This might be a little too specific and therefore not relevant to most, but I'll just put it on here for the 1 person who might enjoy it. I worked on oil rigs for a few years but my first day on the job, after training, I got into such a jacked up situation I thought I might not go back. After the hole has been drilled (8,500 feet for this one, fairly shallow for the area) we have to move pipe back out of the hole and put it in the storage bins. The pipe is filled with drilling fluid that is supposed to pass through the bit at the bottom as the pipe is removed and a "float" keeps the liquid from coming back up through the pipe. Sorry, need to know that for the story.

So there I am, I haven't even put my hard hat together, and my crew is short handed- they need me to be live RIGHT NOW. So I'm in my cheap wal-mart work boots and hardhat with no liner (the driller eventually fixed it for me when he noticed) and I get thrown on a set of 300lbs tongs (like a giant pipe wrench, counterweighted- I can't lift 300lbs) the likes of which I had touched exactly ONCE before and was set for 4 hours of laying down pipe (before saying word 1 to anyone one the crew). The training tongs I had touched once were brand new and perfect, the pieces of crap I was working were crooked and had worn down teeth (replaceable but they were in a hurry to get the pipe out and casing in to get a bonus so no stopping!). So the float was broken, meaning the liquid was not draining and staying out of the pipe as we removed it, so each time we broke a joint roughly 64 gallons of drilling fluid (nasty, chemical filled stuff) busted out of the joint at us (they make shields to keep the crew dry but my driller was pretty hard core and didn't want to take the time to use it). The wet surface, insane noise of the diesel engines and whirring blocks, cheap boots, crooked tongs and a crew that had no desire to help me in any way since I was green and they needed to "break me in" (a good crew will make it seem like those tongs weigh nothing at all) made for 900 joints (pieces of pipe) worth of a crummy first day!