I'm a stone cold rookie, gonna work the texas oil fields

expensive? i'd like one that is stealthy but captures alot of view and has good recording audio, any ideas of how much that would cost without me walking around and making people uncomfortable knowing they were being filmed?

yeah thanks about the advice and i may take you up on that in a while. Sure, just go with the flow and when you are done with school, then go for it. Yeah, i think i could make some cool vids. Last night was pretty wild, driving down a county road pegged out at 65mph with fog i could only see 40ft in front of me and relying on a gps showing a straight road ahead of me, its pretty wild trusting your life to a sattleite because if its wrong and theres a sharp turn ahead.....I'M DONE. As time has went by, i go more and more balls to the wall. I was litterally sweating after 15 miles of that foggy road, huge owls flying past the windshield, deer jumping out across the road, crankin the oldies, window rolled all the way down, on the cell phone with some of the homies in my crew, (yellin at the top of my lungs)"hey where u at dog?".....at a flow back, where you at?....."man i'm flyin down 2129 full throttle goin to 54 block and i cant see 40ft past my windshield, #### its foggy lol".....why you goin down 2129?...."man i blew past the sonora turn off on 10, #### gps fooled my ###".....lol, be careful dog......"lol, yeah man, just like you fool lol, what time you gettin off, WHOOOOOOAAA A GIANT OWL JUST FLEW PAST MY WINSHIELD!!!! lets go to breakfast after work!" (all the while, fumbling around for a cigarrette, a stick of gum, sip of coffee)

Doesnt all that sound great? I seriously figure i'm gonna die behind the wheel but i dont care, i think its a great job and most of us night guys haul ###........so like i said, what are you guys waiting for?????

The gps is great and i couldnt do what i do or how i do it without it. We have some jobs like disposals that we regularly service but its random as far as who gets to do it. It just depends on who's workin at the time when a disposal comes up. We service alot of rigs and flow backs and they keep moving around because the oil field waits for nobody.....its great.

hmmmm, i see some flaws, i think i'd rather have an rv. I think this contraption is a classic "great idea" that isnt a great idea in the real world......but if it costs 5 bucks, i'd buy it lol. Let us know how much it costs, i say 50k.....its a ##### novelty in my opinion but i could be wrong

Yeah, that house folds up alright, i wonder how well it unfolds and seals itself after a year of four seasons. The #### thing reminds me of a ##### segway.

 

remeber that thing? the inventor envisioned a world where you would do everything short of taking a dump on one of those, just some idiot trying to push his own interest on people and ignoring the fact that in reality, it wasnt practical except for certain situations.......NOT FOR EVERYTHING. God knows the last thing people need is less walking.

lol, heres some irony for you, the inventor got killed using his own product.

 

nabors in general always needs drivers around here, sonora, ozona, big lake, they all need drivers. Now, i just want to say, but not discourage people, that nabors and the oil field in general kind of slows down during the holidays, this is what ive been told and i have noticed the work load lately has been limited. I been hauling a lot of brine water to storage lately and other drivers noticed this as well......but then again, some rigs have moved to new locations and theres been some flow back jobs going on, so i guess its buisness as usual, but like i said, ive heard stuff slows down during the holidays.

My job consists of hauling water, brine, disposal/produced water and basically not driving my truck into a gate or cattle guard or off an overpass......oh yeah, put them chock blocks and cones down when ever you stop and dont over fill frac tanks or work tanks when unloading, thats really easy to do if youre not paying attention.

What happens is sometimes you have a load, typically 140 barrels on average and a frac tank maybe has just enough room for your load. As you just about get down to the bottom of your load, the frac tank will be getting really full. You have to get up on that frac tank (close your valve on the vaccum tank first) and look at the level in the front and the back. The reason is because these tanks usually dont sit on perfectly level ground. You check the front hatch and see you got 5 inches of room left but in reality, the back hatch may show you only have 2 inches of room left because the tank itself may be sloping towards the back......so in reality, YOU ONLY HAVE 2 INCHES OF ROOM LEFT. Depending on the size of the tank, each inch equates to X amount of barrels it can accept. Dont worry if you have more barrels left in your trailer than the tank can accept, the main thing is not to over fill the tank and make a spill.

Ive tried to get greedy and get that tank topped off to the max when my trailer load is close. This is plain dumb. When you got a few inches left in the tank, then get ready to call it done and leave it at that.....you can attempt to unload more but you have to be really careful. Its hard to tell how many barrels you have left in the trailer when you start to get close to unloading completely and when the frac tank is just about topped off to the max and your trailer completley unloads, now you will be blowing air and you'll get a nice gusher over flow out of the top of your tank. When youre a few inches from being topped off and you blow air, it will just sort of spit or splash up from the top of the tank and thats no big deal compared to a gush coming out of the top.

When you got a few inches left and now you start blowing air out of your trailer (completely unloaded) and you see the spit and splashing coming out of the top of the frac tank, there are a few ways of finishing the job which is mainly about getting the remaining liquid out of your hose and into the frac tank without getting rained on because the valve on the frac tank is conveniently located right below the hatch at the top lol. What i like to do is close my trailer valve first and let the tank water calm down for a few seconds and get my mind right. I may go up to the top of the frac tank and check how close the level is, i may not. If the back of my trailer is really close to the valve on the frac tank, i may just crack the trailer valve wide open and then move as fast as humanly possible and close the frac tank valve because i know i got about a second before it starts raining from the top of the frac tank. I'll then grab my hose and see if it feels empty, dont worry you'll know the difference. If i feel it still has some, then i may open the frac tank valve for another second or two and close it quick......lol, i may not do it this way too.....it just depends.

What ive explained is very basic and is not intended as being the way its always done, its just an example. Theres so many variables that can change how one does it. I am sure there are better techniques but this is also dependant on the equipment you have to work with as well. I just work with what i have and try to get the job done as mechanically sound and safely done as possible. You are dealing with pressure here and you have to respect it......plus you dont want to get wet if you can help it.

A few weeks ago i got trapped unloading brine at a rig from a reserve pit that sat higher than where my trailer tank was sitting. When i was done loading my trailer, i disconnected the hose that conveniently ran up to the pit (sometimes a rig will have a hose running to the pit which is nice because then you dont have to drag a bunch of hoses out) and when i disconnected, i got the "syphon effect" and man did i get gushed on and let me tell you, than brine is not like ocean water, its #### near liquid salt. You get some in your eyes and you WILL know it. So here i am half blind, getting hosed on, dragging the end of that hose and climbing these huge rocks desperately tring to get that hose end above the brine level of that pit.

Live and learn...............but from that experience, i avoided an exact situation like that when loading up the steel pits at a rig. As time goes by and you try hard to get better, you will get better. I learn stuff every day here and i reckon i always will.

 

I thought i'd like to explain a little bit about hauling ### and why i myself and others do this. First of all, nobody says you have to be in a rush, you can come and work here and take your time if you like. Most jobs basically take a certain amount of time. For instance, when you start a shift, you do a pretrip and fuel up, this generally takes 30 to 45 minutes. On most jobs, you can wash this into your overall time, that way you dont have to fill out a "non revenue" sheet and charge your company for the extra time. You dont want to bleed the company you work for because this is basically like cutting your own throat.

So, if i happen to take longer on a pretrip because i got to air up some tires, hunt down some hydro fluid etc etc....then i'll try to make up that time on the job or jobs i get sent out on. If i got to go out to a site and haul a load out of their frac tank or pit or whatever and the job is normally a 4 hour round trip, if i can do it in 3.5 hours, then thats a half hour i can spread into my over all log and balance the times out so everything looks normal and i dont have to charge my company any non revenue time. Over time, you get better and better at this and learn what is normal time for most jobs. Times are never discussed here at nabors because they pay you by the hour, but you just simply learn over time how long things take and you learn how to get faster about doing them.

It sort of sounds like you are ripping off a company you are doing a job for but not really. If its already accepted that certain jobs take 4 hours, that company is going to get charged that on average because thats how long most drivers take any way. You learn these times by talking with other drivers, which you will all the time because you want to get better and its the normal topics of most driver talk.

So, you learn faster ways of doing things, having your paper work done ahead of time, making your moves smooth, knowing what to do ahead of time before getting to a site by asking other drivers, "hey, this is paul, i'm going to university 54-23-2 with a load of fresh water, am i loading into their blue tank??".....and most experienced drivers on your shift will know exactly what youre talking about and give you the correct information....they may even tell you that its tight there and you have to back in or whatever and this saves you a ton of time......you also have to be careful about things they say too, for instance, a guy tells you to make the first right after the second cattle guard and then the road will turn left and then right.....well, the "and then" part might be a few miles before that left and right come up and you start to wonder if youre even going the right way after a while.....and then you feel the perspiration coming lol. Or then someone's description of what a "T" in the road is or a "hump".....so i generally listen and then ask my own questions because it sucks getting lost out at a lease at night. If it sounds bad reading it on here, trust me, its worse out there.

So like i said, you use this saved time to spread your times out on your log, go to the store, catch up on paper work etc. etc.....and the wheels keep on turning.

When i first started, i said i'd never do these things and thats an ok mindset because theres so much to learn and you just want to get the basics down......but after a while that gets boring and gets thrown out the window, espeacially at night shift because its a smaller crew and we're alot tighter, "hey man, how much time you charging on this one?".....and you all sort of work together on this so everyone's on the same page. Us night time guys like to haul ### and consider ourselves the shift that gets alot done and we do it simply because most of us have that attitude. Also, driving at nigh time, you sort of own the road because nobody except drivers are around, theres no cops, no public, just drivers mainly and when you know its one of your guys coming down a lease road, you #### well make sure you flash the high beams and blair your horn into him, its funny as hell.

Of course not all of us on the night crew are like this but most of us are and us ones who do look out for each other, its like a gang, its great.

But like i said, i wouldnt advise coming into it like this, learn your job on the square first and then slowly transition into hauling ### if you want to. In all reality, nobody cares if you do or not, we ALL try to help each other but like any job, you'll find those that arent down with the program and in all reality, they arent exactly great help either......so you stay tight with the "friend crew" you make and work with the others who arent. Also, its not like you can just jump in the crew who hauls ###, it takes time and trust and you got to show over time that you are down for the program and they know you arent some sort of back stabbing snitch........at least thats the way it works around here and it wouldnt surprise me if it wasnt this way in many other places.

....but like i said, a guy can do things however he or she wants, nobody really cares either way, we just have our click here mainly out of boredom and something to keep you mentally busy and motivated....."if i haul ### here, i can catch so and so at the SWD and have some laughs"....you know, that sort of thing.

I remeber sayin i'd never use the cruise control, drive around carefully like driver school taught me, i'm gonna be the safe low maintenance guy......lol, that slowly went out the window and i use cruise control for EVERYTHING possible, i drive an empty tank around as if i'm driving a ferrari and i'm learning more and more about how far i can push loaded trailers around turns and stuff......but i will say this, i dont push that sort of thing too far, a loaded trailer is something to take extremely seriously and i always will. To this day, i drive MUCH differently loaded than empty. I might be into hauling ### but i'm not into stupid ####. I'll be ###### if i ever roll a truck or catch the side of a gate or cattle guard, theres just no real excuse for that.

......but an empty tank?? lol, watch out man because i am absolutely FLYING!!!!