Fifteen

This was a good well for my dad. It was an open hole completion and it would slough and sand up all the time. We'd wash it out, gravel pack it, run screens in it, pack it with pea gravel, then wash all that shit out of the hole again and start over; we are always working on this son of a bitch. It would make 30-40 BOPD for a couple of months, sand up again, then go right back to making 30-40 BOPD again. I am standing on a pile of formation sand and shale we washed out of this well over the years. It probably made over 150K BO in ten years and even with prices at $3.10 per barrel, that was lots of money back then.

This was not our day job, by the way; that was tending to drilling rigs. This kind of shit was just for fun. Down in a low place, surrounded by post oak trees, with no wind, in the middle of August, Dubai is a lot cooler than this place, trust me.

Those jeans, by the way, were so oil saturated I always worried about them spontaneously combusting. I had to take them off before getting in the pickup and could just stand them against a tree. In the mornings you damn sure better shake them out because scorpions would crawl up in the pants legs. Getting stung by a scorpion first thing is no way to start the day.

I have been in the oilfield a long time. It's all I've ever known.