Rig_Life

Life on The Rigs

'" Get the Fuck - stick, you worm !"

"Get the Fuck - stick, you worm !"

It's a hard life; you've got to be aggressive.    In a tool pusher's or driller's eyes, every second spent on the rig floor is showtime,
and it's all recorded on a tower report during every shift.    There isn't much sympathy for injured or exhausted floorhands on
any rig.......because after all ........ you're getting paid!     If you bitch about the food, you're getting too much time to eat it!

Also, on a drilling rig, sympathy is found in the dictionary, between "shit" and "syphillis."

Anyone who has ever roughnecked on a drilling rig knows what those words mean.     Get ready, we're tripping, coming out, running
in, making a connection, flow check, bit change, mud motor adjustments.......it all starts with the fuck-stick.     Rig work is fast and
hard, and floorhands who aren't alert and paying attention could be (and sometimes are) injured or killed in a most brutal fashion.
While the technology on rigs has improved to a high level, the work is heavy and must still be done the old fashioned way.

Every rig floor has two sides - the stud side (above left) and the dummy side (above right).     The stud roughneck is usually the
senior or more experienced worker, although a new floorhand is often stuck on the dummy side while a greener hand runs the
stud side.     Placement can be simple; one man is more knowledgeable, experienced, tougher, aggressive or outgoing than the
other.

Floorhands often don't get along, things happen.     Workers spend almost twenty-four hours a day together for a two week
"hitch", working on average ninety to a hundred hours a week, then are sent home for a one week "long change".       Going home
means driving up to ten hours after being awake all night.    I never could get enough sleep during my five years in the oilpatch.

Note - "Long change" means you have one day off and six days to get back to the rig.

Working Alberta's drilling rigs was one of the defining experiences of my life.     It was far more dangerous, dirty, and physically
and emotionally exhausting than most people might realize.     A five year rig stint might make a man harder and meaner if he's
not careful.    You become that way just to survive the bullshit, hostility and ugliness of the situation.       And then you have to
leave that character behind and turn back into a family man once you're home again.

You become addicted to the life, the money, the days off and even the heavy work.    It felt like I would never get out of there.
Often I'd feel like just packing up my duffel bags and walking away from it, whether it was thirty or forty below zero or not; it
would have felt great, I could have walked for twenty miles, no matter how cold it was or how far I'd have to go.

I've never really gotten over it.     I left part of me there.     I've often wanted to go back, work the floor, run my tongs on the stud
side....but I forget all the bad stuff; rigging out, rigging up, moving the rig....ugh!    A lot of roughies don't spin chain well.     Ten
years later I know I could still step onto the drilling floor of a rig, throw a spinning chain on a new single and crack that whip.
Those drillers love to smell that smell of a hardened spinning chain crunching into that drill pipe.      And I gave them plenty of it.

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THE OFFICIAL WEB SITE OF HENRY F. TIMMER

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THE OFFICIAL WEB SITE OF HENRY F. TIMMER

"we're coming outta the hole!"

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