half right

Hilarious little story from a rig a couple weeks ago. As long as you like racial humor. And you know basic facts about me. Otherwise, you might as well go away now.

I was out treating (another word for supervising) a job. The crew I happened to be with was made up of three operators and a HIT field engineer from Angola.

A quick explanation. HIT stands for high intensity training, which is when someone from a district that does not perform many jobs is sent to a district that performs many jobs in order to gain field experience. Principally, this means sending field engineers from overseas, especially offshore districts where jobs tend to be relatively complex (high tier), but happen infrequently (low volume). That's a big contrast from most of the US land work which is usually low to medium tier and high volume. A low volume district might perform as few as two or three jobs in a month whereas a high volume district could potentially do more than 100.

Getting back to the short story, now is the time for the racial part. The three operators all happened to be black and I'm pretty sure the field engineer from Angola is self explanatory. There aren't a lot of black people in Farmington as one can see from this handy census chart so there aren't many at work either. Thus, this was a bit of coincidence that they were all on the same job. The rig crew on duty was all white though I suppose I only highlight this point to make a comment about rig crews. Most of the crew shifts on most of the drilling rigs around here are all white. Non-white crew members tend to end up on the same shift and about half of all workover rigs are made up of all minorities. (If you worked in the business, it might become apparent why that is so, but I'm not going to explain it here.) Anyway, most of the rig crews are helpful and friendly guys (almost no women work on rigs) and this rig was no exception. (I think I've only seen one female rig hand ever.)

While we perform our job on a rig, there isn't all that much for the rig crew to be doing aside from cleaning and watching returns if they feel like it. I need to watch returns during the latter half of a job to make sure we don't have lost circulation because we eventually want to get cement back to surface so we know it fills up the entire annulus. As such, towards the end of a job, all I'm really doing (but don't tell anyone) is watching fluid flow from a pipe that goes from the well to the reserve pit. Anyway, the company man usually watches too and it’s a good time to generally joke around with him and some of the rig hands.

On this job, I was standing a little aside from everyone at one point. I often walk around a lot at this point in a job to check other things as well so I end up coming back to watch returns from different spots. While I was aside, one of the rig hands came up to me and said, "So you're about the only white boy on this crew" or something very similar to that. To which I replied, "Well, you got that half right" and walked away to check something else and laugh a bit.