some lessons come hard

Engineers in Training

      Part of my job at Schlumberger was training new engineers who arrived in the field after recruiting programs at major colleges would find these nerds and fill their heads full of empty promises of major riches if they joined the Scumburger team. This they should have paid me extra for alone as I saved two or three of their lives, had they would have been with anyone else to train with initially. Schlumberger picked me because I had more than enough knowledge of what I was working with to help a new engineer in trouble. Between the two of us we would manage to get the job done and get him back to the shop for a little more book learning to better hone his skills.

      Somewhere back in Texas they teach these guys a Take Charge 101 class. Meaning they needed to let the seasoned veteran operators of the trucks know right off the bat who is in charge. Mistake number one and that was listening to that fool tell you any of that nonsense, as usually it was me and a rookie operator on the truck and the engineer on the job. The rookie operator was usually along as they paired inexperience with experienced operators to assure the job was completed.

       The new engineer would usually start the job off with a little speech about how they have heard stories about how things went before, and they wanted you to know that things will be different from here on out as we go along. The engineers were in charge of the crew, no doubt and they were the interface most times between the company requesting our services and our company. Beyond that the line gets fuzzy as the operators usually did most of the work and when there were problems it was usually up to the operators to sort out, and methodically go through our tools trying to identify where the problem was and how to fix it. Sometimes it just meant having another tool sent out from the shop. Yes folks Scumburger would send a new tool out from the shop in a heartbeat, but wouldn’t send anyone to relieve you if you were working on days off. Never could figure that except humans are expendable I guess.

      We would lead the engineer to the site for his first time in his new Ford LTD, back then they were big boats and part of his employment package he received. The company would buy him a new car to use while in their employ, and then sign him into a nice little contract with no money. Then they would train them in Texas in the dust, then send them to Ohio for mud and recreation climbing on slippery drilling platforms slick with new snow fall in tennis shoes. You could try to tell them after the pep talk that the tennis shoes may not cut it out in the oil fields, but you knew they knew better so you just stand and wait for them to fall flat on their face. They usually did. The engineers had book smarts and were usually electrical engineers or mechanical engineers from good colleges, and most were smart people but lacked a lot of common sense, and as we would say in the field , some had the personality of a rubber boot, with an I can do anything attitude. Probably reinforced by an over protective mother who had no idea at all what she was letting her little Johnny get in to.

       After a few jobs they would get an idea of what they were up against and the wardrobe would change as well the footwear usually changed, and gloves were bought and used. It didn’t take them long in the oilfield to season them into veterans as feelings were rarely hurt anymore and they knew who to develop alliances with to save their butts in times of crisis. On one occasion a newbie engineer and I, were sent out alone for the first time to an oil well in the middle of the night. He didn’t have much time to give me his speech as he had to hurry and grab his Ford LTD and chase my taillights across Ohio to the Youngtown area and a newly drilled in well about a half mile off the road on a mud path.

    I was in a hurry to get the job done and had the truck ready and loaded to go, as it was about  time for my days off, and I really had some plans and didn’t want the oilfields to spoil it or cheat me out of anything so we just took off. I led him to the job site and was able to stay in front of him most of the way with the truck. Dozers were waiting as we closed in on the rig and traction was good coming in on the road. The engineer refused to leave his car by the road and insisted on bringing it back to the location of the oil well. I encouraged him and pleaded with him to leave it by the road. But he was afraid they would steal the blue and white boat and he would never see it again. So he managed to get it close to the rig and then hung it in a mud puddle and I told him to leave it. the drill crew  hooked on to my truck with a dozer and finished pulling me  to the end of the catwalk , then unhooked went around to the rear and slid me around till I was facing away from the derrick,  and the winch was on the back. I hooked up a wheel we used on the draw works of the derrick and soon we were heading down hole and logging the well.

     For his first time the engineer was a  bit apprehensive, and over compensating to make sure he did everything  right.  I assured him he did a great job, as good as a rookie could do. Warren seemed like a real nice guy, and unlike a lot of these guys that come out of the Scumburger school of hard knocks to become engineers. I kinda liked the guy till he climbed in his Ford LTD and started to leave the site. He was in front of me now and his common sense and likability was running real close to empty as he would go 10 feet and get stuck. I would hook a chain to my truck and pull him out, with me always being the one hooking and unhooking. After about four or five times of this I was having doubts he would make it off this site alive and knew I had to find a better plan to let him live as I was about to kill him.

    I persuaded him to move his car off to the side of the road so I could get past him with my truck which had 40 speeds forward and 8 reverse and was like a tank on wheels and could easily move through four inches of mud if I had a solid bottom underneath. It would go anywhere if I didn’t have to stop for the dumbass engineer in front of me. He sensed my frustration and tried the best he could to get around to my side. I was standing beside the truck mid ways on the same side he was back to instructing him how to gun the engine and get a run for it in the mud to get his momentum going, and then he could maneuver the car around to my side. He was reluctant to push his new blue and white boat to hard till I finally yelled at him to gun it after about three or four tries, and he did. He slammed his foot down on the gas pedal and the LTD launched backwards and now it had me pinned between the truck and the car as he was out of control and then the car’s front end was sliding towards me in slow motion as he slams on the brakes to try to stop.

   The corner of the fender was heading straight for my crotch in the dimly lit night and it called for immediate reaction to the event, and so I jumped up straight into the air and when I came down I landed right on the corner of his fender sitting on his car a leg on each side of the corner, because the car actually hit the tire of the truck and stopped just as I had jumped in the air and I was pinned. I looked at Warren in the seat of the car and told him to not touch anything or I would kill him. His mouth dropped even lower and his hands went in the air. I told him to put the car in park and climb out of the vehicle. He did as he was told. I turned sideways and pulled my leg up over the corner of his car and off to my relief and I wasn’t hurt. I looked at his car’s front end and it wasn’t hurt, as these things were also tanks. Warren was shook up to say the least; he thought I was a goner at his hands and all this on his first job at Scumburgers. I convinced him I was ok and that he needed to let me drive his car. I put it in reverse and it backed away enough from the truck to allow me to get in front of it with the truck. I hooked a chain to his car and drug his car out to the road.

    That new Ford LTD looked like a turd on wheels there was hardly a square inch that didn’t have some kind of mud attached to it. We stopped at a car wash on the way back and I treated him to a car wash to get the worse off of it because the windows were obscured with mud, and really no one at the shop needed to know what went on that night. If Warren would have listened to me and left his car at the road it would have been an easy job, but instead he learned a lesson about listening to his operators in the field. I learned a lesson to never allow myself to be pinned in like that again. I was lucky and if the same happened today, doubt if I would have been so lucky.  Warren and I kept it between ourselves and in the end he turned out to be one of the best engineers I worked for because we of the respect we had for each other.

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