While most people won’t admit it, there are few things funnier in life than the self inflicted misery of others. Oh come on! You’ve never had friends go out drinking and wake up looking like they’ve been drug through a knothole? Did you help them out by talking loudly, banging pots and offering them an incredibly greasy breakfast? I know I did.
Of course the more character building self inflicted misery happens during work. I stumbled across the featured image of this post while looking for an even older photo. It was from a now long ago time when I spent a week attending a drilling school in Enid, Oklahoma at the Gefco facilities. It was an intensely compressed version of a Canadian college program. One of the big features was being able to go out and help run one of the shiny new rigs while the instructors taught us about various safety measures.
I do mean shiny new. One of the students in the class was from a charity in south America which had just bought 3 rigs and the one we were using was “just completed.” While some questioned why anyone would want their rig used before shipping, I posited the idea it was better to find out before it got to South America a needed part or tweak was sitting at the shop in Oklahoma. Yes, the entire class was helping the charity kick the tires on this thing before it was loaded into a container. While I was a neophyte, many in the class had a decade or more of drilling experience behind them. There is a continuing education requirement in most states and this course qualified. Attending the course is still one of my more rewarding experiences.
Anyone who hasn’t had a demonstration go completely sideways simply hasn’t done enough demonstrations. While hard drives and power supplies are far better today than they were in the 1980s, you can still have the occasional physical catastrophe. God forbid you are what has to be the last person pushing a product for Windows (remember that obsolete operating system?) There is nothing finer than testing everything out only to see the yellow arrow on shutdown indicating Microsoft “helped you out” by forcing updates onto your computer and the shutdown process is going to load them no matter what you want. Yes, those updates are going to completely hose either your demo or your computer. Why? Because you need it to work first thing tomorrow and there isn’t time to test everything again.
Don’t believe me? Do a Web search for “windows won’t boot after update” and look at the hundreds of columns with advice, work arounds and people who finally had to re-install everything. Those articles exist for a reason.
Thus was the fate of the instructors. We fired her up, mixed the mud and sure enough, something went wrong. It wasn’t a big something, just enough of a something to take a good 20 minutes to find then fix. The student from the charity was actually really happy the problem happened here. An annoyance here could have shut the rig down for weeks waiting for some little piece of something to be shipped to the middle of nowhere. I mean that statement literally. They were drilling water wells for farms and tiny villages days away from civilization. Such charities also serve extremely remote regions in other countries. This tiny hiccup we can all laugh about today is a devastating thing in a remote region where you have to make a road good enough to get the rig there. Those 3 foot wide mountain/jungle walking paths won’t work. You a full highway lane width and bridges which can support 40 ton.
Some charities were, I don’t know if they still are, taking things like the Hydra-Drill into remote regions because everything could be put on pack animals. I actually had one of those drills during my youth. It was a lot of fun to play with. It also taught me the truth to the old adage “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.”
