It was a 6.5 hour drive from our previous job to this one. Since we'd left Edmonton the morning before I'd slept about 2 hours (now some 30 hours prior) and at this point things had already started going bad. When I get to a well site I need to go find the geologists trailer and get a bunch of data off of him. The first problem is he was missing in action. I knocked on a few wrong doors, woke up a few angry people at 4:00 am but eventually found the guy and go figure, he barely speaks english. He tells me a bunch of the data I need to know, only to find out at the end of the job after I'd printed everything out and sent it in that it was wrong. Normal wells are drilled straight up and down and this one was at a 45* angle meaning I had twice the work that needed to get done and every half an hour the geologist would come into my truck "Can I have my prints?" with my reply "My tools aren't at surface yet, I havn't finished logging let alone all the processing required. I'll get them too you as quick as I can". Let's just say by the end of the job I was a little less than friendly each time he came into my truck. The worst part of the entire job was a deviation survey that I had to enter into my computer at the beginning of the job that the geologist gave me had 1 line of bad data in it making half of my prints wrong and he was blaming it all on me. It took the next 4 days to reprocess all the data the way they wanted it and so far goes down as the worst job I've ever been on... but the nicest sunrise, go figure. I'll happily trade just normal sun rises if I never have a job go bad again.

Taken in West Texas back in the 1940's. The men were hard working roughnecks, legends were being made. Some "oilfield trash" still are talked about, admiring their skills and drive. On the far left Marquis "Puss" Irwin, 4th from left, Bill "Bear" Irwin, and on the right, H.D. Stout. "Puss" was Bill's dad, and "broke him out" into the oilfield, along with my uncle Spooky, my dad, and many other good men. The boxes contain drill bits, this was taken to send home to their families to wish a Merry Christmas. Note that the hard hats are metal, they are not allowed to wear metal hard hats anymore, they were outlawed as a result of accidents such as electrocution, or the metal simply being mashed from a falling object... Today, the term "when rigs were made of wood and men made of iron" is an expression to describe how tough men had to be to live this life. And a few of those iron men are still around, talking about the dangers, and re-living the thrills.