In Texas it’s not “căn’t” but “cān’t”. Long a. When spoken, it only works as a contraction; otherwise, you’ll sound dumb. I don’t know who coined the adage, but if I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it ten thousand times since the first day I stepped onto the rig floor.

They weren’t kidding either.

What’s sad it’s not just an adage. It’s an attitude. Sometimes an excuse for “I don’t like him.” Never mind that the man in question has a wife, three kids, and bills to pay.

Having said all of the above. Drilling rigs are the playing field for a team of men and, yes, women. If someone doesn’t pull their share of the load, the team suffers.

Drill pipe slips are the best example. They are beyond heavy for one man. They’re equipped with three handles. When a roughneck pulls slips, he uses every muscle in his body. Imagine one of the three men just going through the motions. The nicest guy in the world will get on the next chopper if he doesn’t put out.

That reminds me of another adage. “No demand for nice guys out here.”

Again. True.

So, back to the topic. Years ago, like 20 years ago, I asked a tool pusher about a driller who didn’t return from leave. He told me I fired him. Me? I’m like, dude, I know who I’ve fired, and I thank God the number is low. Anyway, I wouldn’t be worried about the man’s absence if I was the one who fired him. I was 38. Not over the hill yet. After a short investigation, I found out I’d fired several men … without knowing I’d fired them. The other pusher used me, and my position as the company rep, to get rid of people he didn’t like.

I still know their names. Every man of them is written in a book I keep in my computer bag. Today, it still bugs me that men, somewhere, think I’m responsible for the loss of their jobs.

People are different. Personalities can be fragile. Even big burly men have feelings. You have a guy or gal you don’t particularly like, someone who struggles in their job, go look in the mirror. His/her problem might be you. Try a different approach. Put them on another team. We see it all the time in major league sports. The quarterback is pathetic, then gets traded and becomes a super star. Go figure.

Try it. It feels good to do the right thing when lives are affected. Besides, your boss might be looking at you the same way.

I get a haircut once a month whether I need one or not. Last month, when I handed a $20 bill to the lady dressed like a gridiron referee at Sport Clips, she said, “Where did this note come from?” I thought, “My wallet,” but she knows I travel a lot. I knew what she meant. With all the talk about the terrible “One-percenters” and “Big Oil” draining the middleclass and not paying their fair-share into Uncle Sam’s pockets, her question got me to thinking.

To drill deepwater in the Gulf of Mexico, Big Oil needs a rig that took three years to build using components from a thousand different companies and employs 190 people to run once it’s operational, (not counting shore-based support staff.)

Then, ole Big’n needs workboats, helicopters, casing, wellheads, cement, mud, directional drilling equipment, bits, mud logging and electric logging, a remotely operated sub, a cement unit and numerous other pieces of equipment. And he needs a lease he has to buy from Sam, who, after production begins, gets 18.5% in royalties.

To run all the above takes people—cementers, casing crews, pilots, boat captains, directional drillers, loggers, engineers, roughnecks, drillers, assistant drillers, roustabouts, crane operators, able-bodied seamen, cooks, medics, mechanics, electricians, radio operators, and many, many more.

That’s just to find it. Now he’s got to get it out of the ground and to market.

So, Ole Big’n uses after-tax money to pay companies who pay taxes to hire individuals who pay taxes who use their money to pay taxes on goods and services they buy from companies who use after-tax money to hire people who pay taxes … to finally pay the mortician and, in death, Uncle Sam 40% of everything not spent on taxes.

Dear Lord, I’m out of breath.

My thinking doesn’t run much beyond carburetors and mayonnaise, but I know well where my haircut money comes from.

Ever thought about how many Egyptians live in Egypt? Or why there are a billion Indians and a billion Chinese? I used to ponder these questions. I mean I know what causes a population explosion, but a billion. That’s nuclear. Did they have a competition? The winner gets a free rice paddy?

Then, one day, like “poof”, the answer to the number of Egyptians came to me. None. Zero. Zilch. Egyptians were, was, used to be, a race of people. They spoke Egyptian and wrote on papyrus in hieroglyphics.

I had a rig hand bring me some papyrus. He told me it was very special. They spelled my name on it. Looked like a dog chasing a chicken around an outhouse. I think he was pulling my leg.

Today, Egypt is inhabited by Arabs. In Arabic the country is called Musser. An Arab from that country calls him/herself Muss-ura. The spelling is not correct, but using phonics, the pronunciation is close. Try it on an Egyptian. Let it roll of your tongue. They’ll be impressed.

I worked with many Egyptians over the years. Hundreds. Loved ‘em. Great people.

Same with Indians. Worked with many, many. Loved them, too. Though,
sometimes I wish there was such a thing as reincarnation. I’d want to come back as an Indian policeman. In Mumbai. I saw on T.V. once where the police get to take a billy club and whoop on ‘em now and then. I know a couple….

One night I asked God for patience and wisdom and woke up in Saudi Arabia. Fourteen years later, I’d had enough training in patience, and I got to a-wonderin’ about the wisdom I’d requested. I got down on my knees, bowed my head, looked toward heaven, started to open my big mouth and thought, Nope, no way. Lord, you’re not going to get me this time.

Anon was Indian and a laundryman. A good one. It always amazed me that he ironed my clothes everyday. Work duds to boot. I mentioned more than once that his efforts were over the top. Washed, dried, and rolled up in the laundry bag was adequate. He insisted. Not vocally, but by continuing the practice. One night, through a comedy of errors, we thought the laundry was ablaze. It looked like it. Turned out that Anon was ironing and tossed the bucket of water he used into an air-conditioner vent and fried an electric motor. When he screamed, “Fire!” The driller, Mach-mood, a Syrian, discharged a 40-pound extinguisher into the space without first looking into the room the see where Anon was. All of it. Right in Anon’s face. Anyway, during the investigation, I got to a wondering, like you are now, what the one-gallon bucket of water was for? Anon didn’t have a spritzer, so he filled his mouth from the bucket and spit it all over my shirt and pants.

One day a pusher I know toted a pressure washer and a gallon of gasoline to camp. He instructed Samir, the laundryman, to dab a bit of gas on spots of diesel-based mud on the crew’s coveralls and hose them down with the pressure washer. Samir was a thinker. He decided to just add the gasoline to a load in the washing machine. If a dab worked, a lot would work better.

He said nothing happened until he pushed the “Es-start” button. Samir looked like the first runner up in a Chihuahua look-alike contest. Hairless and dazed.

I think the laundryman is the most important person on a rig. Don’t believe me? Take two pair of underwear to work. When you don’t get a pair back in your bag, …

Do the math.

Had that happen to me once, in Saudi Arabia. I started with more than two pair, but my supply dwindled with each washing. Did you know there is a box for spare drawers? A big box, too. When I asked the camp boss about my missing unmentionables, he brought it to me. I used a pencil to pick though an assortment of silk speedos, (I’m Saudi mind you,) tighty-whities, and boxers.

“I don’t see ‘em,” I said and handed him the box.

He shrugged, pushed the box toward me again, and said, “This no problem, you pick.”

Sometime after the Deepwater Horizon disaster a helicopter full of oil industry regulators, all presidential appointees, traveled from D.C. to visit the rig. The most senior person, as in position not age, rated Secret Service protection. I’ll refer to this individual as VIP, to protect the guilty.

When the chopper landed, we escorted VIP and company from the heliport into a conference room for a short safety orientation–rig ops, location of lifeboats and the types of alarms and their meanings, that sort of thing. VIP took a seat, politely coughed, then placed clasped hands on the table and looked around the room. We held our collective breaths—me as the companyman, the toolpusher, the captain, the drilling manager, and various corporate uppity-ups who had arrived the day before to hobnob with the elite—and waited for some profound adage that would carry the day. After all, this person worked for the president. Has to be the smartest of the smart. Then, VIP sighed and said, “Where is the minority and women representation?”

Now, I ask you, who looks at people that way? Who looks at a group of human beings, picks out every man who is not white, all females no matter their color, and assumes those individuals have been dealt a bad hand and both deserve and would accept a leg up?

We have women on the rig. Some are black. Some are white. One is, like, brown. She’s a Filipina. We have black men, too—drillers, assistant drillers, toolpushers, 1^st mates, crane operators, roustabouts and chefs. You name them. They are crew members, part of the team. When someone asks me about my crew, I don’t say, “I’ve got 42 white guys, 6 Mexicans, 18 blacks, 4 women, and 1 Thai, but he was born in Texas.”

The men of color I work with are men. The women are women. To assume they need or deserve anything other than what they earn by toting their fair share of the load for 12 hours everyday is an insult to them. Just like it would be to me.

Imagine this scenario.

Ralph walked up to Bob and held out a C-note.

Bob glanced at the bill, then looked at Ralph. “What’s that for?”

Ralph shrugged. “Well, you’re black, so I just assumed ….”

Comments like VIP’s are just as insulting and ignorant.

During a recent visit with a cousin she mentioned how glamorous it must be to fly to so many different countries. I’ve never thought of flying that way. If you watch travel commercials or listen to celebs, you might get that impression.

This old roughneck has traveled all over the world stuffed into the economy section in the back of the plane with the rest of the peasants. Stand in line, wait to get on, wait to get off, numb behind, sore neck, internal clock messed up like a run over lizard, and wondering what planet I just landed on. After 12 hours, all 467 people cooped up in a 747 need a shower. The cabin smells like an outhouse doused in British Sterling cologne.

You might ask, “Why economy?” The simple answer: there’s nothing cheaper.

I walked to the back of a line in Frankfurt one time, and the man in front of me turned and said, “Thank God!”

I said, “For what?”

He said, “I’m not the last one in line anymore.”

Real funny.

Roughneck types change planes in tourist destinations like London, Paris, Rome, Frankfurt, Vienna, Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Singapore, then fly on to Pakistan, Yemen, India, Tunisia, Nigeria, Angola, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Oman and Iraq.

I’ve never sat next to newlyweds who shared honeymoon pictures of their stay in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

“Oh, yeah, this is Darla and me next to the rainbow roundabout in Dammam. The picture really doesn’t do it justice. And again here, near the Shula Mall where they behead folks on Friday afternoon after church. We almost got to see one. Oh, look, Darla, remember this picture from the newspaper when you went swimming in a bikini and attracted 10,000 Arab men to the beach? That was a time, I’ll tell ya. We nearly swam to Bahrain before we could get out of the water.”

A kid says, “I get to go to Paris.”

A driller says, “I have to go to Muscat.”

Boloney: roughneck round steak. No cheese, just one slice of meat with a smearing of Mayo smashed between two pieces of white bread. A roughneck can clench this sandwich in his teeth, throw the chain, make his tongs bite and pull the slips without losing the meat. Can’t do that with a chicken salad sandwich or leftover turkey.

I’m just a dumb old Texan, but I wonder about Oscar Meyer. Go into Piggly Wiggly and ask ‘em where they keep the boloney. You’ll find yourself in the Bologna section. Where did he get Bo-log-na? Look it up. It’s pronounced boloney. Huh? I’ll bet Italians don’t call their city “Boloney.”

I’m just saying.

I grew up on the stuff. Boloney, Spam, and Vienna Sausage, properly pronounced Vī-ēnna by any true Texican. Long i and long e. My dad used to put an er on the end. They come 5 or 6 to a tin. Thankfully I forgot how many.

Though, there was a time or two early in my oilfield career I wished I’d packed my suitcase with Bologna and Vienna Sausage instead of clothes. When the “chef” on my rig in India cooked chicken, he battered up everything but the squawk, and the pieces he served were unrecognizable. No legs, no breasts, no wings or thighs, just pieces of pieces cooked with other pieces. A battered beak still looks like a beak.

Saudi and Yemen were about the same. Come to think on it now, we had Indian cooks there, too, so …

I know of a worm roughneck who pulled out a juicy fried chicken breast his mama had prepared for him. He gnawed and smacked and sighed until he drew the undivided attention of the driller and 3 roughnecks he worked with. When he noticed them staring at him, he leaned over to peer at his driller’s round steak sandwich and said, “Wow! I can’t wait until payday. I’m going to buy me some boloney!”

Speak three languages and you’re trilingual. Speak two and you’re bilingual. Speak one and you’re American. The latter is not always true, but pretty close.

I smile when I hear parents, moms in particular, mention their toddler’s little mind. I think They’re learning to speak English, the hardest language in the world!

If to, too, two, for, fore, four, their, there, (they’re,) hear, here, right, rite, sight, site and cite aren’t confusing enough, there’s further and farther and clinch and clench.

I know an Afghani who reads, writes and speaks five languages. He grew up in a mud hut on the Paki border. I don’t even know what you call someone who speaks five languages. Pentalingual? Is that a word? No. Maybe brilliant is a better description. I always wondered what language he dreamed in.

Fly to Europe, anywhere, pick a major city in any country. Then, go for a walk with your ears open. You’ll hear German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic and English, just to name a few. Two out of three people speak two or more languages, including English.

I took Spanish in the seventh grade. After nine months, I couldn’t ask for a taco. It took me 14 years working in Saudi Arabia to acquire a good Arabic vocabulary. Come to think of it, I can’t ask for a taco in that language either.

Filipinos, Indians and Bengalis pronounce F and V as P. My name was Dabid for years, and I answered to it. I used to ask for beep steak, medium well.

So a Pill-a-pee-no (Filipino) speaks Pill-a-pee-no (Pilipino) and lives in the Pill-a-peens (Philippines,) and I’ve seen as many as pipty-pipe Pill-a-pee-nos at one time.

I know some roughneck types who crew changed in the Med, via Italy. Their driver missed the turn to the dock, and Billy Todd yelled, “Hey, Fred Bob, you speak Italian, tell him to stop!”

Fred marched halfway down the aisle and addressed the driver. “Stop-a da bus! Stop-a da bus!”

Soon after my wife and I married we drove to west Texas to visit some of my relatives. A typical March day greeted our arrival. Wind at 40, gusts 55 or beyond, temperature 50 but felt like 20 and most of the topsoil was airborne and headed for Oklahoma, so the streetlights were still lit in the middle of the afternoon. Just another day for me, I was raised there. My bride thought otherwise. Before our visit ended, I had to place my right hand over my heart and solemnly swear, cross my fingers, hope to die, that I would never, ever, in a million years, move her to Lubbock, Texas.

Poor girl. She should have said “anywhere the sands blows” because eight short years later, we moved to Saudi Arabia.

I remember the day we arrived, July 8^th, 1996, for several reasons. We were in London the day before and the sun shined all day. I’d heard Londoners had seen it before, but I’d been there a hundred times and had not experienced anything other than cold drizzle. And I remember the stares and dirty looks I received all the way from Bahrain, across the causeway, into the magic kingdom … from my wife and three kids.

Okay, I got it. It’s different. A trip into Dammam to the new Burger King for lunch would ease some anxiety. Show ’em western influence existed. We hit the drive-in and I relayed everyone’s order to the invisible lady in the microphone. When I finished, my kids wanted to know what language I spoke. “Um, Texan with a Filipino accent and Texan with an Arab accent when I said ‘same-same’ twice in a row, and three short English words with a Texas accent.” They were impressed.

Eventually, they adjusted.

Maybe not at the time, but looking back, I believe my kids would say they enjoyed that period in their lives. They experienced events and places few westerners can boast. Until recently, Saudi Arabia didn’t allow visitors, the pilgrimage to Mecca aside, but even then pilgrims aren’t allowed to venture out of that particular province.

I mean, what teenage girl can say her dad turned down ten she camels in trade for her. What teenager can say he/she travelled to Egypt to play in a soccer tournament, or played golf in Dubai, Saudi, Qatar, and Bahrain, or saw Brian Adams perform in Bahrain and Sting rock the night in Dubai?

My middle girl asked me if I attended concerts back in my high school days. Sting was her first and she was disappointed by the infrequent visits to the Middle East from the world’s performers. I told her I went to Chicago. She said, “Oh my, who did you see?”

I think about life sometimes, especially as I age. How I arrived where I am and the many close calls that could have ended my walk. Like when I thought to tap the brakes on my old pickup a mere twinkling of an instant before another pickup blazed through a stop sign, inches in front of me. I didn’t see the other vehicle. I had no clue it was coming, but I remember thinking Tap the brakes! Tap the brakes! and wondering why at the same time. I often wonder if the other guy thought Hit the Gas! Hit the Gas!

Like the day I walked into a drilling superintendent’s office looking for a job and as we shook hands, his phone rang. It happened to be one of his drillers, my first to work for, looking for a man with a weak mind and a strong back. Go figure.

Like when I decided to visit an old friend one Sunday afternoon and he was having a party. Through a friend of a friend of another friend I met my wife. That was 29 years ago.

Looking back, weighing the evidence, the more I’m convinced of “by God’s design” than “by chance.”

Relative motion is the calculation of the movement of an object in relation to another moving object. Like cars approaching an intersection from different directions or traveling the same direction at different speeds—a football and a wide receiver, a baseball and an outfielder, aircraft, ships, planets and meteors, and you and me as we journey through life.

Sometimes the twain shall meet. Sometimes not.

Anyone who uses a radar knows about relative motion. Another name for it is Hyper Physics.

We, you and me, are walking physics problems. Okay, wrong word. We’re calculations.

Once upon a time, a woman looked at me and said, “You have a problem!”

I politely said, “Thanks! I thought I had more than one.”