Quite a few years ago, I was roughnecking for one of my best friends. Besides me and the driller, the rest of the crew consisted of my friend's brother-in-law and a guy who I knew, but not very well. I knew his family, though, because his dad had worked for my grandfather in the oil field. For the life of me, I can't remember the guy's name...but that's not important for this story. I'm sure he would want to remain anonymous and I can't say as I'd blame him.
We worked nights - morning tour (pronounced "tower") and on the way home, the guy, like many of the guys I worked with, liked to drink beer. Before you gag, remember that night shift workers have their days turned around and 7:00 a.m. is like 5:00 p.m. to everyone else. I've never been much of a drinker and especially when I worked that shift. Drinking upsets my sleep and it's hard enough getting rest during the day, what with the usual daytime noises.
The guy whose family I knew liked to drink any chance he got, though, and that morning when he cracked open his first beer I got the impression that he had started drinking even before the shift was over. (really stupid thing to do on a drilling rig - they're dangerous places to work even when you have all your senses about you) By the time we dropped him off, he was sloshing drunk. We watched him stagger up the sidewalk to his front door and as we drove off, made wisecracks about his wife being angry with him and hoping he wouldn't have a hangover that night at work.
The day passed, I got what rest I could trying to sleep during the day and when my boss picked me up, we headed straight on to work without picking up the guy. I asked where he was and was told his wife had called and said he couldn't make it, that earlier he had suffered an accident at home and had been forced to go to the emergency room.
We guessed at what had happened - his wife had hit him with a frying pan when he came in drunk, he had slipped in the shower or maybe he had continued his drinking when he got home and was just too drunk to go to work and the ER story was just an excuse to keep from being fired. Even though we were short-handed, we thankfully got through the shift without too much trouble. Another day went by and it was time to go to work again. This time, however, the guy was ready to go to work and on the way to the rig, told us why he had missed the previous night.
"I was really drunk when I got home." he started his story with an obvious fact. "My old lady woke up when I fell down in the living room and gave me hell for a while." (That was something else we had figured would happen, duh.) He went on: "I really needed to pee, so I went into the bathroom and started peein' like a Russian racehorse when I noticed a loose thread hanging from my fly. I pulled on the thread but it wouldn't come loose. There was a piece of broken mirror on the toilet lid (probably the result of a previous drunken episode, I thought) so I picked up the jagged glass and slashed at the thread."
Get the picture? Do I need to spell it out for you? I don't think I will. When we got out to the rig and started changing clothes, he showed us his injury. It was close to the top of "it" and had required 27 stitches to close.
Made me cringe then, makes me cringe now. There's a moral to the story, but you can supply your own, I'd wager.
I quit that job after a while, then a few months later I came back to work for my friend. In that time, the guy had also quit and and had also come back to work on the rig, but on a different shift. We passed by an ambulance on the way to work and nervously hoped it wasn't coming from our rig....but it was. The injured party was the same guy! He had to go up in the derrick and must have been semi-drunk when he did because he forgot to put on his safety belt and fell out. He slowed his fall some by grabbing onto a cable but still hit hard enough to break several bones. That was lucky - in a way - but even though he didn't hit as hard as he could have, he landed a-straddle the drawworks guard. He managed to avoid crushing "anything important", but he was split from his rectum to nearly his belly button. That makes me cringe even worse than thinking about his other injury.
That's not really funny, not unless you have a sadistic sense of humor. Maybe I do have a sadistic sense of humor because it reminds me of an old joke:
Johnny's mother sent him to the store for a loaf of bread. He was walking home, the loaf of bread under one arm and the hand of his free arm stuck deep in his pocket, when he bumped into the pastor of his church.
"Afternoon, Johnny!" said the preacher. "I see you have the staff of life in one hand; what do you have in the other?"
"Oh," sheepishly replied Johnny. "That's a loaf of bread."
