A hilarious book about life at oilfields

“Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs: She Thinks I’m a Piano Player In a Whorehouse” by Paul Carter

This is a hilarious autobiography of this bloke with an endearing nickname Pauli, who works at the rigs but with more stories about his drunken adventures and shenanigans off-site than his professional endeavors.

Yes, the content of the book is exactly what you would imagine from its title. It is a raw (very raw) account of how crazy life can get when you work at various different oilfields around the world.

The beauty of working at a rig is that you get to have intermittent long breaks in between intense work. Hence, the abundance of epic stories from our guy Paul Carter. During his off seasons, he went to Thailand to participate in Songkran, watched a cockfight in Manila (with chicken “looked a bit like Tina Turner”), went to Tunisia for a month and come back broke but with loads of polaroid and drunken stories, somehow ended up joining the Freemason’s, or partying at a bar served exclusively by midgets.

Or that time he acquired a pet monkey in Brunei by exchanging it with company cap and t-shirt and taught it to love beer, cigarette, and speed metal music; but then it learned to masturbate 10x a day and caused all sorts of chaos when it hit monkey puberty. Or that time when he went to a pub in a deserted Western Australian town to have a beer and ended up carrying his mate to an ER with a disfigured face after being caught in a brawl.

Yes, trouble seems to follow him wherever he goes, like being chased by 2 cobras in Borneo, got arrested in Vietnam, chipping a tooth in a crowded Jeep transportation in Philippines, caught dysentery in Papua New Guinea, got surrounded by dangerous thugs who all hitting his car in Nigeria, caught in a house fire (also in Nigeria), witnessed a murder (still in Nigeria), got into a car chase with the police in China, experienced several earthquake seemingly wherever he went, and typhoons, getting caught in the middle of a gun fight, got hit by a car while riding a bike in Sydney, or went to Japan for a clean and civilized project for a change but ended up having a pervert guide who buys a soiled underpant (and a dirty love letter) from a vending machine.

And then, of course, there’s the on-the-job tales. The accidents, the natural disasters, the treat of local uprising, and the way these professionals handle them are a sight to be seen. The most bizarre experience that he told was probably the one from when he ended up working in Yuzhno Russia, a place with temperature as low as minus 60 degree Celsius and the highest crime rate in the entire Russian Federation, and his 2nd gig at another remote area in Russia where he got to stay at a former asylum building (a nut house, if you will).

Finishing this book is like going back home from an epic party, with Pauli at the center of a room telling his war stories where he seems to always have shit going on in his life. Good stuff. So goddamn entertaining.

Anyway, here are some random quotable gems from the book:

• I’m a cat-loving pacifist who ought to care deeply about the environment. On the other hand, I represent people who would squeeze schoolchildren to death if they thought some oil would come out.
• I firmly believe that when politicians aren’t kissing babies they’re stealing their lollipops.
• Your dog has a dog?
• It was early afternoon so there were only four hallpack truck drivers shooting pool inside. They were all Maori; two of them had tribal tattoos covering one side of their face. All stood over six feet and looked like they’d been genetically engineered to crush small buildings.
• A wise man once said, ‘The road to hell is paved with lawyers and accountants.’
• Ambu collected his money, then announced, ‘You want to see the scorpion kill itself?’ We were all mesmerised by then. ‘Yeah sure Ambu.’ So he lit a small fire under the lid and tossed another scorpion in. As the heat slowly started cooking the poor thing alive, it could no longer alternate legs to stand on, and speared itself in the belly, dying instantly. I had no idea there was a creature that given no choice would kill itself.
• The first time an attack happened I thought, all these guys with guns is a bit much isn’t it? Like using mercenaries to discipline naughty schoolchildren or hiring Jamie Oliver to help Pol Pot eat people in Cambodia.
• ‘Gentlemen, I’ll be needing a stool sample from each of you please.’ ‘There’s some on my foot,’ said Jack. ‘There’s some of yours on my foot too,’ I said.
• On arrival in Lagos, after going through customs and immigration, I was to look for my driver; he would be wearing green company coveralls and holding up a sign with my name on it. I would approach and speak this sentence and only this sentence, ‘It’s hot here, just like Australia.’ The driver, upon hearing that, was to answer, ‘Just as hot, but no kangaroos.’ If he didn’t say that, it meant that he had murdered the real driver, stolen the company car and was planning to drive me out of town, put two in the back of my head and make off with my stuff.
• Then just behind the front row of the crowd I saw the sign ‘Mr Pauli’. Practising my line under my breath, I walked up to the fit-looking man in green coveralls who bore the sign and said in a loud confident voice, ‘It’s hot here, just like Australia.’ He gave me a blank look, then flashed a huge benttoothed grin and said, ‘I am de driva.’ Cocksucker, I thought, what do I do now? Leaning in, with lots of eye contact, I repeated, ‘IT’S HOT HERE, JUST LIKE AUSTRALIA.’ ‘Oh yes sa, BUT NO HOT KANGAROOS.’ Close enough. ‘I am Oscar de driva.’ ‘How do you do Oscar, now get me fuckin’ out of here.’ ‘Very good Mr Pauli follow me, I have caa with air-condishanings.’
• I thought Nokia should develop a camera/gun, or a phone/gun, or even a gun/phone/camera … there would be massive sales in West Africa.
• Darkness is your friend in dodgy remote Chinese ports where a tall bald white man in a Mambo T-shirt tends to stick out like chairman Mao at the MTV music awards.
• I ended up in an aisle seat next to an elderly Chinese gentleman, who must have been ninety and looked like he had built the whole wall himself.
• Colin [a dog] became the rig mascot and soon was embarking (no pun intended) on a cruise out to a quiet part of the South China Sea, hundreds of nautical miles from any major shipping lanes, where he was going to listen to his Van Halen CDs, drink out of the toilet, hump the furniture and not get eaten by the welder.
• He would run to accomplish a task with the kind of urgency that left you wondering if he would get severely beaten or have a finger cut off if he was too slow.
• I stopped giving him shit not too long after meeting him as I discovered that Eddie was a ‘kendo’ champion and could kill me with his big toe.
• Someone had written something in ballpoint pen under the picture of a man demonstrating the crash position: ‘In the event of an emergency landing do not attempt to suck your own penis.’
• Our contact was nice, but he looked like he was on the local wife-beating team.
• It doesn’t matter where you go in the world, the two things you’re guaranteed to see are Coca Cola and the AK-47.
• The characters you meet in the oilfield are unbelievable—from full-on rocket scientists with multiple Ivy League degrees and a keen interest in painting to-scale miniature sixteenth-century military figurines on their bunks, to Billy-Bob the brain-dead redneck ex-con whose misspelt jailhouse tatts, fart jokes and new truck back home are all he can talk about.
• He focused, grabbed my collar and in a clear white moment said, ‘If I get shot, you have to call my brother and tell him there’s ten grand buried in a coffee can in his front lawn.’
• ‘You buried ten grand in your brother’s front lawn?’ ‘Fuck no, but he’s a prick and it would have served him right.’