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A true portrait of the Texas oil patch. Drawn from life, painted a couple of years later. The whole thing is a gamble, and the only way to win is to provide oilfield services and don't live too high. That's because if you provide services, such as well logging, workovers/swabbing, and renting out spare parts with suggestive names like "mud cross" "mare's tail" "beaver slide" etc., you get paid whether they make a good well or not.
Remember to leave while you're ahead--and still have all your fingers.
Remember to leave while you're ahead--and still have all your fingers.
Category Artwork (Traditional) / Human
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 1280 x 758px
File Size 203.2 kB
A mare's tail is (I've never seen one, but I type up the workover reports) a sort of brush they stick down the inside of the tubing. The workover rig runs it down and up the length of the tubing to remove buildups of paraffin--the same stuff that makes Dairy Queen's chocolate dip--cones.
Dairy Queen also uses bentonite, an ingredient in drilling mud, to make their "Blizzard" ice-milk+candy products. Perfectly harmless, like paraffin, but it's kinda weird to eat oilfield products. Especially in little oil towns...
Dairy Queen also uses bentonite, an ingredient in drilling mud, to make their "Blizzard" ice-milk+candy products. Perfectly harmless, like paraffin, but it's kinda weird to eat oilfield products. Especially in little oil towns...
I really need to begin composing a little cartoon book about defensive driving in the oil patch. I might even make it furry or part furry...nobody would notice my secret pleasure in doing so. I think it's likely that automobile accidents are the #1 cause of death and injury (read: death and worse) in the oilfield, just as it is in mining. As I recall, more people get killed in their cars coming and going from the mine, and driving on the job site, than are killed by the less prosaic accidents--explosions, flooding, rock bursts, highwall collapses, etc.
I lost my mentor and most excellent grand-dad figure to a one-car accident in 1996. He was driving while exhausted and ran off the road in the flat part of Texas. I couldn't have saved him, but maybe somebody else would read such a pamphlet.
I lost my mentor and most excellent grand-dad figure to a one-car accident in 1996. He was driving while exhausted and ran off the road in the flat part of Texas. I couldn't have saved him, but maybe somebody else would read such a pamphlet.
You seem to have grown up out there...yes...one freezing night south of Crane, Texas, I found myself holding a 9-inch piece of 2X4 over a bit of PVC pipe while a roughneck who had been awake for 8 days bashed it repeatedly with a sledge hammer. My continued ability to draw comes from looking at my fingers later and asking myself "is it possible that I will need these in the future? Because they sure are expendable out here."
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