by This Is Not a Drill- Just Another Glorious Day in the Oilfield (retail) (epub)
‘I’ll give it some thought,’ said Don and burst out laughing.
Almost an hour later Ambu finally came out, armed with lots of paper so he could go down the hall and give blood, and pee in one cup and poo in another. In the past, after receiving instructions to bring back a ‘stool’ sample, Ambu has gone off and returned with furniture, ice-cream, even cigarettes. The cups they give you for urine and faeces are the same size and dimensions; however, the main difference between them is that the one marked for number twos has a tiny shovel attached to the lid. So even if you had not yet mastered the English language, you should understand the purpose for putting the little shovel in the lid, thereby distinguishing the vessel’s intended contents. This time Ambu got it right and he returned some time later, smiling, casually walking past us holding his cup that had an entire foot-long turd jutting out the top.
Two days went by, spent mostly in the Singapore workshop pretending to work, then we got the okay to go on our next job, in sunny Bangladesh.
If my career was a house, with Japan being the lounge room, then Bangladesh is the remains which stand in that muddy patch of the backyard.
The flight was average, only remarkable because Don didn’t stab anyone, or make obscene hand gestures at old people, or ask complete strangers to pull his finger, or drink soy sauce, or push foreign objects up his nose and wander into first class, or stare at small children until they got paranoid, or push John’s face into his lunch, or strike up a conversation with a pretty girl in one of five languages only to start faking a twitch, or sniff hair, or smoke in the toilet—I could go on for days. We landed in Chittagong, and we gathered around the luggage carousel to wait for our offshore bags to trundle by. An hour later they appeared, and we filtered through customs and into the arrival hall.
Usually we have an agent or representative there to meet us, someone who has all the local info. They would help organise transport to and from a hotel, and to the heliport, for example, or bail Don out of the local lock-up in time for him to make it to the job, or pay off the local heavies after he put someone through a window, that kind of thing. But here we had nothing organised, so we ended up pairing off and climbing into three equally diabolical-looking, three-wheeler tuktuk things. My first car, a Holden Torana, was much like a two-door V8-powered strip club; it could kill half the Amazon every time you floored it. My current car is also a Holden, only a new one; it trundles along on a shot glass of fuel and Chanel No.5 comes out the tailpipe. What we really needed right now was a ‘Paris to Dakar’ Land Rover, especially when getting to the hotel turned out to be one giant game of chicken.
In Bangladesh, the crap coming from the exhaust of our transport was black but actually cleaner than the air that went in. The air was so filthy that when the six of us walked into the hotel lobby, we looked like we’d just arrived for the Al Jolson convention.
Our chopper out to the rig was going to be early the next morning so we all shuffled off to our rooms to relax and get some sleep. The hotel looked like a derelict building would if you wallpapered it and put gyprock over all the holes. I kicked the door shut and walked across the room to dump my thirty-kilo offshore bag on the desk. On the floor there was a nasty-looking purple oval rug, and as soon as my right foot hit the middle, it disappeared into the floor. My bag combined with my bodyweight was too much for the old floorboards, so there I was, looking at my left leg jutting straight out from under me. I was surprised that I could hear Don swearing. I scrambled to get up, luckily the rug had protected my right leg from the splintered wood. I pulled the rug back up, got down on all fours and peered through the hole into the room below me. Don was sitting on a chair, smoking a cigar and looking up at me. We laughed for a full five minutes.
At the time, Bangladesh was experiencing some problems of its own. In Dakar the people were rioting and this had spread to the outlying areas, so to be on the safe side we all stayed indoors that night. Not that an upset local here is a big problem; if we were in Korea, I’d be worried. We were in Seoul once when the locals decided to have a riot, and no-one goes off like the Koreans. They all go at it like their hair is on fire, I especially like the matching headbands. As we were about to leave, Don went missing. He’d gone out drinking the night before the riot started and never came back to the hotel. So eventually we packed up his gear—I had his passport and offshore pass—paid his bill and left for the harbour to jump on a supply vessel bound for the rig. At the last minute Don arrived at the jetty in the back of a packed ute, with his new friends chanting and punching the air. Don didn’t have any of his original clothing on, he was wearing a headband and sporting a split lip, and didn’t even know what the riot was about.
The Bangladeshi rig was a joke. It sat in the middle of a swamp, an old Russian jack-up that was more rust than anything else.
The company man was a perfect caricature of a company man. The brim of his massive plastic ten-gallon cowboy safety hard-hat came round the corner, followed several minutes later by a beer gut and a classic old-school oilfield attitude. They’re thinning out now, these older guys; one by one they’re retiring. They came up in the days when the rigs were hard as fuck, and they were screamed at, abused and tormented by tool pushers and drillers who would appear quite mad on a drill floor now. The ones who survived were the hardest, and it’s these characters who you see now and again running a drilling operation. You can tell if they’re old-school simply by the way they walk, and the way they will run off (fire) someone for no reason, but I like them because of what they say. And at least you know exactly where you stand.
‘How’s it going?’ I nodded towards the drill floor, smiled and stuck out my hand.
The company man spat a wad of chewing tobacco on the floor, crushed my hand until my toes hurt and grinned. ‘There’s more oil in ma fuckin’ hair. Check your tools.’ He turned and sauntered off, packing a new wad of chew into his black bottom lip.
Two weeks later I’d lost nine kilos, apparently the average for anyone who ate in the galley. The rig had tried to kill us from the outside too, the main staircase simply falling off one afternoon, just after we had all used it. Then the next day a five-inch gooseneck fitting protruding from the floor exploded across the main deck with 2800 psi behind it. That’s a bit like putting a landmine in the local park.
The whole operation was a mess, and after all the drilling was done, we didn’t find a thing.
Things come full circle eventually; time catches up with all of us in one way or another. I’m happy, in all of the four dimensions. For me the rigs are an endless source of adventure and torture at the same time.
I’m sitting in a small crew room next to a land rig in the Japanese mountains as I write this. I’ve been up for more than thirty hours, the coffee is shit and it’s starting to wear off. The blizzard outside the door has turned the rig white, and I can just make out the drill floor through the horizontal snow. Ambu and Don are asleep on the floor near the heater; I’ll wake them up soon so we can help the guys on tower to rig down. We’re all getting older—half of the crew are hitting their mid-fifties—and pretty soon it will be like running pipe with the cast from Cocoon. We’ll shuffle in walking frames towards the rig and hope no-one puts their back out.
You get used to the oil patch, and you become used to white noise, to pain, to wearing huge industrial orange earplugs to bed every night because the big guy in the bunk above you snores like my mate Steve’s French Mastiff being hot-waxed, and come to think of it you get used to the guy who looks and acts like Steve’s dog. Now I’m talking about a gigantic drooling beast that lays all over the furniture, only gets up to eat and wets itself when you come home. Imagine a grown man that can do an ‘excitement wee’ after hearing the words ‘chopper home’.
By tomorrow Don will be trying to drag Erwin and me out of a Tokyo motorcycle shop and into a bar, Ambu will be eating something that looks like it was rolled onto his plate by a dung beetle, and Jake will be getting new ink via a bamboo needle and
the steady hand of a master tattoo artist apparently favoured by the Japanese mafia. The rest of us will fall back happy in each other’s company.
Erwin just picked up the last stand of pipe to run in the hole. It’s 2 a.m., Tuesday I think. The last stand, the last job for this year. I wonder what Clare is doing. She’ll be happy to know I’ll make it home for Christmas. I pick up the payphone on the wall in front of me and dial home, the sound of Clare’s voice transporting me to a better place. For anyone who does what we do for a living, you don’t need me to tell you how hard it is to maintain a normal relationship. Drilling rigs have been looming over my subconscious like a fat oilfield zeppelin ever since we decided to start a family.
‘There’s a letter here for you,’ Clare says. I ask her to open it. ‘It’s good news.’ She is smiling, I can hear it in her voice. ‘You know that oilfield desk job you always wanted to have a go at? Well, I’m looking at it.’ I’m ecstatic, I’ve been waiting for that letter for more than a year. My phonecard is about to run out. ‘One more thing, honey,’ she says, ‘I’m pregnant.’ The line beeps and cuts off.
Erwin comes through the door, stamping the snow off his feet and waking up the sleeping beauties. The wind snatches the door and slams it shut behind him, leaving the cabin looking like a pillow just exploded. No-one notices the blank look on my face. Erwin pulls off his hard-hat, and that smile spreads across his face through the melting snow around his upturned collar. He cracks his neck and rubs the back of his right knee—it gets sore in the cold after one too many bike crashes and thirty years on the rigs. ‘Just another glorious day in the oilfield,’ he says and grins.
13 THE WHOLE OIL THING
I wanted to round everything out, I wanted to have a conclusion, an answer. I set out to make something as smooth as the prime minister’s bedsheets, but somehow I ended up with an oily rag.
Time is money in oil. Every minute, every hour, every single day, year after year, the BPD (barrels per day) must keep pumping life into the system, a system that since the end of World War II has grown into a monster with an appetite that redefines insatiable. Feeding the monster via our global umbilical network has given us ease of progression into a new disposable push-button life, but mother’s milk is going to give us all umbilical whiplash that could take it all away forever.
Perhaps I have a jilted, somewhat negative view of human nature. After all, we’re products of our environment. I’m free, I live in a free market economy, I have the right to choose everything from soap to government, I can make or lose money according to my individual goals or fuck-ups, and if I don’t like any of that I’m free to piss off and live somewhere else.
The huge amounts of money we spend fighting wars for oil and building ever-smarter smart bombs could perhaps be spent on deepwater exploration. Instead we feed our lust for selective destruction; now there are bombs which discreetly enter buildings through the letterbox and vaporise anyone whose eyebrows are too close together. It’s a lot like the space race in the 1960s, when the sheer idea of getting to the moon was unbelievable, back when bombs just went bang and history judged the military not by what they aimed at but by what they hit. Why is this Earth-bound frontier so formidable, or own inner space overlooked?
This is an ocean planet. It’s so big and completely mystifying. Take the Pacific Ocean: it covers half the globe, and you can jump on a plane and fly non-stop for twelve hours and not see any land. How much oil lies out there? All of the offshore drilling so far has occurred around the edges if you like. The future is a race to meet demand by pushing the boundaries of deepwater exploration. And the open sea is a formidable opponent. Off the coast of West Africa at the moment we are drilling into the seabed without damaging the life that exists there, other than the hole itself in six thousand feet of water, and down to twenty thousand feet of real estate, but we are far from reaching the uncharted depths. Sixty per cent of the planet is covered in water more than a mile deep, and it’s largely unknown; more people have been into space than have explored the deep sea.
To drill for new oil out there, within the most powerful force in nature, will take engineering like never before. There could be trillions of barrels out there, enough for us to stop killing one another long enough to find an alternative to fossil fuels that works. Out in the open sea, a rig is vulnerable; forget the sheer depth, the surface alone can slap a rig around with a savagery that’s difficult to describe in print. I’ve been offshore in bad weather and felt real fear pulling at my ‘what if’ strings; anyone who has looked over the deck into a dark, heaving, white-capped, freezing liquid hell will know what I’m talking about.
Mother Nature is to be feared and respected like no other, but perhaps we have finally reached a point where we can beat her down. We are neither savage nor wise, it’s our half-measures that are the worst of it for Mother Nature. Overharvesting, deforestation, habitat destruction, war and pollution will cause, possibly within a hundred years, the biggest mass extinction event since the end of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. In the beginning Mother Nature reached our soil and made it hers. After only a million years or so of doing nothing, we have come leaps and bounds, especially in the last hundred years, a millisecond for her. Old greed and corruption dies hard, makes men blind, drives them mad enough to devour her heart and turn her into a memory walled up in a zoo. There is more life on our planet right now than ever before, more than one and a half million different life forms exist. These are remarkable times; this new century will mark either the greatest era of human discovery or the end of 50 per cent of our planet’s biodiversity.
But that’s just my opinion. Any questions you may have, please direct them to: [email protected].
Readers’ reviews and emails to Paul Carter for Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, She Thinks I’m a Piano Player in a Whorehouse
Hi, Paul, that was one of the best books I’ve ever read, and I’ve read friggin heaps. Just wanted to tell you that was the closest I’ve ever come to pissing my pants laughing whilst reading a book. Please write more.
Al
Have you ever picked up a book and not been able to put it down? I was literally in tears last night I was laughing so hard. The funniest book I have ever read, by miles. Although I am paying for it now after sitting up till 3am this morning to finish it. Highly recommended.
Ron
Great book, never have I experienced belly laugh with a book. My wife thought I was nuts. Hurry up and write another!!
Craig, New Zealand
Paul, just read your book on a flight across to the US on business. One of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time. I think the cabin crew were not far from sectioning me when I read the bits about Joe the monkey. Good luck and keep up the good work.
Andy
Thanks for a great read. It’s the first book I’ve ever bought and I couldn’t put it down. I read it in two days. It has opened my eyes to the world. I’m gonna have to get off my arse and do some travelling. Thanks mate ya truly bloody Australian!
Wesley
My husband is a sat diver (we have been together for coming up 13 years now) and I have just finished reading your book—I couldn’t put it down until I finished it. I have never laughed so fucking much in my life.
You described so much of what I have heard of. I wanted to thank you for writing your experiences down as I was able to see them clearly and in turn see my husband’s experiences more clearly—and shudder whilst giggling about them!
Our 15-year-old son has just grabbed it and is already laughing and coming in and pointing out places that he has heard about and telling me that ‘Dad has done stuff like that too’. When our 10-year-old grows up more he will read it too and will be able to learn more about Dad’s other life.
I learnt today that your book is doing the rounds of the vessel that my husband is on in the Gulf of Mexico and all the boys out there are enjoying the read—even the ones that don’t read are reading it!
You
are truly a fucking champion and thank you for bringing a smile to a rig pig’s wife!
Jen
Hi Paul,
I’m an Aussie living in London and a mate’s just returned home from Sydney with your book. I’m down to the last 10 pages and I don’t want it to end. I’m not normally much of a reader but luckily yours fell within my ‘under 200 pages’ limit and scored double bonus points for ‘big words AND pictures’ : ) Above all it’s very very funny shit.
Would love to buy you a beer . . . in fact there’s a small fan club of mates now that agree we’d just sit ya down, get ya drunk and let YOU do the talking.
Congratulations on the book you’ve done a fantastic job. I can’t wait for the next one.
Sam
Hello there, just finished ‘dont tell mum’, fuckin brilliant book, couldn’t put it down. Keep ’em coming Paul, highly entertaining when you’re sitting in your cabin.
Dan
Dear Paul,
Just read your book non-stop in a three-hour sitting. As the partner of an Aberdeen offshore worker and having lived in the oil community for most of my life I just wanted to say how utterly marvellous your book is and how much I enjoyed it. I laughed like a drain from start to finish. Many thanks for a hugely entertaining evening!!!
Fiona
A mate leant me your book, read it twice in 2 days when I was in Bali in March. A lot of people stared at me and gave me a wide berth because I was laughing so hard I had tears running down my face . . . can’t wait for your next book.
Anonymous
Hi Paul, I picked up your book in the A&R bookstore yesterday and wanted to let you know that I’m loving it. Wonderful storyteller. You have me captivated. I’ll be buying my Dad a copy for Father’s Day. He’s about to head off to WA to drive dump trucks at an iron ore mine. My Uncle works on the oil rigs. Maori guy . . . called Tom Ormond . . . laughs . . . well you never know! All the best for the second book.