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Oil Field Anecdote: Trump Edition
I am back in the Eagle Ford Shale south of San Antonio moving Patterson 224 to its next 2 well pad. There are some unwritten rules in the oil field about things not discussed: anyone’s wife, religion, and politics.
The religion aspect is always fun/interesting to break the ice. If I am on a new rig and we are going to eat together I catch everyone looking around wondering if we are going to pray or eat and I will break the silence, me or someone else offers the Blessing, and dinner is over in about four minutes. After that it is assumed we will pray together, next thing you know the cussing has stopped, etc. It is fun to witness.
Outside of an occasional Obama joke, politics is strictly off limits and that works for me. The oil field is a break from the real world and chance to deal with real people not afraid of hard work.
Before we move the rig we have a premove meeting; usually six guys, all supervisors. I get everyone’s inputs, limitations, equipment, maintenance requirements, route restrictions, permit issues, etc., and assemble it into a plan that we execute about as long as lunch.
It is always good to see the gang again after a couple of weeks. I figured BS time would be filled with the start of football season until our trucking safety supervisor, a 26-year Army Retired Sargent Major, asked if anyone was going to watch the debate tonight. Everyone in the room stood up and roared, hell yeah, Trump is gonna kick their _, finally we have someone saying what I am thinking, etc.
We never, ever talk politics on a drilling rig and in a split-second we had an old fashioned church tent revival going and the subject was Trump. I was silent and making the stupid face. This is a non-partisan group whose life is the oil field and to a man the agreement was that Trump was a fighter and they are tired of the Republicans’ BS (there aren’t many/any democrats out here, we just don’t talk about it).
To Ricochet member King Prawn: I finally saw what you’ve been talking about. It is more real than I imagined. Whether it has legs or not remains to be seen.
Published in General
Good words. I think we have to be very careful how we characterize wealth and its creation. The rhetoric of the left is that anyone who is wealthy became that way at the expense of others, that wealth creation is a zero sum game and someone has to lose for someone to win. While that is true in futures markets it isn’t economically sound.
Crony capitalism contributes to wealth inequality, but many of the people whose wealth grew during this downturn aren’t criminals or cronists and we should emulate, not indict them.