by the Royal Dutch Shell Group in the oil industry.