The world abounds with famous quotations. Personally, I prefer Mark Twain or George Bernard Shaw. I prefer them, that is, among those whose utterings are published. What I really prefer are famous quotations from the oilpatch, from the field and from the office. I have collected quite a few, some of which I would like to share with you. Names are withheld to protect the embarrassed.

When working in the field in West Texas in the late ’60s, I had occasion to ride with the gang pusher in a winch truck towing a 30-ft (9.15-m) pipe trailer. We were doing about 60 mph on a lease road when we were passed by a pumper (lease operator) heading the other way. Just as he got to us he flipped his arm up and launched a freshly killed rattle snake in our direction. It wrapped around the windshield. In a panic, the gang pusher veered right then left. At some point, the pipe trailer came unhitched and proceeded under its own power down the side of the lease road and out into a field. On its way, it eliminated two telephone poles and a gas metering loop. While reviewing the carnage after the dust cleared, the field production manager asked the gang pusher if he had the trailer’s safety chain attached. “Nawh,” he answered. “Never thought we’d need it.”

While living in Aberdeen in the late ’80s, I had a friend who had worked for the UK Minister of Energy. On his first day on the job, as he related, he was called into the Minister’s office for a briefing. Said the minister to my friend, “First things first. You may have heard that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. That is definitely not true. I was born with the entire damn silver service in my mouth. You might want to remember that.”

Jump back to the Gulf of Mexico in the late ’70s. While taking on casing and shifting mud we developed a dangerous looking list on a drilling tender working at South Marsh Island 66. The barge captain came by to let the tool pusher and I know that he had the situation under control and was righting the list. As he left I called out and asked if he knew where the cementer slept. He did. Well then, I said, when you pass his quarters would you open the door, throw a life vest in, holler “we’re sinking, every man for himself,” close the door and keep walking? He agreed and the tool pusher and I returned to our conversation. Less than a minute later, the cementer, naked as the day he was born, came streaking by our window, clutching the life vest and obviously headed for the heliport. The tool pusher turned to me with a puzzled look on his face and said “Bill, he’s gonna jump.”

It took us 30 minutes to talk him off the heliport.

Earlier in the ’70s I worked in the Spraberry Driver Unit in West Texas. We had a couple of newly minted engineers in the office, one of whom decided to increase production in a certain well produced by a 20-something year-old pumping unit by kicking it up to 20 strokes per minute. Despite my protestations that the unit — complete with bad saddle and wrist pin bearings — would not stand the increase, we were ordered to kick it up. When the engineer called to check on all his new production the next day I had the sad (fun, actually) job of informing him that the walking beam was laying some 30 ft from the unit with various other components scattered near by. His comment? “I’ll be darned.”

I have a sort of wild friend who ran mud for me for a number of years in the ’70s and ’80s. He is like the fellow in the Lil Abner cartoons of long ago — always under a black cloud of some sort and it is usually his own doing. And a lot of that has to do with his taste for the ladies. Nonetheless, he has made some astute observations over the years. My favorite occurred over a few pints a number of years ago in Aberdeen. I was on the verge of my first trip to Bergen, Norway. My friend, ever helpful, gave me this insight. “Bergen, yeah man. That’s where they drown all the ugly girls at birth.”

The source of my favorite quote is fellow Driver Unit worker Dick Black. I said I would not use names but Dick is no longer with us and I really want him to get credit for this one. Dick was a bear of a man, stronger in his 60s than most men in their 20s. You will have to excuse Dick for his reference to flatulence. Dick was fond of grabbing one of the younger employees (especially the worms) and engaging him in a fairly serious head lock. He would pat the unlucky fellow (Ernie for our purposes) on the head a couple of times and say, “You know Ernie, I would rather hear a fat boy f##t than a pretty girl sing any day. Go ahead son.”