West
I was twenty. An engineering student at Waterloo, three years into being Canadian, and I had never been anywhere.
A small company in Calgary hired me for a co-op term. Four months. They installed weather monitoring towers on oil drill sites deep in the Rockies. The towers tracked conditions and told the operators when it was safe to flare off gas—government rules, environmental compliance. My job was to configure the software, set the rules for each tower, be the tech guy. I had never been outside Toronto and southwest Ontario since moving to Canada—this was my first time that far from home, working on my own.
The drives were five, six hours. From the office in Calgary into the foothills, then deeper, into country that didn’t look like anything I knew.
My partner on most of these trips was a technician named Bing. Filipino, late thirties, endlessly cheerful. He handled the physical side—the eighty-foot towers, the equipment, the installations. I handled the laptop. We told each other stories to pass the time.
He told me once about a Coca-Cola sales rep who went to a remote village in the Philippines and ended up marrying two sisters, both daughters of the village chief. I don’t know if it was true, but it didn’t matter—we had hours to fill.
One trip, the truck’s 4x4 failed to engage going up a snowy dirt track. The tower behind us—eighty feet of steel on a trailer—started pulling us backward. Toward the edge. Toward a long tumble down the mountainside.
I had my hand on the passenger door, ready to spring it open and jump.
Bing kept driving. Something in his hands, his timing, the way he worked the wheels. We didn’t go over, and got towed out later.
We didn’t talk about it much after—what was there to say?
The drill sites were strange places. Remote, but full of activity around the clock. The roughnecks lived on-site, worked in shifts, slept in trailers. I remember walking past one trailer and seeing a group of them watching hardcore porn, door wide open, like it was the evening news.
They didn’t know what to make of me. This skinny desi kid who showed up, plugged in a laptop, typed for a while, and left.
Once I drove six hours to make a configuration change that took ten seconds. The on-site supervisor watched me do it and said, with something like wonder, “That just cost us five thousand dollars.”
I didn’t know what to say to that either.
The company was a husband-and-wife operation. He was a physics grad from U of T—quiet, fair, the kind of person who treated everyone the same regardless of where they came from or what they looked like. She was warm and welcoming. This was deep in what people now call the most conservative part of Canada, though back then the lines weren’t drawn the way they are now. Or maybe they were, and these two just didn’t care.
In my spare time, I built something.
The towers were remote—hours from anywhere, scattered across the mountains. Checking on them meant driving out, which meant days. But in 2004, satellite modems existed, and I started wondering.
I built a system that pulled the sensor data in real time and displayed it on a website. A dashboard showing conditions at each tower, live, from anywhere in the world. Whether flaring was permitted or not. The works.
When I showed it to the team, they were stunned. The technology wasn’t supposed to be able to do that—the towers were too remote, the data too trapped.
But there it was on the screen.
It was one of my early glimpses of what technology could do. You could take something that seemed fixed—data trapped on remote towers, hours from anywhere—and just make it available. Write some code and change how things worked.
I found that inspiring, and I still do.