A quick note before this one.

Up until now I’ve told you there’s no schedule and no pressure, and I meant that as a kindness. Turns out it reads as don’t count on me. So from here, an essay lands every Tuesday at 8am US Eastern, which is 10pm Tuesday for me on the rig. Same stories. You just know when they’re coming.

That change, and a few others you’ll see around the place, came from Riza, who read everything I’ve written, sat with the numbers, and told me the truth about it. Thank you, Riza.

Right. On with it.

I come back to my room after twelve hours on shift and it looks like a hospital ward. Dim white LEDs. Beige lockers. Lino floor. Blue sheets, the industrial kind, a bit less clean than a hospital would let you get away with. I’ve lived in a version of this room for twenty years. The rig changes. The room doesn’t.

The laptop opens and I start on whatever it is that night. I like to think I’ve got some kind of perfect schedule. I really don’t. It might be pulling images off the camera and sorting them, which is hours on its own. It might be dictating the chicken scratch from my tally book into actual notes, the same book I use for pipe counts. I might be balls deep in Eden trying to work out what all the ideas in my head are. Substack notes. LinkedIn posts. Commenting on other people’s stuff like a crazy person. Two hours, sometimes three. Then sleep, and up early to train and walk, then another hour before shift.

Every day of the hitch….Every single day.

And every single day, I feel like a fraud.

Not most days. Not on the hard ones. Every day. Drilling is easy, and I don’t mean the work is easy, I mean it doesn’t scare me anymore. Twenty years in, knowing what you’re doing feels like nothing at all. Put me on a floor with a stuck string and I’ll sleep fine. Put me in front of a keyboard with something people are going to read and I’m 22 again on my first rig, waiting for someone to notice I don’t belong here.

That’s what the fraud feeling actually is. It’s the tax on doing something in public before you’re good at it. I paid it once on the drill floor and don’t remember paying, because I was young and everyone around me was paying it too. I’m paying it again at 41, on my own, with an audience.

And I’ve just made it worse. I’ve signed up for a sixteen-week ghostwriting course. Premium Ghostwriting Academy, Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole. Their email marketing nailed me, and I’ve thought about that more than I should. You could chalk it up as good persuasion doing its job on a tired man after shift. Or you could call it a sign that it’s time, the same kind I’ve been following everywhere else lately. Honestly, I lean both ways, and I’m not sure it matters. The pamphlet lady was handing out pamphlets to everyone on that street. It still found me.

It’s not out of nowhere, either. I’ve been practising this for a year and a half, in a sea of online courses and how-tos, and I’ve enjoyed every hour of it.

So who the fuck am I to do this? Who am I to write anything, let alone sit a course and come out the other side calling myself a ghostwriter?

I’ve never liked labels. When people call me a photographer, I say I’m a driller with a camera. When they call me a writer, I say I just write some stuff down. I’ve dodged every title anyone’s tried to give me, and I do it because I’ve got this idea that you need twenty years in a thing before you’re allowed to call yourself the thing. Which is stupid, when I write it out. If you’re doing the thing, aren’t you the thing? I don’t know. It’s just another limiting belief. But it’s a stubborn one, and this trade is the first one where the label is the product. You can’t sell ghostwriting as a driller with a laptop. If I want to do this, I have to wear a word.

That’s the part I lie awake on. Not the writing. The word, and the people who’ll hear me say it.

Because when you’ve done the same thing for as long as I have, you become institutionalised to it. It’s genuinely hard to see yourself as anything else. And when you try, you’re going to cop it. The criticism, the limiting beliefs, your mates asking what the fuck are you doing now. That’s part of it. I know that. It doesn’t make it easier…

…So why bother.

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You know why if you read The Money Tree Post My son hid a note in my passport that said he wished money grew on trees, and I sat in an airport and let it take me apart. I wrote about the money. This is what came after the money.

The cabin at 2am

I’ve spent a loooooooooooooooong time telling myself a story about this life. That going away is character building. That it’s good for the boys. That it’s good to miss each other. I’ve said it in these essays and I’ve said it at the dinner table. And the note made me look at that story properly, and I think it might just be something I tell myself so I feel better about the airport. Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s both. But I’m not sure I believe it the way I used to, and that’s new.

Kids will do that. They’ll say the most honest shit to you and it lands in your chest. They’re your highest high and your lowest low, you can be laughing with them one week and furious at them the next over whatever it is this time, but when your kid tells you something like that, you have to try. What else is there? You listen and you try. This is me trying.

But there’s something strange about this time. I’ve done courses before. Done them and done nothing with them. This one feels different. I feel energised by it, properly motivated, and for the first time I actually believe it could work, which is weird for me. Usually I don’t.

The photography is an uphill battle, I know that. I’m trying to sell an industry on a thing it’s never needed. But the writing feels in reach. I’ve got a network I’ve been building in front of for two years. There are people out there making a living with words. Why not me. It’s a question I can’t find a good answer to anymore.

I haven’t stopped feeling like a fraud….I don’t think I will.

And I’ll be straight about the size of this. I don’t know if writing could ever replace my income and bring me home. Probably it can’t, or not for a long time. But it could put some money on that tree, and right now that’s enough of a reason.

My why is nine years old and hid a note in my passport.

The budget was the first seed. This is the second one.

Tomorrow after shift, the laptop opens again. Same room, same blue sheets.

Still a fraud. Still doing it.

What’s the thing you’ve been doing that you still won’t call yourself? Hit reply.

Done for tonight

I rushed off to the airport again last swing. Kids’ sport, late night, bags half done, the usual sprint.

At the check-in desk I handed over my passport and a bit of paper stuck out of it. Thought it was an old baggage tag. It fell out, folded up neat, coloured in, folded the way kids fold that little paper game where you pick a number, the one that always ended with me taking them to Timezone or pizza.

There was no time to open it. Twenty questions at the desk about a visa I get on arrival. So I stashed it, got through unscathed and found a seat on the other side of immigration. Then Casey messaged to say the boys went down upset, and then asked “did you see the note in your passport?”

He’d written it himself and hidden it in there. So I opened it up.

“Daddy, I wish you didn’t ever have to go to work. I wish money grew on trees… ….But that’s not how it works.”

(That last line is mine) It’s the thing I say to him. He gave it back to me, folded up in a cute hand written note hidden in my passport, and I sat in that airport cafe reading my own words in his handwriting, and…

…Every fiscally irresponsible decision I’ve ever made hit me right in the chest.

I posted that story when it happened and I let it end there, on the ache. What I didn’t write was what the ache actually was. The ache was the sentence underneath his sentence. Because if I’d been smarter with my money, going away might be an option instead of a sentence. He wished for a money tree, and the truth I sat with in that cafe (and the 22 hour plane ride) is that I’d been handed one, twenty years of one, and I’d stripped it bare.

So this is the extremely embarrassing part, and the part I’ve never written. (or ever really said out loud)

Here’s the ledger, or the shape of it, because there isn’t one villain purchase. I’ve looked. It’s a multitude. Jet-setting around the world. Weekends in Berlin. Living on Fifth Avenue in Playa del Carmen because it felt good. Spontaneous trips to Holland. Oodles of fishing gear (a man needs a set up for each fishing situation). Every piece of DJ equipment the moment it came out, and a crate of records dug out of shops at a hundred bucks a pop. The copious extracurricular activities that gave me good stories and have served me in no other way. A 21-foot Lotus Trooper and a souped-up Nissan Patrol, both bleeding money the whole time I owned them.

A life of excess. Abundance, spent as it landed. Twenty years of an extraordinary wage treated like an ordinary one that would never end.

This is what it cost, with numbers on it. The house I sold (to do the trip) is now worth about $300,000 more than what I got for it, and now I find myself priced out of the market I used to own a piece of….So we rent. And whatever the modern take on renting is, I’ll tell you how it feels to me as a man. Like life has stalled and is on hold. I get a lot of joy and fulfilment from providing. It’s not complicated and I won’t apologise for it. For most of the boys’ lives we ran the setup we both wanted, Casey home raising them, me away earning. Apparently that model’s sexist now. (…Tell that to the missus) She loved it. But the boys are older, everything is fucking expensive, and that version of providing is gone. People just expect you to have the things by now. A house. A good car. A hundred grand in the bank. I know comparison is where joy goes to die. (or whatever that Instagram quote is supposed to say) I know it. The shame sits in my gut anyway, and it feels like I’ve let my family down.

Now, in fairness to the defendant, (me) I have to put the other side of the ledger on the table too.

We’ve lived. There is no doubt about that. We sold everything, bought a caravan, and gave our kids two years on the road around this country, school at a fold-out table, red dirt, all of it. I found photography on that trip. I don’t regret a day of it and I never will. I won’t go to my grave leaving things undone. (that is for sure) Now there’s the other kind of man to consider here, the one who squirrels away every dollar and never does anything with any of it. That’s just surviving. I’ve never wanted that either.

Both of those things are true at once. That’s what makes this hard to write. This isn’t a repentance story where I renounce the Berlin weekends. Some of that excess built the exact life I’m proud of. And some of it was just leakage, hunger with a receipt.

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And that word, hunger, is where this stops being about money.

Addiction is genetic for me. My birth mother was a heroin addict. She died of an overdose when I was six weeks old. My father died in a car crash when I was five. My aunty Michelle took me in and adopted me, and she didn’t become like a mum to me, she became my mum, full stop, in a middle-class house in New Zealand with five kids and never quite enough.

And here is the thing I only understood while writing this. My whole model of money comes from her.

We moved to Australia when I was eleven so us kids could have a better life, more opportunity, and I remember my parents struggling. Always eking through, never on top, that slow drowning where the bus ticket maths matters. And I remember my mum giving me her last ten dollars so I could go to the movies with a girlfriend to have a good time. Her last ten. While the sums for the week didn’t work. She put me through a private school they couldn’t afford because she’d decided my education was worth going under for, and I repaid that by dropping out halfway through Year 12 and joining the Navy. (which is a guilt trip for another essay)

In the house I grew up in, money was for love, and love was spent immediately, even when it broke the maths. That was the lesson, taught by the most generous person I know. So when a 22-year-old roughneck suddenly had more money than he’d ever seen, he did exactly what he’d been raised to understand money was for. He turned it into good times and gifts and experiences and flights to the people he loved. The multitude of poor decisions wasn’t rebellion against how I grew up. It was obedience to it.

And underneath that again, from the mother I knew for six weeks, the hunger itself. I’ve written before about substances, addiction and about the escapes that look like discipline and the ones that don’t. I have been very honest about those. Money turns out to be the last one, and I recognise it now by the exact same tell that ended the others…

…I’m fucking sick of looking at this person in the mirror.

That’s the sentence that got me sober. It’s the sentence that got me here.

Do you want to know how deep the shame actually runs? I won’t go and see a financial adviser. A grown man, twenty years of top wages, and I can’t book the appointment, because I cannot face sitting across from a stranger while they look at the paperwork and both of us arrive at the same sentence…you worked away this whole time, and you don’t have this. I’ll stand on a drill floor in forty-degree heat, I’ll write about my dead parents on the internet, I’ll tell a room full of strangers about my addiction issues. That sentence, I can’t sit in…

…That’s how I know this one’s the real one.

Casey doesn’t carry any of this. I want that on the record. She sees the same numbers and a completely different picture. We’re happy, the kids are healthy, we’ve got a roof, we live a good life, and her whole philosophy fits in three words. It’ll work out. She’s not wrong, either. It has, so far, every time. Some of that is luck and some of that is her, and I honestly can’t always tell which. But the shame is mine alone. She’s never once handed it to me. I issue it, I prosecute it, and I serve it.

So here’s the update, it’s only small, but here it is.

After the letter, for the first time in my life, I sat down and pulled every account, every card, every subscription, all of it, into one place, and I made a budget. I’m 41 years old. I have earned serious money since I was 22. And a few weeks ago I did a budget for the first time, because a seven-year-old hid a note in my passport and smacked me right in the face with my own words.

(kids have this amazing way of making you feel every emotion you didn’t know you had)

That’s it. That’s the whole victory so far. No property portfolio, no redemption montage, no guru course. Just a man, a spreadsheet, and a level of embarrassment I’m choosing to put on the internet because I know for a fact I’m not the only one out here carrying it. FIFO money is famous. Nobody talks about where it goes.

I still haven't said anything to him about the note. He doesn't know I've read it more times than I'll admit, or that it sat me flat on my ass to do the first budget of my life. Or that I’m pushing harder than ever in the background to create a way for me to be home with him. One day I'll tell him. Probably around the same time he's old enough for the rest of it.

I can’t grow him a money tree. That’s not how it works, and he already knows, because I taught him the line before I’d learned it myself.

But a budget at 41 is a seed in the ground. It’s the first one I’ve ever actually planted.

We’ll see what grows.

My name is Justin and I write about my experience offshore. New essay every weekend on The Drillers Digest.

Something I’ve noticed lately is how many of you subscribing have nothing to do with this industry at all. I didn’t expect that, and I appreciate it more than I can say. If you’ve never set foot on a rig and you’re still here reading, thank you.

Thanks for giving me seven minutes of your day for my digital confessional. I hope you got something out of it, though on this one it’s probably more a “what not to do” than a “what to do.”

And if you want to see what it actually looks like out here, the portfolio is on my website. Sometimes the pictures say it better than I can.

CLICK ON ME FOR PHOTOS

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Another bird is fitting for this story (these are all my own images)

I’ve written before about where I’ve landed with God. This is an update on my spiritual journey because things have started moving.

The Kingfisher - This is the start of my journey (if you wanted the context)

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Church always seemed like the obvious next step for me. Let me be clear about one thing first. I don’t think you need a church to have a relationship with God. How you carry that, how you present yourself in this world, is yours to work out and nobody else’s business. But for me there was this pull.

It’s the same gut feeling I’ve been leaning into for a few years now. It’s the one behind most of the decisions that have actually mattered, and I’ve stopped being able to explain it, which is fine, because I’ve also stopped needing to. It doesn’t arrive as a thought. It arrives lower down than that, in the chest or the gut, and it just sits there festering, week after week, until you deal with it. I’ve learned to stop fighting it. Every time I have fought it, I’ve wasted a year.

So I’d been asking. Praying on it, (writing on it). I’m still writing letters to the man, depending on the day and how bold I’m feeling. Seeking some kind of guidance on the feeling. Looking for clarification, or a nudge in the right direction.

And I’d done the homework, because that’s who I am. I looked at churches around me, and there are a few. I looked at men’s groups, Bible groups, and there are a few of those too. I paid the $499 for a year of Jordan Peterson’s academy, because I’m a structure guy. I like…(love) a course. If I want to learn something, I want it set out for me, in order, with somewhere to start and somewhere to finish. That’s how my head works and it always has. They cover all sorts on there, but one of the things they go deep on is religion and the history behind the Bible, so I’ve been delving into that.

And all of it has been good. Genuinely. It’s helped me work out where to even begin with a book that intimidates most people who pick it up.

But none of it was the thing.

I kept feeling this pull towards an actual church, an actual room with actual people in it, and I kept not pulling the trigger. I couldn’t find my place. I kept putting it off, and told myself I’d sort it next swing. That went on longer than I’d like to admit, and if you’ve ever known exactly what you should do and done nothing about it for months, you’ll know the particular flavour of that. It’s not laziness. It’s something closer to stage fright.

Then I came home off swing. (last swing)

Friday night landing, and Saturday morning Casey’s off to work, so it’s me and the boys. All hands on deck, four weeks to make up for. Which means a dad’s YES day. Whatever they want, whenever they want it and…

…the answer is yes.

This usually starts at Timezone with a hundred bucks loaded onto a card each, which is an obscene amount of money to feed into machines and worth every cent for the look on their faces. Then coffee and a croissant at the Common Bakery on High Street in Fremantle. Then New Edition bookshop up the road, because getting lost in a bookshop is one of the great pleasures available to a man, (and a boy) and they’ve got a proper photography section at the back where I go looking for a Salgado or a Helmut. Grab the boys a book each, and walk it off.

Then we finish with burgers, because burgers are always the choice of the day, at Short Order. Best cheeseburger in Perth, and I’ll argue that with anyone over the validity of that statement (feel free to comment)

We’d done the whole circuit. And as we walked out of Short Order, bellies full, boys hopped up on a mix of Arizona ice tea and chocolate milkshakes this older woman, stately looking, beelined straight for me. Pamphlet in hand with that look on her face.

You know the look. And she knows the look she usually gets back. The awkward shuffle, the sudden fictitious meeting a man’s very sorry but he’s already late for, which is a lie everyone in the exchange understands to be a lie. She asked, very kindly, whether she could have five minutes of my time to talk about…something.

I looked her in the eye and said, “What took you so long? I’ve been waiting for you.”

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She looked confused. I think the yes confused her more than the line did. But I stopped, with the boys standing there beside me, and I listened. I took her pamphlet and I read it. I let her tell me about the power of receiving God and the Holy Spirit, about baptism, about her church. And then I told her the truth, which is that I’d been praying for a sign, that I’d been searching for this, and that she’d found me.

It’s a strange thing to explain, this pull, and I’m aware of how it sounds. I’m not fighting it anymore. That’s the closest I can get. It’s magnetic. There’s a compulsion in it that I don’t fully understand and can’t really argue with.

It’s the same compulsion that has me sitting here writing these things down and putting them out into the world. Some days I ask myself, why the fuck am I doing this? Why am I sitting here writing this? Why am I opening myself up to embarrassment, to scrutiny, to other people’s opinions about my life? I don’t have a clean answer to that either. I just know the pull is real, and every single time I’ve followed it, it’s put me somewhere I needed to be. That’s a good enough track record for me to keep saying yes to it.

Then I sat on the pamphlet for three weeks.

Here’s the practical reality nobody warns you about when you go looking for God at my age with a nine-year-old and a ten-year-old at your feet. My life runs on school, sport and music lessons… (some skate lessons in there to) I was genuinely unaware, until I sat down and looked at it properly, of how much we have on. There is something on every day of the week except Saturday. I love that. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. (keep your kids, especially boys busy) But it also meant the classic Sunday morning service sat exactly where sport sits, which ruled it out completely.

So the option was a Friday night service.

Friday nights. My Friday nights used to end in some dank downstairs club with my arse up against a speaker, melting on a dance floor somewhere, chasing something I couldn’t have named at the time. These days I’m either in bed by half past seven or I’m trying to make an eight o’clock service. If you’d shown that sentence to the version of me who lived those Friday nights, he’d have laughed and told you to eat a dick! I’m not sure he’d have been laughing at me, though. I think he might have been jealous, in a way he couldn’t have explained.

Three weeks passed. My whole time off, nearly gone. And on my last Friday home, I knew. That was it. If I didn’t go now, I’d be flying out and it would be another five weeks of carrying the same unanswered thing around with me.

So I reached out to the lady, and sent her a message. She rang me straight back, immediately, lovely as she’d been on the street. Said she’d be there, said she’d love to see me, said she’d meet me out the front so I wouldn’t have to walk in on my own. Which was a kindness I didn’t ask for and needed more than I let on.

I spoke to Casey about it. I told her straight. This is my journey, this is something I need to do, and I’m not forcing it on you or on the boys. I’m not turning up with a rulebook for this family. I’m just going to go and see, and we’ll see how it goes.

That afternoon I did school pickup. Last week of the swing. I’m not always in the mood for the small talk perched up out the front of class, and that day I wasn’t at all. Some of those parents don’t know me as well as they know each other, which is just what happens when you’re only there half the time. I’ve got my group of school mums I usually wax lyrical with, but none of them were there. So I posted myself up against the post holding up the pergola and stood there quietly, waiting.

And this tall guy walked past me. Someone I’d never clocked before. Our eyes met, and I got this odd feeling. That same weird compulsion, that familiar feeling, like we knew each other from somewhere. We both awkwardly doubled back on each other, caught each other’s eye again, and gave that semi-awkward hi that men give. He said hi back. He carried on. I carried on.

And I stood there thinking, who the hell is that guy?

Then the kids were at my feet and off we went. Home to dishes and unpacked bags and the winding down of the day. Bedtime routine, boys down and quite house.

I kissed Casey goodbye and told her I’d be home later, and off I went to my first church service.

It was a windy night. Dark, cold, and it started raining right as I pulled up, (which felt about right). And there she was, waiting out the front for me exactly like she said she would be. I ran up to the door and she greeted me and we walked in together.

There were twenty, maybe thirty people inside. Not their main service. This is the one for people like me, the ones who can’t make the weekend. And up the front, sitting up where the speaker sits, was the tall guy from school pickup.

I leaned over to the lady and asked who he was. She told me his name, said he’s a senior member of the church, not the pastor, but he’d be giving the service that night.

So I sat there for the hour. I sang. (and I never sing!) I did all the things. And underneath the newness of it, underneath not knowing when to stand or what to say, there was something else going on in me that I wasn’t expecting.

Because seeing him up there, three hours after we’d awkward(ly) nodded at each other outside a school, it felt like another sign that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I felt safe. (That’s the word). At ease, in a room I’d never been in, among people I’d never met, on a night I’d been putting off for months. Like I was being guided, and the thing I’d been following had known where it was taking me the whole time.

Afterwards he came over, and my little chaperone eagerly introduced us. We shook hands and looked at each other and landed on it at the same moment…

…You were at school today.

Turns out his kids have just started there. He can only do pickup on a Friday, which is why I’d never seen him. I pick mine up every day when I’m home, but I’m only home half the time, which is why he’d never seen me. And his daughter is in my youngest boy’s class. They already knew each other.

Two men who’d never met, standing at the same school gate for the first time on the same afternoon, hours before one of them walked into a church he’d been circling for months and found the other one at the front of the room.

I could chalk that up to coincidence and write it off. Plenty would. But I don’t think I will. Things keep getting laid out in front of me, one after another, and I’m choosing to keep listening…

…So, the update.

Baptism is the next step, and they’d love that. The lady, the good heart that she has, can be a little pushy about it. I know It comes from a good place. They want you to receive the Holy Spirit, to be filled with it and with the love of God, and I understand exactly why that matters to her. I’m not opposed to it.

But I’m on a slow roll here. I’m taking this at my own pace. And the man from the school gate seemed to genuinely understand that without me having to explain it. No push. He just pointed me at the Bible, told me where to start, what to read first.

So that’s what I’m doing now.

Starting.

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The phone rings and I know what he’s going to ask before I answer it.

Pleasantries first, always. Then: “Hey man, have you heard anything? have you got your ear to the ground? Are there any rigs coming down?”

I don’t have one. My ear’s been to the ground since the day the rig left, and his name is the first thing out of my mouth every time something moves. But I don’t have the thing he actually needs, which is a job. So I tell him what I’ve heard, what I know, what I don’t…It’s the best I can do. (there is a slight feeling of guilt that sits in your stomach)

So we talk anyway.

He’s a Derrickman (pushing hard for AD). Mid-twenties, maybe thirty. Just got engaged and built the house in the same season. One of those new estate builds, 350 square metres with a display model sitting on it, double exposed-aggregate driveway with side access for the boat he’ll probably have one day. Composite decking up to the front door. Out the back, the classic unfinished sandpit of a backyard, a retaining wall still to go in, with a three-by-three shed in the corner. The type of house for starting a family. They’re talking about kids, and underneath the talk he’s running the sums on whether him and the missus can make it work with him gone half the year.

I’ve watched him from the chair. I can’t hear a word over the top drive but I don’t need to. You read men in how they move. When the floor gets away from somebody, he’s the one who comes up and takes it by the scruff. Doesn’t ask. Doesn’t announce it. Just takes control like the job was already his, and the younger boys fall in around him without being told.

And there’s a half-second, once the floor’s his, where I stop seeing a Derrickman.

I see myself twenty years ago. Same hunger. Same push. Only he fills the boots better than I ever did, and I don’t know what to do with that. There’s a sense of pride in it. There’s something else under the pride too, and I don’t much like looking at it straight. So I don’t, I look at it the way you look at the sun. Sideways, from the chair, and never for long.

I knew for sure on an ordinary day.

Middle of the day, peak hour on the drill floor, every eye on the operation. Nothing special about it, which is the point. We’re displacing from water-based mud to oil-based, and you get one shot at that. Once it starts you can’t stop it, and the worst thing you can do is pump the wrong stuff to the wrong place.

The pressure’s high, and I can hear the stress in his voice over the radio. It’s not going well, I’m trying to keep my own voice flat so nobody else catches on.

I’m in the chair, pumping, watching volumes. I catch his eye and give him the “Go down there and have a look.” face. (no words need to be exchanged)

He’s gone before I’ve finished looking at him. Down to the pit room, and then he just takes it. He rings me from down there and tells me straight what he’s seeing. He knows the lineups. He knows the quickest way to fix the problem we’ve got. I stay in the chair and keep pumping and stay on the tightrope without setting off alarm bells. (polite smiles and “it’s all good”, are in full swing in the Doghouse)

Those phone calls, that’s where the job actually happens. You don’t say much. You do more listening than talking.

What I remember most is somewhere in the middle of it, my shoulders let go. The anxiety went out of them and I didn’t notice until it was gone. Because I knew, the way you know a thing without ever saying it, that whatever was wrong down there, he was the man to fix it. He was the man who’d ring me and tell me straight.

Afterward I say thank you… a smile with a head nod as we carry on like nothing happened. (there is still half the day to go)

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Midnight rolls around and then we eat. Nothing much gets said over dinner. It’s about the time the ice cream comes out that the day gets talked about. Chocolate, always, in the plastic offshore cups, full to the brim with nuts and chocolate sauce if it’s on the go. Fresh cream if you can get your hands on some. (it’s a good night when you can get some fresh cream) And you always check if any rig crack in the cake fridge — caramel slice, for the uninitiated — that goes in as a sweetener.

Then the honest look, the read of the eyes. “All right. How did it go down there?” And with a cheeky smile he tells me all the spot fires he put out, laughing about how close we came to having to stop. I thank him, screw up my lips, give him the head nod. He knows that we both know tomorrow will bring the same thing.

So I do the only thing I can actually do for a man like that, which is get out of his way.

Bringing a man up mostly means stepping back. You hand him a job and you let him run it his way, and you keep your mouth shut while he does it differently to how you would have with anyone else, because he doesn’t want to be shown. He wants to make the call. That’s what the good ones are chasing, more than the money. The satisfaction of calling the play and watching a smooth operation come off because of decisions he made.

Stand over his shoulder instead and you’ll kill him faster than any redundancy would. Nothing takes the legs out from under a capable man quicker than being micromanaged. So I step back further than feels comfortable and I let him have the floor. That stepping back is the trust…

…It never gets said. It just gets done.

What I know is they can go as far as they want to go. And the part I’m not supposed to say out loud is that helping him isn’t charity. I need him. When I move up, I want him behind me in the chair, because trust is everything out here and I trust him. That’s how succession actually works on a rig. Not some fancy org chart. One man deciding another man’s ready, and pulling him up behind.

But the industry has other ideas.

He made it, in the end. Right before the rig left, they made him AD. All those years of pushing, all those near misses, and he finally touched it. One rung off the chair…

…And then the rig did what rigs do. LEAVE, and he got made redundant with the rest of them.

Nothing to do with his work. He could do the job, just bad timing. The promotion came too late to count for anything on the list, and no amount of me propping him up changes that arithmetic.

“Close, I keep telling him”.

One chair. That’s what a rig carries. There’s a Main Driller and an Aux chair, but no one is chasing the Aux chair, so call it one. One chair, and in Australia the man sitting in it has probably held it five years, sometimes ten. Positions don’t open, they’re held…usually for a very long time.

And the ladder resets. You can spend a whole contract climbing to the next position, get a taste of it, and then the rig sails and you’re back to square one. Worse than square one, because you’re only as good as the position you’re hired for. Doesn’t matter that you were a Driller on the last rig, this rig has a Driller. On this rig you’re a Roughneck, and your drilling experience is a nice story for the smoko shed. Offshore is a game of Snakes and ladders, played with your mortgage on the table.

That’s the game he’s been losing. It’s the same game I’ve been playing for two decades now.

Even inside that system, mostly you just get lucky…

…mostly (solid movie reference for the movie buffs out there)

So now he’s a little jaded, not broken—Jaded. Broken quits. Jaded keeps turning up with a chip forming where keenness used to be, and I can hear it in him, one phone call at a time. The disappointment settling into resentment.

And under it, the question he’s actually asking.

Is this sustainable? Can you build a life on this, the mortgage and the wedding and the kids they’ve only just started talking about, on an industry that can pack up and leave without ever telling you whether you were in its plans?

I don’t have an answer for that one either. Decades in, and I’m still riding the same rollercoaster. I’ve just had more practice at the drops.

Everyone offshore has a name on the end of their tongue sitting there waiting for an opportunity.

The first man you think of when you hear a position is opening up somewhere. Your ear’s always to the ground, and when something moves, that name is out of your mouth before you’ve had time to think about it. Everyone’s got one. Everyone’s is different. Two men off the same rig will sometimes carry the same name, (and that tells you something about the man being carried)

Everyone’s got their…

…MONEY HORSE

He’s mine, and yours is yours.

Not every man gets a name carried for him though.

Some hands do a life time, reliable, safe, exactly what’s asked of them, and nobody ever says their name in a room they’re not in. It’s not that they’re bad at the job. They’re just not the ones that stay with you. And the harsh truth is a crew couldn’t work any other way. You can’t run a floor with six standouts on it.

You need all different types of people to make a strong crew dynamic. You got to have the scrubber.

(He’s a story for another time—the inverse of the MONEY HORSE)

Some of them know it. Some of them chose it. There are men out there who worked out early that the higher you climb, the more of you the job owns, and they decided the paycheck was enough. Do the shift, catch the chopper, carry nothing home. You want to sneer at that until you’ve carried the weight a while yourself.

Because plenty of men want to be the man right up until they are the man. Then they find out what comes with it.

And somewhere in all this is a fact I don’t look at very often.

I was somebody’s money horse once.

Somebody watched me from a chair when I was young and hungry and taking floors by the scruff. Somebody said my name in rooms I wasn’t in, and kept saying it, year after year, every time something moved. I didn’t know. What I knew at the time was that I kept getting the jobs. All of them. The hard ones, the ugly ones, the ones nobody else got asked to do. And when I was young and stupid, I took that the wrong way. It felt like being flogged.

It took me half a career to see it from the other side of the glass. Being leaned on was the compliment. The leaning was him telling me.

Which is the answer most men give if you push them on it. Have you ever told him? “Mate, telling him is what the last five years were. Every job I handed him was me telling him”. My time was me telling him. That’s how it’s done, because that’s how it was done to us. It’s a whole generation of men who say the important things by rostering them.

I told mine. Out loud, with words. And I told him the selfish part too. That I want him behind me because he makes my life easier. Because I trust him, and when I move up I want to know exactly who’s in the chair at my back. It isn’t charity and I didn’t dress it up as charity.

And I’ll tell you what saying it costs. Once it’s said, I hold him to it. The standard goes up. I’m harder on him than anyone else on the crew. He cops more from me than the men I don’t rate, and some days he reckons that’s unfair. It is unfair. That’s what caring about a man’s career looks like.

The phone will ring again. Pleasantries first, always. Then…

…“Hey man, have you heard anything?”

Maybe next time I’ll have something for him.

Until then, his name stays where it’s always been.

“Rigggggggght on the tip of your tongue”, SING IT!

My name is Justin and I write about my experience offshore. If you’re someone in this game, or you can relate in some way, I post every Sunday on The Drillers Digest.

To everyone reading this, I appreciate you. Your time is precious, and thank you for giving me ten minutes of your day.

And to the money horses out there still waiting on the phone to ring — your name’s being said in rooms you’re not in. Hold the line.

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Last Sunday I told you about a rented music room in Auckland. Twenty people and a telephone, learning to say things out loud so they didn’t rot inside you.

This week I want to tell you where that room went.

It went offshore.

Every rig I’ve ever worked has a version of the same promise, laminated and stuck to a wall. Speak up. Stop the job. If you see something, say something. It’s in the induction before you’ve found your cabin. It’s on a card in your pocket. Stop work authority. Every person on board, from the OIM to the greenest roustabout, holds the power to shut down a multi-million-dollar operation on nothing more than a bad feeling.

That’s the doctrine. and it’s a good doctrine. I believe every word of it.

Last week I wrote that the group my mum joined had it the other way around. A doctrine nobody could swallow, and a practice that worked. Live forever? No. But say the thing out loud before it eats you? That took. That raised me.

The industry is the exact inverse. Doctrine everywhere you look, and almost nobody using it.

Because the card is free… But using it costs. (can seem like it will cost you)

Story time.

I won’t give you the rig or the year, and if you were there, you already know why.

It was a BIGGGGGGG plate, a (fuck off plate) on one of the derrick beams, up in the derrick, installed by rope access. Crew on ropes, hung in exactly the right spot, doing the slow, deliberate work rope access exists for. Job done, ropes packed away, everyone home safe…

…Then it needed to come down.

And getting rope access back out costs money $$$ and takes time, and somewhere the maths got done, couldn’t we just go up in the man rider? Hook a tugger to it, crack the bolts, lower it out. On paper it read like a simple job.

They asked “a” crew to do it.

That crew said no.

It started with the supervisors in the room, the driller and the AD. I don’t think we can do this. This went up using rope access. Why are we taking it down like this? The words, as close as memory keeps them, we’re not comfortable. Shouldn’t the rope crew take it down the way they put it up?

And I’ll stay on that a second, because the poster makes it sound free.

You don’t want to be seen as the one who wouldn’t do the job. That sits with you. And behind it sits the ledger every person out here carries, this will follow me down the road. Who do you think puts your name forward when the next chair opens up? The Toolpushers. The Senior Toolpushers. The exact people your NO lands on. If you think that isn’t in the back of your mind in the half-second before you speak, you’re living in la-la land…

…It absolutely is.

Some people thrive on a bit of argy-bargy they love the friction, and Speak up like it’s a sport. Good for them. This piece was never for them. It’s for the person who feels their pulse go up just reading this. The person who doesn’t know if they could.

Speaking up as a company man and speaking up as a roughneck are two different animals. If you think they’re the same…

…I just disagree with you. (strongly disagree)

What came back to that no? No shouting. No hostility in it at all. A bit of side-eye, a bit of eye-rolling, and mostly a genuine question. Why? Why not ropes?

And the ones asking it were standing there working it out themselves. Can we do it? That’s the reflex. Offshore people want to find a way to make it work, you keep it moving, and it’s ingrained in you.

Sometimes that’s the problem.

Nothing you could quote. The job just got put off, the way things get put off.

That crew knocked off. The other crew came on. They said they could get it….(the other crew)

It got slotted in ahead of a cement job. A busy stretch. Probably not the greatest time to be doing it at all.

Nobody was rushing anyone. No stopwatch, no one leaning on the crew.

That’s not how it works out here. We call it perceived pressure, and it’s the more dangerous kind. If you’re smart enough to read between the lines, (and the people who get sent up derricks usually are), you know what the schedule wants without anyone saying a word. You want to do a good job. Most people badly want to do a good job. You don’t want to be the person who let anyone down.

You want to say yes.

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And underneath all of it sits the oldest voice on any rig. If I’m not doing something……….I’m lazy. (and no one wants to be seen as lazy)

Tell me that voice isn’t real. Everyone reading this has heard it in their own head.

Every crew has a go-to. The one you call when the job’s awkward and high and nobody’s quite done it that way before. The one you lean on when it’s tight.

He’d be climbing into the harness before anyone got around to asking him. Mid-thirties, wife, two kids, the whole picture. Halfway through his hitch.

A roughneck then. Everybody could see where he was going.

So he went up in the man rider to hook on the tugger.

And while he hung there, ten, fifteen metres above the floor, waiting on the winch line, that voice found him. He was doing nothing. Just waiting. No one told him to do what he did next. He thought…I’ll crack a couple of these bolts while I wait, and get a bit ahead.

Muscle memory. The same thing that had a whole room of people working out whether they could. Look at it in retrospect and it’s a fair assumption he’d do exactly that. It’s what good workers do. They fill the waiting with work.

His foot was between the beam and the clamp when it let go.

I’ll spare you most of it. A ridiculously heavy piece of steel, his boot, fifteen metres of air underneath, in a spot where help doesn’t come quick. He had to rip his foot out of his boot to get himself free.

The boot stayed up there.

They got him down in the man rider and off to the medics. He kept his foot. Luck, mostly. He also crushed every one of the small bones inside it.

For a plate. Ahead of a cement job.

I was asleep when it happened.

I found out the next morning at pre-tower, the way you find out about everything on a rig. Half a sentence in, before any details land, you already know it’s bad. (you can feel it when you walk in a room, you know something bad happened)

No one feels good about that. Whatever you’re imagining about the crew that said no, kill it. Someone you work with is seriously hurt. A mate. You’re wired into it somehow, and you believe it could have been prevented. And yes, there’s a sentence that exists in a moment like that. Everyone knows the sentence. You can’t say it, and you wouldn’t.

So it does what every unsaid thing does.

It lingers.

I spent last week telling you what a rented music room taught me. Say it out loud, don’t hold it in your body. Here’s where that runs out of road. Some things don’t get said, because the man in the hospital matters more than you being right…

…The I-told-you-so stays down.

Even the saying-it-out-loud life has a room it can’t reach.

Afterwards, it’s easy. Everyone turns into a senior adviser. Easy to say it should have gone back to ropes. Easy to say the man rider was the wrong call. Easy to say he should never have touched those bolts.

But walk the chain and find me the villain. Someone trying to save a callout. A crew that wanted to get it done. A man alone up a derrick with time on his hands and a work ethic that had never once got him in trouble before. Every single link was somebody trying to do a good job.

That’s what makes it dangerous. Good people trying to get ahead of the clock will hurt you far more often than bad ones ever will.

And the part I keep coming back to, the NO had already been said. That’s the bit the poster never covers. The card got played…

…And the job went and found a yes.

People say it’s par for the course. I say offshore we keep learning the same lessons over and over and over and… over again. We have gotten safer over the years, yes this is true. But the same lessons keep coming back around, like they’re on rotation too.

Whether a no holds, whether the card is worth the plastic it’s printed on, comes down to one thing in my opinion. What’s being sung from the top. Culture trickles down. It never trickles up. If it isn’t sung from the roof tops, a roughneck hasn’t got a hope in hell of making real change. Nor an AD. Some days, not even a Driller.

I know what silence costs from the inside. I’ve written about my time in the chair. Months of not saying hard things until the unsaid compounded and put me on the floor of a shower in the middle of the Timor Sea. The thing you don’t say doesn’t stay where you left it. It eats you alive. I wrote that about a family table last week. It’s just as true up a derrick.

So I’m not going to hand you a lesson. I don’t do five steps, and you’d smell it if I tried.

What I have is the arithmetic. The cost of speaking gets paid once. The cost of silence compounds. That’s all I know for sure, and some weeks I’m not even sure of that.

What didn’t you say on your last swing?

Not the safety card. The other thing. The thing about the job, or the person next to you, or the schedule, or yourself. The one you swallowed at pre-tower and carried down the stairs and took home in your bag.

What’s it costing while you hold it?

He was off close to a year. A couple of surgeries. There are plates in the foot now. (and looks like something out of an old terminator film) Small bones don’t set the way big ones do.

He came back. He’s an AD these days.

They got the plate down eventually. When they finally went up for it, they brought the boot down with it to.

The Driller’s Digest is free, and it stays free.

Thank you to everyone who’s subscribed. And to the two of you paying for something you could read for nothing, I know exactly who you are and I won’t forget it.

Some days I don’t know if I’m engaging you, or with you.

So if you’ve got a no that didn’t hold, or one you never said out loud, hit reply. Comes straight to me, goes nowhere else.

Pass it to someone on your crew if it was worth your time.

— Justin

I grew up in a cult…

…Okay, that’s hyperbolic, and it was there to get your attention, and I’m guessing it worked. It’s not entirely wrong either. From the outside looking in, the group my family belonged to has been called a “cult”, plenty of times, and I understand why. I’ve told this newsletter about addiction. The breakdown. Things I haven’t said to men I’ve worked beside for a decade. I’ve talked about everything, probably too much, and this is the one thing I never talked about.

That should tell you something.

The short version of me, if you’re new here. I was adopted. Both my parents died when I was young and my Aunt raised me. She’s my mum, Michelle. She was married to a man called Stuart, (thats how I got Forrest) and when that marriage ended, when I was five or six, maybe later, (my memory isn’t the best) I honestly can’t remember, she went looking for something and found it. A group called People Unlimited, based in Scottsdale, Arizona. We lived in Auckland, New Zealand.

The pitch, as best a kid could grasp it.

live your life without the fear of death. Don’t hold it in your body.

They also preached immortality. Actual, you-will-not-die immortality. Which is where they lost most people, and probably where your eyebrows just went up. Fair enough. Eyebrows went up in the ‘90s too.

Her (Michelle) first child was a baby girl called Nicole. Sent home from the hospital, careless as that. Nothing is wrong, they said. She died at home, pneumonia, still a baby. Then, at 22, Michelle opened her door to two babies left there by my father, her older estranged brother. He trusted her enough. Or he dumped us and ran. I’ll never know which. I’ll lean towards the dumping and running side of the fence due to the fact that he started another life. She took us in and she carried all of it.

She saved my life.

The meetings were church without the pomp. No basilica, no collection plate. A hired-out little room in Auckland, the type of room that looked like rented out music room at a school trying to make a little extra loot. twenty people, and a telephone. We’d patch in to the events in Scottsdale, early morning or late at night, the time difference always a thing, and listen to the speakers, Bernie and Jim, coming down the line from half a world away.

Bernie I will never forget. I can’t quote you a single word she said. What I remember is the voice. Commanding, passionate, one of those personalities that stays lodged in your head thirty years on. She has jet white hair perfectly cut into a bob…As a kid I always felt she was yelling at me. She probably was. She was magnetic, and maybe that’s what drew Michelle to her.

A month later we would have the tape sets come in the mail, People Unlimited tapes, and they got played in the room and played in the car. I was always taking it in with out even actively knowing or understanding it. As a kid you just think it’s crazy.

They talked. Open forum, in front of the room. What you were doing. How you were feeling. What someone had done to you and how it made you feel. Out loud, to everyone, nothing left on the table. This raw, unfiltered openness.

For the record, I never believed the immortality part. Not at seven, not at seventeen. Both my parents were already dead, and I sat in those rooms for years listening to people talk like death was optional. What I understood, even as a kid, was that maybe the forever was the motto, an archetype of sorts to live by. Live your life free from death. Don’t let the things left unsaid slowly kill you. The doctrine never took. The practice did.

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That practice came home with us. We held a family meeting every week, around the dinner table. Minutes were taken. An actual family, at an actual dinner table from Auckland, to Adelaide we kept minutes. Everyone got their time to talk, to express (that’s the word that always sticks with me) themselves, and you sat and listened until it was yours, uncomfortable as that got. If you’ve seen the Seinfeld episode about Festivus, the airing of grievances, you’re not far off. I thought it was stupid. You do, when you’re a kid.

It was also the complete opposite of every other household I knew.

I came up around standard Anglo-Saxon Christian families. Catholic, Anglican, respectable. And I can tell you what respectable meant. More secrets than anyone could count. Deplorable things happened in some of those houses and everybody shut their mouth and passed the potatoes. Nothing ever got said. Meanwhile the twenty people in the hired room phoning in to Scottsdale, Arizona were the only ones I knew who told each other the truth, real shit.

I’m only seeing this now, writing it down. The group that taught me to say everything was the one thing I never said.

You don’t mention it at school. There’s no version of the schoolyard where a kid announces his mum believes she can live forever and walks away clean. So I said nothing, from six or seven years old until I left home at eighteen and ran off to the Navy. Raw honesty inside the house, total silence outside it. I carried the rest as embarrassment. Shame, maybe. I’ve never been sure which, and I carried it long enough that I stopped noticing the weight.

The people themselves were (are) good people. Beautiful people, open and kind, and they gave Michelle something she needed then and still needs now. (and she deserves that) She moved to Scottsdale when I was nineteen or twenty. I was off sailing around the world on a Gulf deployment by then, living my own life, and it was time for her to do something for herself. She’d wanted it as long as I can remember. It felt inevitable, like the place she was supposed to be. Over twenty years now. That’s where her people are, and I’m glad she has them.

There’s a better line sitting right there and I know it.

A cult swallowed up my mother…

…But that one’s just to get your attention too.

The group’s had to evolve, because People Unlimited ran into the obvious problem, which is that people are limited. Members died. That’s what people do. You can’t keep preaching immortality over the top of that, so the pitch now is longevity. Life extension. Stay healthy, look after your telomeres, say the things that need saying so you’re not holding stress in your body.

I can get behind every word of that.

RADD Fest if you want to get behind it.

What’s sitting unsaid at your family’s table, and who’s paying for the silence?

Every hard thing I’ve put in this newsletter cost me something to write, and I wrote it anyway, because somewhere in a rented out music room in Auckland I learned the power of saying it out loud. I also know what happens when you don’t. You leave the thing that needs saying silent, you hold it, and it eats you alive. The last couple of years I let that muscle go slack. This piece is me finding it again.

And on Sundays, at my table, we hold a family meeting. My boys sit down and say their piece, and we listen, and we blow out a candle when they are done…(our own little touch to it, to finish it) because that’s the process in our house. I thought it was stupid at their age. They probably think the same. They don’t know where it comes from yet. One day I’ll tell them. Out loud, obviously.

Bernie wouldn’t have it any other way.

Thanks for reading. This one strayed a long way from the drill floor, I know. It’s about what shaped the man who stands on one, and you can’t write honestly about the life without eventually writing about the wiring underneath it.

I’m Justin. Twenty years offshore. Driller, father, photographer. Driller’s Digest is where I write about the work, the money, the families, and what all of it costs. If this one gave you something, share it with someone. If it didn’t, the rig stories will be back next time.

Loss

I was late on the last newsletter, so you’re getting two in a week. Make of that what you will.

I sat with the last one a little longer after it went out and figured I didn’t really answer anything. I wrote that finishing the print shop felt like loss, and then I walked away from the word like I’d explained it. I hadn’t. So I mused over it on my walks.

I said the job costs something. I listed birthdays and phone calls. I never said the real one.

Here it is.

When I get home from swing, my youngest runs at me barefoot. Doesn’t stop for shoes, doesn’t stop for anything, just comes flat out down the driveway and hits me mid-stride. That’s the welcome home. That’s what the whole hitch was for.

And I know it’s leaving. The older statesmen in my life have rest assured me, with that particular smile men get when they’re handing over bad news they’ve already survived, that teenagehood is coming. Closed doors are coming. One day there’s a barefoot run, and then one day there isn’t, and nobody rings a bell to mark it. You don’t get told which run is the last one. You find out later, by absence.

That’s a form of change coming way too fast for my liking. I’d give a lot to slow it down, which is a stupid thing to want, and I want it anyway.

Now the part I’m less proud of.

I selfishly love it. The hug, the being missed. When I walk through that gate I am wanted. I am the flavour of the month. Dad lets us! And out comes my wife’s disapproving eye roll, the side-eye, met with my raised eyebrow and a cheeky smirk, because deep down I love that shit. I am wanted. I am needed. I am loved. Two weeks of it, pent up and paid out all at once at the front gate.

It’s unfair, and I know exactly who it’s unfair on. She dealt with the tears. She did the school runs and the meltdowns and the are-you-coming-home-dad phone calls, and then I walk in and collect the hero’s welcome like I earned it. She built that welcome. I just showed up to receive it.

Even leaving has its own version. A black cloud settles over the house, the kids cry, and it’s sad, of course it’s sad. But I’m quietly ready to go. And a part of me likes the sadness. It’s proof they love me, right?

I don’t sit offshore hoping they cried. I’ve never once wanted them hurting. The selfishness is smaller and more ordinary than that. When the proof is in front of me, at the gate, in the squeeze, I drink it. I harvest it when I land.

My wife has never called any of this out directly. What she says is that I love going back to work. I’d always said I was just ready. But she’s right, there’s love in it. This job is what I am. I’ve done it my whole adult life, I don’t know any different, and there’s no point pretending the rig is only a cost I pay.

It feeds me too.

Took me a while to see what it feeds. Then a stranger showed me.

Someone left a comment on one of my LinkedIn posts. “Back in my day, when people cared.” (something along those lines) And it got me instantly, properly defensive. People care now. I care. The people out here right now are the ones who want to do the job well and go home with all their fingers. We’re not disconnected, and we don’t need passing shots from the sideline by people who haven’t put boots on in twenty years.

I live it. We live it.

I didn’t reply. I mostly don’t. The posts are there to create discussion and I’ve let go of needing to be in every one, especially for a war of words online. So he’ll never know that his throwaway line has been rattling around in my head for a week, or that I’m writing this because of him.

Because once I calmed down, I stopped hearing an insult and started hearing something else. That person isn’t really saying nobody cares. He’s grieving. His version of the industry is gone, and “nobody cares anymore” is how loss talks when it doesn’t know its own name. And the reason his comment got so far under my skin is that I recognised the hunger in it. He’s standing in a comment section trying to collect one more hit of mattering. His phone stopped ringing. The rig stopped needing him. The gate stopped clicking open.

I know that hunger. I feed mine twice. Offshore, where the job needs me. And at the gate, where the kids do. I’ve built a whole life where I never have to stand anywhere I’m not wanted. Even this writing is part of it. It genuinely helps me sort the musings in my head, but i’d be lying to myself if you said there wasn’t a little rush in the notifications, the attention. Everyone chasing proof they matter, each of us with whatever currency we’ve got left. His currency is his era. So he spends it in comment sections.

We lament change out here worse than most. “Evolving,” the word we all reach for in our LinkedIn posts, is just a fancy word for changing, which is a polite word for losing what you were used to.

I catch the same grief coming out of my own mouth. I couldn’t roughneck now, I’ve said it, it’d bore me stupid. You’ll hear the other version too, that what the boys do now isn’t real roughnecking because they’re not in bib and brace, covered head to toe in oil for some unknown reason. You know the Facebook video. Some backyard super single in the backwoods of America, yee-har, (cowboy shit) everything covered in dope and nothing covered by procedure. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a form of roughnecking. I’ve always found it strange and unnecessary, but it seems to make some people’s dick hard.

Meanwhile the floors I work have bomb shelters and red zones. Automatic pipe handling that’ll even dope the connection for you. The boys are less physically involved and less exposed to moving equipment than any generation before them. Less chance to get squashed or crushed. More of them going home whole.

This is change. And the old boys mourning bib and brace are me mourning the barefoot run. Something real is passing, the hurt is honest, and the thing arriving matters too. The kid behind the closed door is becoming a man, which is the entire point of him. The roughneck behind the red zone barrier keeps both hands, which is the entire point of the barrier. Loss and progress turn up in the same delivery.

I didn’t know they travelled together.

Then there’s the day I keep trying not to picture. The one the older statesmen promise is coming. I pull up from swing and the gate doesn’t click open. Nobody’s at the door. It’s just another Thursday. Except it won’t be just another Thursday. It’ll be the first day one of my two supplies is gone. The day the commenter already lived. The difference between him and me will be nothing but time, and whatever I’ve built in myself by then that doesn’t need a gate to click.

I don’t have that built yet. I’m working on it, apparently in public.

So no, I never replied to him. But somewhere out there is a retiree who fired off one bitter line between coffees and handed me the exact thing I’d been circling for a month without being able to name. He gave me this whole essay. He’ll never know, and I’m grateful to him anyway.

For now, the gate still clicks. There’s still a kid who doesn’t stop for shoes.

I’m not missing a single run while they last.

My name is Justin and I write about my experience offshore. If you’re someone in this game, or you can relate in some way, I post once a week on a Sunday. Sometimes twice a week, it would seem, when I have something to say.

To everyone reading this, I appreciate you. Your time is precious, and thank you for giving me ten minutes of your day.

Everyone says it’s the best part. Who can disagree with that.

We go to work for one thing. Money. And the money comes with a price tag. Absence. You pay for it with the exact thing you’re working for. Time on the other end. Some might argue the ledger never evens itself out.

Most of us have to be out here. We’re not out here because we did well in school. Show me another job someone like me could do that supplies the same financial gain, opportunity and lifestyle. I’ll wait. Or maybe it’s as simple as the trolls say. Just learn to code.

Everything you do in life is some type of sacrifice. It costs you something. You choose your own poison. I make no judgements.

For four weeks your significant other has been holding down the household while you try and hold down your relationship with your wife and be a FaceTime dad. She’s full. You can hear it in her voice. “How was your day?” You know it was shit. You can hear the kids fighting in the background, that distant shouting, your conversation interrupted mid-sentence. “Stop it, you two.” You try and fix it. That’s what guys want to do. Fix it. You can’t fix everything, and some days it feels like you’re making it worse just by being on the phone.

When I started offshore they took your phone off you. Plastic bag at the ready room. You got it back when you left. There was one phone for the whole rig, an old white soundproof box near the gym, like a little dog box. Single chair inside, timer button on the outside. Five minutes. You’d see a hand come out of the door and push the button again, sneaking another round, and the people in line would groan. Sometimes you stood there while a man had a five-minute domestic with his wife through the wall. That was part of it too. And while you waited, you talked. Could be the mechanic, the electrician, the motorman. You didn’t pick who you stood next to.

Now we’ve got Starlink. I can call home every day, and I pushed for that. But being able to call every day hasn’t made the calls any better. Halfway through each hitch I sit at my desk after shift and write my boys a letter. My wife prints it out and gives it to them. That letter lands harder than any FaceTime call I’ve ever made. They keep it. Meanwhile on FaceTime they’re pushing the octopus face filter and fighting in the background. They’re not really there. Some days I’m not sure I am either.

You can see it on the faces around you too. Three weeks in, deep bags start to set in under their eyes, the sparks gone flat. You know they haven’t slept and you probably know why.

As the weeks count down, things magnify. Small things you’d normally let slide turn into conflict. Four weeks down and you’re ready to go.

You’re tired. Your body and mind are exhausted. Some hitches going home can feel like turmoil, a mix of excitement and hostility depending on the hitch you’ve had. There’s this stress and tension in your body. This feeling of being full.

You’re tired. You’re ready.

The chopper lands and you’re a one minute handover away from your relief. You take your seat, ear muffs on, close your eyes. The bird lifts and the rig is behind you. Whatever goes wrong out there tonight is his 2am call, not yours. Airport next. All you want to feel is that you’re on your way. Moving forward. Be it in a chopper, a shitty banged up Hiace van sitting side saddle, or on a plane fighting quietly for the armrest. It’s all part of the game.

There’s this overwhelming sense of calm when I take my seat on that first leg. My shoulders drop. Four weeks of tension lets go of my body. The kind that comes with the job. You don’t even realise it some days, but it’s there and it builds. Go do your blood work and test your cortisol levels. Then you’ll find out what I’m talking about.

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I settle into my seat, the plane hurtling down the runway, and before we’ve even taken off I’m asleep. Maybe it’s my body shutting down. The exhaustion takes over and you’re out. Only to be woken for your scorching hot, MSG riddled meal.

Somewhere in the middle of it all there’s a layover. I used to rush through airports. Now I sit. I find a decent meal before the next leg. I window shop for something small to bring home for the boys. I people watch. Everyone heading somewhere, everyone carrying something. I enjoy being anonymous in a crowd. A man who doesn’t have to be anything to anyone except a passenger.

I know how that sounds. I’m away from my family and I’m telling you I enjoy part of the absence. But it’s true. The travel is the buffer. The slow shift from driller back to husband and dad. You can’t flick that switch off in an hour. Egypt via Doha via Perth. The further away the job, the sweeter the walk through the front door.

That distance, that 20 hours of travel, is your time to unwind. To let go. Trip sheets, RigFlow, reports, handovers, trend sheets, PMs. All behind you. Your relief has it now. You’re going home to live your life for 28 days at a time.

Somewhere over the ocean on the last leg, the butterflies start.

Touch down home. You wait for your turn to leave. After a lifetime of flying I still can’t understand the rush. Where do people think they’re going in such a hurry? Everyone has to get off and you will get off too. I stick my headphones in at this point. My way of blocking it out.

I still get anxious, even nervous, about coming home.

Four weeks of being told when to eat, when to sleep, when to work. Then you land home and your wife asks what you want for dinner and your brain completely shits itself. Freedom is harder than it looks after a hitch.

Airport pickups have become a thing of the past, lost sadly to the school week routine. I remember them as young kids running at me screaming “Daddy!” as I walked through the arrival gate. Cherish that. It goes by so fast.

Now I wait at the uber bay looking for my number plate. You feel like the chosen one when you spot your digits. I’m not one for conversation. Headphones stay on. WhatsApp notifications digging in between an episode of Seinfeld to pass the drive home.

“When will you be home babe?”

The uber pulls down my street. I’m collecting my bags when I hear the sound of the gate, then “Daddy’s home!”, then a barefoot nine year old in his PJs running at me.

I get the biggest squeeze a dad could get. Arms around my neck like he’s making sure I’m real. 28 days of pent up emotion in one hug. You can feel it. You can hear it in his voice.

Part of me it kills. No kid should have to store that much up.

My wife is behind him. The kiss, and the hold that goes a few seconds longer than normal, because we both need it. Four weeks of holding down the household is in that hug.

Distance and time heighten your emotions. You miss them so much, but you eat it, push it down, deal with it. Kids don’t. They don’t even know how to do that. Theirs are raw, honest emotions, and you feel every bit of it in that hug.

The bags land in the same spot every time. Just inside the front door, in the hallway. That’s where they’ll sit for the night….. maybe a few nights.

By the time I get home it’s bedtime on a school night. The boys have been counting down the same 28 days I have, and they’re wound up and waiting. But the routine my wife has held together for four weeks matters more than my grand entrance. I lay with them and listen to whatever they’ve got. Usually it’s one dobbing on the other for something. I hug them goodnight and get them back down. The routine holds.

There’s a dinner wrapped up on the bench. She cooks for me every time, no matter how late the flight gets in, and it’s always gone lukewarm to cold by the time I sit down to it. She tells me to heat it up. I never do. I like it cold. A lifetime of mess halls and timelines programmed me to eat like a heathen, and cold suits a fast eater fine. I scoff it down like a starved stray dog.

I strip off the travel clothes and sit in a hot shower for way too long. Then it’s finally her turn. We sit and talk, and I’m shot. She waited four weeks and gets the most tired hour of me.

Four weeks on a communal single mattress makes a man appreciate his own bed. Mine’s orthopedic latex, like sleeping on the floor, and it’s great for my back. I don’t feel jet lag anymore. The shifts line up with the time zone at home. Twenty hours of flying to sleep it off and one night in my own bed puts the clock right back.

We tried to buy the time back once. Two and a half years caravanning around Australia, homeschooling the boys. I didn’t quit the job to do it. I flew out and back the whole time. The difference was that every day home was a day together. And my family spent every hitch parked in one spot, waiting out the 28 days so we could move on. For them, me coming home meant the trip could move again. I’d land from a month offshore and find myself packing up a caravan the next morning. It was a great couple of years. I never once felt like I got a break. The ledger came with us.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy that hug at the gate. And part of me knows the truth I don’t like saying out loud. If I was home every day, that hug wouldn’t exist. You don’t get greeted at the gate for coming back from the shops.

But I know what that hug costs.

That can be uncomfortable to sit with.

I’ve got 26 days to sit with it. Then the bags go back to their spot by the front door, packed this time, and my boy starts storing it up again.

The Drillers Digest. Written somewhere between the rig and the front gate.

If this one hit, you’ve lived your own version. What does your first night home look like? Put it in the comments.

Know someone mid-hitch counting down their own 28? Send them this.

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The other week I wrote a post about treeing a stand.

The gist of it: there was a time when putting a triple across the derrick meant nothing at all. You chained it off, stood it back up and carried on with your day. No paperwork, no investigation, no man in a clean shirt asking how you feel about what happened. Do the same thing now and you’ve bought yourself a case number, photographs, witness statements, and a series of meetings where grown men study a piece of pipe like it’s the Zapruder film. I said the industry had moved on without asking anyone’s permission, and anyone who came up in the old world could move with it or become the old boy in the corner telling stand-treeing stories to people who legally can’t relate.

Then I sat back and watched the old world argue with itself in my comments.

Some old hands told me it never happened, that no driller ever ran the blocks at a man on purpose, that no driller would slow his own trip. Others, in the same thread, fondly remembered the bets that used to ride on dropped stands. Nobody saw a contradiction.

And I’ll grant them one thing: most of it wasn’t malice. It was the chart. The Geolograph pen scratching away in the doghouse, drawing a line for every idle minute, and the whole rig racing it. Which is worse, in its way, because it means there was always an instrument watching the old crews. It just measured speed. The one they clip on us now measures whether I’m standing somewhere that can kill me.

And under it all, the chorus that arrives on schedule beneath any post like mine, from profile photos taken on jack-ups in 1987:

“We didn’t need all this paperwork. We just got on with it. We set the standard you lot work to now.”

That comment section is why this essay exists.

I read these comments and I feel two things at once.

The first thing is respect. I came up under these men. My first years offshore were spent standing next to people who’d been drilling since before I could walk, and some of what they taught me doesn’t exist in any management system. How to read a driller’s mood from the way he worked the brake. How to feel a string. When to shut up. I owe them, and I’ve written plenty about the world they built. The phone box with the buttons worn smooth. The flour and egg when a new hand went man riding. Crews that felt like crews. I grieve that world too. Openly. I’ve written whole essays out of that grief and meant every one.

The second thing is closer to anger. Because there’s a version of history doing the rounds in those comment sections that needs taking out the back. The version where it was safer back then. Where men were switched on instead of buried in permits, and the paperwork is what ruined everything, and things were fine.

Things were not fine.

I know things were not fine because the bodies are counted. The industry counts them. It has counted them since 1985. And the count says the old boys are remembering a world that never existed.

So let’s go back and look at what the good old days actually did to the men who lived them.

The golden age

The 1980s. Peak nostalgia territory. Conventional rigs, hard men, no HSE department breathing down anyone’s neck. The decade half my LinkedIn feed wishes it could move back to.

Pull the record on the 1980s.

March 1980. The Alexander L. Kielland, a semi-submersible working as a flotel in the Ekofisk field, North Sea. Two hundred and twelve men on board, most off duty in the accommodation because the weather was up. Around 6:30 in the evening, a sharp crack, then trembling. One of the rig’s five legs broke away. A fatigue crack in a single weld, a weld that had probably been defective since the day the rig left the French shipyard, had been quietly growing for four years while men slept above it.

The rig listed to 35 degrees within seconds. The men had fourteen minutes. Seven fifty-man lifeboats on board. Four were launched. One released properly from its cables, because the release hooks couldn’t let go under load. Men sat in lifeboats they could not detach from a capsizing rig. 123 died. It was the worst offshore disaster in history to that point, and the inquiry later concluded most of them could have escaped in those fourteen minutes if a command structure had existed to tell them what to do.

No structure existed. That was the good old days.

February 1982. The Ocean Ranger, drilling the Hibernia field off Newfoundland. The biggest rig of her kind in the world. A storm put a wave through a porthole in the ballast control room, a window where no window should have been, and seawater shorted the ballast panel. She went down in the early hours of the 15th.

All 84 men died, and the sinking is the least of what killed them. They died in the water. Hypothermia and drowning, in seas barely above freezing, because the rig carried no immersion suits. Nineteen eighty-two. The technology to keep a man alive in cold water existed and simply wasn’t on board, because nobody made anyone put it there. The inquiry found a better trained crew could have saved the rig entirely. Close the deadlights, cut power to the panel, and every man sees the morning.

The storm supplied the load. The gaps did the killing.

July 1988. You know this one. Piper Alpha. A pressure safety valve removed for maintenance, a blind flange in its place, a permit to work system that failed on shift handover, and a night crew that started a pump the day crew knew was open to atmosphere. The first explosion took out the control room. The men did what their training told them: mustered in the accommodation and waited for instructions. The instructions never came, because the platform kept feeding itself gas from two other platforms that didn’t shut in for close to an hour.

167 men died. 109 of them from smoke inhalation, most of them in the accommodation, waiting, doing exactly what the system had taught them to do. The system was the thing that killed them.

Add it up: 374 men from three rigs in eight years. A weld, a window and a permit. Weather had nothing to do with any of them.

I’ve left two names off that list deliberately. The Glomar Java Sea, 1983, all 81 lost in a typhoon in the South China Sea, the wreck found floating upside down. The Seacrest, 1989, capsized at anchor in Typhoon Gay, 91 gone. The old boys will tell you that you can’t legislate weather, and fair enough. A typhoon doesn’t read procedures.

But ask yourself why storm sinkings with full crews aboard mostly stopped happening. The storms stayed the same size. Someone finally made leaving a rule. Suspend the well, secure the rig, get the men off. Written procedures with trigger points now, where it used to be a nerve some toolpusher had to hold against a day rate. What changed is that going home stopped being a judgment call.

So even the two I’m not counting still make the point, and the decade’s full bill, counted and uncounted, passes 540 men. That’s just the catastrophes big enough to earn names and memorials. It doesn’t include the steady drip: the single fatalities, the man crushed on a pipe deck, the one over the side on night shift who got a paragraph in a local paper. The ones who died one at a time, which is how most men die out here. A crew that went quiet for a week and then got on with it, because getting on with it was the culture, and the culture was the problem.

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The quiet carnage

The disasters get the memorials. Mostly, though, this job took men apart one piece at a time.

Ask the record what the hand injury rate was in 1978 and the record says nothing. Literally nothing. The IOGP didn’t start counting until 1985. IADC’s statistics program is the same era. Before that, there is no ledger. The silence is the story. The industry knew its production to the barrel and its day rates to the dollar, and it did not systematically count its severed fingers. A man’s hand was cheaper than the paperwork. The counting itself, the boring, mocked counting, is one of the reforms.

So the old days don’t just look better because the dead can’t argue. They look better because nobody wrote the damage down.

Once the counting started, the numbers came back ugly. Hand and finger injuries lead the recordable incident rates every single year. A third of all recordables by IADC’s own incident program, and fingers named the most vulnerable body part on a rig, year after year, report after report. The one who cops it most is the floorman, tripping pipe, caught between objects on the rig floor. The exact job I did. The exact place I stood.

Everyone out here knows someone missing a digit. The old hand working along beside you with nine fingers, sometimes eight, and always a story to go with it. Half of them tell the story as comedy, and I’ve laughed along, because that’s the language we speak out here. Listen to enough of those stories, though, and you notice what they are. A casualty list with the grief removed.

The culprits change with the era, that’s all. The spinning chain ate plenty back in the day. The modern rig keeps its own list: the iron roughneck tracks, prying them up to change them out, trying to get that pin out, another roughneck in there on the pry bar. One slip of that bar, and any fingers underneath are gone.

Fingers come off relatively easily, it turns out. Unfortunately, they don’t go back on.

Now connect the fingers to the machines the old boys hate. When researchers compared new technology rigs against old conventional rigs at the biggest onshore drilling contractor in the United States, ten years of data, 77 million man-hours, the new rigs ran at two thirds the injury rate of the old ones, and roughnecks collected the biggest share of the saving, mostly in their limbs. The study named the difference itself: on the old rigs, connections were made with manual tongs. The new iron spins the pipe so the hands don’t have to.

Every catwalk machine, every iron roughneck, every pipe gate that replaced a V door. The old boys call it the death of real drilling. The data calls it fingers that stayed on hands. Both are true. That’s this whole essay in one machine.

One more number, because it’s the one that stayed with me. When a drilling hand gets hurt badly enough to lose time, the American labor bureau’s median is thirty days away from work. Across all industries, seven. When this job bites, it bites four times harder than a normal job, and that’s the reformed era’s own number. The everyday version of this work was backs that never came good, hands that changed shape, people who came back to the rig moving differently and never said a word about it.

They still slip, too. Slips and trips at the same height, the least glamorous injury in the world, were the single biggest category of lost work day cases in the industry’s 2024 data. Twenty-two percent. No typhoon, no blowout. A wet stair and a man carrying something he shouldn’t have been. The mundane never stopped being the main event.

The ledger

I’d normally worry about boring you with a statistics section, but you read mud reports for a living.

The IOGP, the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers, has collected safety data from its member companies since 1985. It’s the largest database of safety performance in the upstream industry, and remember who’s holding the pen. If the ledger has a bias, it flatters the industry.

Their own headline number: the fatal accident rate has fallen more than 90% since 1985.

In 2024 it was 0.77 deaths per 100 million hours worked, from 32 fatalities across 4.1 billion hours. Run the arithmetic backwards and the men of 1985 were dying at ten times the rate we are now. Same ocean, same gas trying to get out of the same ground. Run 2024’s hours at the 1985 rate and you’re mourning somewhere north of 300 men instead of 32. Every single year. That’s three hundred families a year who get to be bored by their husbands and fathers instead of laying flowers.

The UK tells it even harder, because the UK has a before and after line drawn in fire. On one side of the line: 167 men in a single night in 1988, the worst industrial accident in modern British history. On the other: the UK sector recorded zero fatal injuries in 2024. Two fatalities in the entire past decade, across a workforce of roughly 23,000. From the deadliest night the industry has ever had to a decade you can count on two fingers, inside one working lifetime. There are men still on the tools who have personally lived the whole arc.

America, for balance, because the US onshore boom shows what happens when the reform doesn’t reach everywhere. The CDC counted an average of 108 worker deaths a year in US oil and gas extraction between 2003 and 2013, a fatality rate seven times the rate for all American workers. That’s the 2000s, not the 80s. Which tells you the safety came from somewhere other than the calendar. It came from regulation with teeth, and it only exists where the teeth reach.

And home. Australia. 2016 was the first year since our national offshore regulator stood up in 2005 that no fatalities or major injuries were reported. The most recent NOPSEMA report: no fatalities, injury rates at near five-year lows.

One of the serious ones under that post asked me a question that deserves better than a comeback: why are there so many things going wrong offshore today, things that would never have been missed twenty years ago? Where did the fundamentals go, the basic knowledge that used to live where it mattered?

Fair question. Part of the answer is the counting itself. The old world produced just as many stuff-ups. It wrote almost none of them down, so today’s failures are all lit up and yesterday’s are all forgotten. The rest of the answer is the trend lines themselves: fewer men dying per hour worked than at any point since the counting began. The things going wrong were always there. What’s new is that we look.

You cannot look at those trend lines and call the old days safer. The old days killed people and took fingers like it was a line item, because it was a line item. Somewhere in an office in Houston or Aberdeen or Perth, it literally was.

Grief in work clothes

The people writing “we set the standard”, in the comments share one qualification. They survived. That’s the whole trick of it. The men who’d disagree with them, the 123 at Ekofisk, the 84 off Newfoundland, the 167 on Piper, aren’t on LinkedIn. Dead men don’t post. The nostalgia vote only gets cast by the winners of a lottery they didn’t know they were playing, and every year that passes the sample gets more skewed, because the survivors are the only witnesses left.

There’s a name for this and the old boys would hate it, so I’ll use it. Survivorship bias. You’re polling the lifeboats about the voyage.

I don’t think that’s the full story either, and this is where I’ll lose the safety managers who were nodding along.

Because when an old hand tells me it was better back then, I’ve learned to listen for what sits under the words. Nobody misses the fatality rate. He watched men get hurt. Some of them watched men die, and carry it the way men of that generation carry things, which is silently and sideways.

What he misses is who he was.

He misses being twenty-six and hard and necessary. He misses a crew that felt like the last of something, because there was one phone and one movie room and nowhere to hide, so the crew was all you had and you were all the crew had. Being trusted to know things instead of being told to verify them. A world where his judgment was the safety system. Never mind that the judgment era is the one with 374 names against it. It felt like competence, and feeling competent is most of what a working man has.

The cruellest part is that the competence was real, and so were the instincts. It’s the landscape they were built on that’s gone, paved over, so the people on the floor now are drilling in a country he never worked in, carrying weight he never carried, answering for things nobody ever asked him to answer for.

The characters went with it. The people with a presence you could feel through a doghouse wall, built by an industry abrasive enough to produce them. We sanded the abrasiveness off, and the rigs stopped growing them.

I’ve written before about what that world gave us and what the Starlink era took away. The doors that close after shift now. The connection that used to happen by default and now only happens by choice. He’s right that something died. I’ve stood in the graveyard with him.

So the grief is real. The conclusion is what’s wrong. He’s taken the truest thing he knows, “we lost something'“, and welded it to the falsest thing he says, “therefore it was better:,. And that weld is as fatigued as the one on the Kielland.

The nostalgia is grief wearing work clothes. And grief deserves better than being dressed up as a safety argument.

And if you’re one of the people typing those comments, one question, asked straight. When you say it was better back then, better for who? You made it home to type it. Run through your old crew lists and tell me every name on them can say the same.

The archaeology

Now the claim itself. “We set the standard.”, This is the one I can’t let through.

Walk any modern rig and read the safety systems like an archaeologist.

The release hooks on every lifeboat you’ll ever ride, the ones that let go under load, exist because the Kielland’s boats wouldn’t. Men died in launched lifeboats attached to a capsizing rig, and the IMO rewrote the rules for the world’s shipping because of it.

The clear command structure, the OIM’s absolute authority to abandon, the muster discipline you’ve drilled a thousand times. Kielland again. Fourteen minutes and no one to give the order.

The immersion suit in your locker. The Ocean Ranger. Eighty-four men who didn’t have one.

The safety case regime, the entire philosophy that an operator must prove an installation is safe rather than tick a checklist, comes from the Cullen inquiry, written out of Piper Alpha’s ashes. 106 recommendations. Every one accepted. The permit to work discipline that gets called bureaucracy in the comments? Piper Alpha was a permit to work failure. 167 men. The paperwork the old boys mock is the corrected version of the exact paperwork failure that killed their mates.

Norway tore down and rebuilt its entire regulatory structure because of Ekofisk, then made operators legally responsible for their workers’ lives. The regulator we have in Australia exists because a review found the old patchwork wasn’t good enough.

Every reform on that list was extracted from the industry at the point of an inquiry, paid for in advance by men who never got to see what their deaths bought.

So no. The old boys didn’t set the standard. The standard was set by 123 men in the water at Ekofisk. By 84 frozen off Newfoundland. By 167 at Piper Alpha, most of them waiting patiently in the accommodation for help that couldn’t come. Every procedure that gets called soft has a body count behind it. Every permit is a paragraph from an inquest.

The paperwork is a headstone with a signature line.

The dead set the standard. The rest of us just sign it at pretour.

Out of turn

Half the time I don’t know who I’m writing to.

The loudest voices under these posts are men on the tools or retired off them, and I’ve learned the rules of my own comment section. Rig stories make me one of the good ones. This one makes me a man talking out of turn. The tribe likes its history served warm, and it prefers its witnesses to stick to the approved stories.

But the audience that needs this essay was never going to be in the comments. The men who weigh day rates against weather windows, who let a contractor’s hour carry more risk than a company man’s, the men in clean shirts who decide what a finger is worth. They’re somewhere quieter, running numbers.

So maybe I’m just making noise for people who want to be right. I wrote it anyway. The record deserves at least one witness who stood on the floor of both worlds.

The choice

So where does that leave the comparison everyone wants to make? Then versus now. Their era versus mine.

Nowhere, because it’s a comparison between two different species of thing. One world was harder and more alive, and it killed you. The other is safer and lonelier, and it sends you home. You can grieve the first honestly while being grateful your son will only ever know the second. Both at once. Call it fence-sitting if you want. I call it the truth, and most true things about this life come in pairs that don’t resolve.

The modern rig isn’t the finished product either, and I won’t pretend it is. Thirty-two men still died in 2024. The rate came down. The knock on the door still happens. The most this job has ever managed is survivable, and the families of the 32 know how far that sits from safe.

There are fair fights to have with the modern rig. Whether the automation that saved the fingers has turned watchmen into passengers. Whether a bored crew is a switched-off crew, and what that boredom costs in situational awareness the day the iron does something the program didn’t expect. And whether somewhere under all the process, personal accountability went quiet. Those are real conversations about the price of the trade, and the old hands are welcome in every one of them. “It was safer back then”, is a different animal. That one’s just bullshit with a memory problem.

The system will wear a new slogan next year, the way it always does. The goal under every slogan hasn’t moved. Don’t hurt people. Send them home whole.

Stand in a modern doghouse and count the screens. Twenty-odd, probably more, where a Martin Decker and two pressure gauges used to be. Red zone management watching the floor, geo tags tracking every man on it, live reporting and tally screens running while the operation runs, because the paperwork happens mid-job now instead of scribbled up after. Great innovations, all of them, and every one takes a small piece of your attention away from the thing you’re actually doing. The red zone system ghosts in a couple of workers who aren’t there, the alarm goes again, and we end up managing the system that’s meant to be managing the floor, mid-operation, because the operation doesn’t stop for the alarm. More automation, and more systems to learn, understand and monitor while you run the well. I’m not offering that as an excuse. It’s just the seat we drill from now, and one more reason the comparison is obsolete. Apples to oranges, from where I sit.

But if the old boys insist on making me choose, their world or mine, then I’ll say it and mean it.

I’ll take the loneliness. I’ll take the closed doors, the Netflix, the permits, the verifications and the geo tag on my chest.

Because I’d rather sit in my kitchen missing the old world than have my boys sitting in theirs missing me.

The old hands got to grow old enough to write passive aggressive comments about how soft we’ve all become.

374 men from three rigs never got the chance. Count the typhoons the old boys say don’t count, and the decade’s bill passes 540.

That’s the standard. They set it. The least we can do is stop pretending we did.

Every swing there’s something waiting that didn’t exist when I left. A new policy. Procedures moved over to V24. RigFlow for the reports. Live Action. An MPD package running Safekick. A Cyber 14 update with a stack of features nobody’s had time to sit with. That’s a normal swing. Come out of a shipyard with a full upgrade and it’s four or five new systems landing on you at once, and every day feels like day one.

You drop your bags and you’re already catching up, because the rig kept moving while you were home mowing the lawn. The rig always keeps moving. It doesn’t give a shit about your leave. Whatever you knew cold when you flew off, some percentage of it expired while you were standing at the school pickup. You find out which percentage on your first tour back.

Walking onto a new rig altogether is worse. You feel naked — Bad naked. All new equipment, new line-ups, everything foreign, and you need to absorb it fast. Where’s the manifold. How does this crew run their handovers, and which way do they do the thing you’ve done a thousand times somewhere else. Twenty years of experience and you’re standing there like it’s your first hitch, because in some ways it is. The experience didn’t disappear. It just doesn’t know where anything is yet. There’s a gap between what you know and where you are, and you close it one embarrassing question at a time. Or you don’t ask, and you close it slower.

Some of these systems come with the celebratory five-day course in Houston. You fly halfway around the world, sit in a simulator worth more than your house, and come home with a certificate that says competent. Nice piece of paper. Goes in the file. And look, sim time is the best training going. Controlled environment, scenarios thrown at you until you find out what stuck and what fell out the bottom. I’d take it over a classroom every day of the week.

But a certificate of competency and actual competency are two different animals. Five days gets you familiar. Gets your toes wet. What the simulator can’t give you is the day the system does something the instructor never showed you, with an operation running and people waiting on your answer. You don’t know a system until you’ve used it in anger, on the rig, with real consequences hanging off the back of it. Six months to a year of deep diving before things dial in. That’s the real number. Nobody says it at the course, and it isn’t printed on the certificate. Nobody’s found the shortcut either. Believe me, we’ve looked.

Other systems don’t come with a course at all. You learn them on the fly. A new Cyber, figured out mid-operation. Plenty carries over from the old one. Plenty doesn’t, and the differences don’t announce themselves. They wait for you. If you’ve never worked with PIMS, you’re learning its moods in real time. Which arm can be where. What sequence has to happen before that PIM will do what you’re asking. Why it just stopped you doing something you’ve done safely your whole career. These systems will save your ass one day, no question. They’ll also drive you around the bend, sometimes in the same hour. That’s the deal with anything smart enough to protect you. It’s smart enough to argue with you too.

Stack it all up and yeah, it gets overwhelming. It’s also progression, and this is what evolution looks like from inside it. The industry moves and you move with it or the gap opens up under you. Most days I find it exciting. New systems, new capability, a rig that can do things rigs couldn’t do when I started. Most days.

Now the ugly part.

This industry has a problem with people feeling stupid. Everyone recites the same line. The only stupid question is the one you don’t ask. It’s on posters. It’s in inductions. Lovely sentiment. And everyone offshore knows what actually happens when you ask. You get the look first. Half a second, that’s all it takes. Then you get the answer. Don’t you know that? You should know that.

One serve of that and a man learns fast. Keep your mouth shut and figure it out alone. It doesn’t even have to happen to you. You can watch it happen to the bloke next to you and learn the same lesson second-hand. The question dies in your throat, and every question after it dies a little easier.

I’m squarely in that camp. I’ll admit it here because I’d struggle to admit it in the pre-tour. My learning happens in my cabin. Door shut, spec sheet up, manual open, Google doing the heavy lifting. Teaching myself at 8pm what I nodded along to at 8am. Sitting on my bunk going through documentation like there’s an exam coming. And I’d bet a swing’s pay half the rig is doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same hour. Grown men with decades of experience, studying in private like kids hiding homework, because the culture makes it cheaper to hide the gap than ask across it. The knowledge is on the rig, two doors down, watching a movie. And we’re all in our cabins, alone, asking the internet what he could tell us in five minutes.

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Maybe that’s leftover from ten years ago, from a rougher version of this industry some of us grew up in. Maybe we do it to ourselves and the culture changed while our habits didn’t. It’s real either way, and it means the not-knowing-enough feeling arrives with social teeth attached. You’re learning two things at once out here: the system, and the performance of already knowing it.

These days I’ve stopped bluffing. I’m too old for it. Someone asks me something I don’t know, I tell them straight. Not too sure, but I’ll find out. Honest answer, the right answer, the one we’re all supposed to give. And it still feels shitty every single time. Because you feel like you should know. Like it should be there off the dome, twenty years in. It isn’t, because it can’t be. Some things only come with time on that rig, that system, that hole. Knowing that doesn’t soften the feeling much. You say I’ll find out with a straight face and something in you winces anyway.

Then there’s the ladder.

It takes years to feel comfortable in a position out here. Actual years. Repetition, mistakes, finding out at 2am what you actually know versus what you thought you knew. And right about when the job starts to fit, when your hands run the work without your head having to supervise, you’re learning the one above it. The comfort you spent years earning becomes the platform you leave.

Why? Money. Let’s not be precious about it. I wouldn’t keep pushing for the next seat if the pay was flat, and show me the man who would. We can dress it up as passion for the craft, and the craft is real, I love the work. But nobody does twenty years of missed birthdays for the love of mud weights.

More responsibility earns more money. If you want the money, you carry the responsibility, and if you want the responsibility, you’d better know more. That’s the whole machine and it only runs one direction. You’re being paid for what you know about the operation and what you’re willing to carry because of it. The discomfort is the tax, and everybody pays it. Every pay rise I’ve ever had came with a fresh serving of not knowing what I was doing.

There’s status in it too. Rigs still run on hierarchy, whatever the org chart says. Where you sit at the table. Who gets asked and who gets told. On the drilling side, nearly everyone I meet is geared for the climb. I could count on one hand the guys genuinely content in their seat with no eye on the next one. Everyone else is pushing. Which means everyone keeps choosing, over and over, to walk back into being the least competent version of themselves. The derrickman who had the pits wired becomes the AD who doesn’t. The AD who finally got smooth becomes the driller sweating in the chair. You trade competence for opportunity your whole career, and you do it on purpose, and you’d do it again tomorrow.

I thought stepping sideways might quiet the feeling down. When I moved rigs, the seat on offer was auxiliary well driller. A demotion, if you want the hooky word. I don’t see it that way now, but I’ll be honest about the start. There was disappointment. You’d be lying if you said there wasn’t. There was also gratitude, because a lot of good men don’t have a job right now and I do. The relationships I’ve built in this industry got me across, and I can name several times over twenty years those relationships have paid off. This was one of them. Build them. They’re worth more than the certificates.

Then I got here and got with this crew, and I’m happier than I was before. Paired with the best driller on the rig, a guy who’s been on this vessel since it was new, and we work well together. New rig, new systems coming from every direction, and the auxiliary chair turned out to be the right way in. Room to learn the vessel without carrying the whole show on day one. In hindsight, blessed.

But the move taught me something about the feeling. It followed me down.

Even a rung back, there’s still so much to know. Still that low hum of not being enough for it, of having something to prove. I changed seats and the feeling didn’t even notice. It was waiting on the helideck with my bags.

And maybe there’s something underneath all of it. I want to be successful, and out here promotion is stitched to success. So you watch the people around you and compare your growth to theirs. I should be here by now. Human nature, can’t help it. A guy you started with is two seats ahead. Another one’s behind you and closing. You run the maths on other men’s careers like it tells you something about your own. It doesn’t. You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. I know that. I still run the maths.

So I’ve stopped treating the feeling as evidence against me. Call it a motivator, a fire under your ass. Having something to prove keeps you sharp, and the moment you push past what you think you know, you find out you haven’t scratched the surface. Every system I’ve learned opened doors into three more I’d never heard of. Houston didn’t make me feel qualified. Houston showed me the size of the thing.

Twenty years in, I’ve stopped waiting for the day I feel like enough. I don’t think the day exists. I’ve watched for it in men thirty years deep and I don’t see it in them either. What I see is the ones who made peace with the feeling and the ones who let it eat them, and the work sorted them into those two piles a long time ago.

The feeling will be on my next flight out. It’ll be on yours too.

Drive into it.

Driller. Photographer. Still asking.

If this one landed, send it to a bloke on your crew. Odds are he’s in his cabin right now, door shut, asking Google something the man two doors down could answer in five minutes.

And if you’ve been sitting on a question all swing, ask it. Worst case you get the look. You’ll live.

New here? I write about the offshore life, the work, the head stuff, the things nobody says in the pre-tour. Subscribe and it lands in your inbox every swing.

I’ve also built a few free tools for offshore workers: a tax calculator and a guide for getting paid in USD without your bank robbing you.

Links below. Choose your own adventure.

Justin Forrest

The Link Tree Button

A few weeks ago I sat in a meeting with a potential client. The regulator. The body that oversees a multi-billion-dollar industry in their patch of ocean. I asked a simple question. What imagery do you have of the work you regulate? The rigs. The people.

They didn’t know.

So we looked. The answer was zero. Not a small library. Not an old folder of grainy stuff from the nineties. Zero. The regulator of a multi-billion-dollar industry had not one honest image of a single rig or a single worker in the region it governs. The biggest problem they actually flagged was that they’d worn out the same Shutterstock images everyone else uses.

That’s the thing I couldn’t shake on the drive home. Not the missing photos. What the missing photos mean.

A camera is a witness. That’s the whole thing, stripped right down. It stands in front of something and says: this was real, this happened, these people were here. Everything after that is just technique.

I keep coming back to a few photographers who understood that. Sebastião Salgado spent years pointing his lens at the people the world walks straight past. Gold miners hauling sacks up ladders out of a pit in Brazil, tens of thousands of them caked head to foot in mud, looking like something out of the Old Testament. The men who fought the oil fires in Kuwait, black to the eyeballs. Shipbreakers, labourers, hands. He didn’t pose them and he didn’t clean them up. He shot manual work the way it actually looks, and somehow that made these men giants. You stand in front of a Salgado print and you cannot pretend the man in it doesn’t exist.

Robert Frank did it another way. Drove across America in the fifties with a second-hand camera and photographed ordinary people candidly, in diners and on buses and at funerals, and handed the country a picture of itself it hadn’t been shown. Ordinary people, caught straight.

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That’s what a candid photograph does that a posed one never will. It catches a person half a second before they arrange their face. Mid-work, mid-thought, unguarded. And in that half-second you get the truth of them. What the job has done to their hands. What twenty years looks like around the eyes.

So that’s the value, if you’re asking me what it is. A photograph is proof you were here. It’s the difference between a life of work that gets remembered and a life of work that just vanishes the day the last person who saw it dies.

So look at what we put up instead.

You’ve seen the photo. A jack-up in silhouette against an orange sky, sun coming up behind the derrick, one lone figure on the deck looking out at nothing. It’s on every brochure, every corporate deck, every LinkedIn banner in the industry. I can tell you in about half a second that it’s stock. Nobody’s working in it. Nobody’s sweating. The light’s too clean. That figure has never racked a stand of pipe in his life, and he’s standing on a hundred other brochures wearing the same clean coveralls.

Now go stand in Perth Airport. Domestic terminal, early flight, the high-vis army already three deep at the coffee cart. Look at the walls. Every billboard is red dirt and yellow trucks. People in spotless PPE squinting heroically at a haul road. Mining has plastered itself across every flat surface between the car park and the gate, and nobody in that industry is hiding.

Now find me one image of offshore. One photo of a drill floor, a moonpool, a roughneck covered in mud at four in the morning. You won’t. We don’t exist out there. We pay into the same GDP and keep our face out of the frame.

And so when the public pictures us, they picture a spill, a flare, a cartoon villain in a hard hat. There’s nothing else in the frame, because we never put anything there. No wonder it’s easy to demonise us. We never gave anyone a real picture to argue against.

And it does something to the people too. There’s a low hum of shame in this work that nobody says out loud. The feeling that you’re doing a bad thing. Wrecking the planet. One of the bad guys. So you go home and you keep your mouth shut. You don’t tell people what you do, or you tell them and you watch their face change. Meanwhile the miner three rows over at the gate has a billboard behind his head calling him a national hero.

A rig is the most multicultural workplace I’ve ever stood on. Filipino stewards, Angolan roustabouts, Brits, Norwegians, Aussies, people from every corner of the map sharing a galley and a smoko and a job that’ll kill you the second you switch off. People of all colours and creeds, out past the horizon, keeping a machine running that the country can’t function without. You’d never know it. The country it feeds has never seen its face.

Every company in this business says the same line. Our people are our greatest asset. It’s on the wall in every induction room. I’ve heard it a hundred times in twenty years. And I keep asking the same thing back. Show me. How do you show it? Because from where I stand you’ve got an employee number, a barcode, a line on a crew manifest, and not one photograph that says you were ever here.

Now I’ll be straight with you, because I have to be. I can’t see this clearly. It’s my work. I’m a photographer and a driller both, and I want the answer to be yes so badly that I don’t trust myself on it. So let me argue your side for a second.

Maybe the honest answer is there’s no return. Maybe you run a real image library for two years and it changes nothing on the balance sheet. Maybe people offshore aren’t here to feel seen. Maybe you’re here to do the work, take the money, go home, shut your mouth, and the seeing is beside the point. Maybe a number is all you were ever meant to be, and maybe that’s fine.

I don’t think it’s fine. But I’ll grant you it’s possible, and any honest case has to.

So here’s the question, and it’s for the movers and shakers, the ones who can actually say yes. You didn’t have this before, so why would you need it now. That’s the line I get, every time, in some shape or another. We’ve managed fine without it. And I want to ask you straight. What are you protecting by keeping your own workforce out of the picture? How many hands does a single photograph have to pass through in your shop to get to a maybe? Five? Ten? And what exactly is the risk you’re managing when the thing you won’t show is just people doing honest, dangerous, skilled work?

And if you’re offshore reading this, one for you as well. Why do you keep quiet? Why do you let them tell the story without you in it?

Twenty years from now the rigs I’ve worked will run aground on the shores of a Bangladeshi scrapyard, cut up for body parts. The people I’ve worked with will be old or gone. And there’ll be almost no record that any of it happened. No face, no floor, no four in the morning. Just the same orange sunset on the same brochure, the same clean coveralls, looking out at nothing.

Somebody, several rooms up, decided that picture was enough. Signed off on a whole workforce nobody outside the gate will ever see. I’d put money they’ve never been offshore in their life.

Movers and Shakers.

If you’re the one who signs off on this stuff — marketing, comms, the budget — I want to hear from you. Not to pick a fight. I want to understand the call. Why is it a no? Or why has it never been a question at all? What are you weighing that I can’t see from the deck?

And if you work out there, tell me I’m wrong. Or tell me I’m right. Either way, say something. The silence is half the problem.

Drop it in the comments or message me direct. I’ll read every one.

Life starts at midday and finishes at midnight.

At least for the first two weeks. Then we flip the whole thing around and run it the other way, days instead of nights, but for now we’re on nights, which means I start where I finish. Make that make sense. So I’m going to tell you about my day by starting at the end of it, because out here the end is really the beginning, and the beginning is just the part where you’re too tired to notice.

This isn’t the brochure version. Nobody out here is living the dream. We’re living the roster, and four weeks at a stretch teaches you the difference fast.

23:45

Quarter to twelve. I’m on the floor, twelve hours of work behind me, waiting on my relief. If I’ve got any decency in me there’s a fresh coffee waiting for him when he turns up, because he’s about to do his own twelve and the least I can do is hand him a hot one to start it with. The small courtesies are the whole religion out here. You look after the next man because in twelve hours, at three in the morning, you are the next man.

He arrives and we do the handover. I walk him through all of it. What I did, what I didn’t get to, what’s going to bite him at three in the morning if he’s not watching for it. You try to cover everything and you always forget something, so there’s a fair chance he’ll be ringing the cabin in an hour asking where the hell I left the such-and-such. You do your best. That’s the handover.

Then I wait.

I’ve done my bit, but you wait for the crew, because you leave as a crew. The doghouse team walks off together or it doesn’t walk off at all. So I stand around for the last of the boys to finish up, and then we go.

“Morning.”

“Morning.”

That’s the whole conversation. My night is his morning. I’m walking off as he’s walking on, two men passing on a steel staircase, living in completely different parts of the same day.

Into the boot room. Kick the boots off. Wet socks, the sweat of twelve hours sitting in them, the kind of dirty that gets into the weave. A boot room at crew change has a smell all its own, twelve hours of other men’s labour hanging in the warm air, and like everything else out here you stop noticing it by week two. Peel all that off and pull on the indoor coveralls, the gray ones, the half-shrunk ones that have been through the industrial dryer one too many hundred times. Then down to my room with the dirty coveralls in hand, because they’ve got to go to the laundry, and that’s the last actual work thing I do before I shut it down. Drop the day’s gear to be washed, then turn around and head back for the shower.

My room’s pretty plush these days. Two single beds, no more bunks, which when you’ve done your time up top of a bunk feels like a genuine promotion. My own locker, fully stocked, food and provisions like I’m some kind of crazy prepper. I can damn near feed myself for the whole hitch out of that thing.

Then I scrub the day off.

Into the shower and wash it all down the drain. Wash your hole. Wash your face if you’re that way inclined. Moisturizer on, working overnight. There is something genuinely stupid about a pair of hands that spend twelve hours in grease and pipe dope rubbing night cream in at two in the morning, and I do it anyway, because I’d rather not turn up at the airport in four weeks looking like a haggard old offshore relic before my time. Small vanities. They keep you human out here.

Then it’s time to shut it down, and my nightly routine is simple. Shower, melatonin, a bit of light reading, nothing heavy. The classic offshore airport book. The genre standard is Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, She Thinks I’m a Piano Player in a Whorehouse, and yes, I own a copy, and no, I’ve never actually read it, which might be the most offshore thing about me.

Somewhere in there I try to catch home.

01:30

I shut it down by 01:30 at the latest, and when you do the time-zone maths, that’s the house in Perth just getting up. The missus is a 4am gym riser, so if I get my timing right I catch her for a good morning right as she’s starting her day and I’m ending mine. The kids I have to get on the backside, eight hours later, when I wake up. They’re shutting down as I’m coming to. You just learn to navigate the times. You learn to love people on a clock that never quite lines up with yours, and you learn that a voice note can do a lot of the work that being there would do, if you were there.

I do a little breathing before I sleep now. I used to lie there with the day still running. These days I shut down clean. That took years.

Lights off. Gone.

I set the alarm for nine, which gives me just over eight hours, and most mornings I beat it.

08:50

I wake around 8:50, five minutes before the bell, tossing and turning, and the first thing I’m aware of is a bladder about ready to let go. Small mercy: the prostate’s still in working order, so I’m not up four times a night like some of the older boys. I sleep through, and then at ten to nine I’m very much ready to fill the bowl with stale yellow.

So that’s the start. Up, the ceremonial morning piss, and the phone back onto the wifi to find out what the world got up to while I was unconscious. A bit of news. And the good ones, the good morning messages from the kids, sitting there waiting for me from eight hours ago. That’s the real reason I reach for the phone.

Half asleep, cold, I get changed into the gym gear and figure out what I’m doing with the day.

I train in the morning, first thing, before anything else. I know it’d probably be smarter to do it after work, but it’s never going to happen, because the second I knock off there is nothing on this earth I want less than to walk back down to the gym. So I get it done at the top of the day. Tired and cold and not really awake, but that’s how I do it, and starting the day this way sets the rest of it straight.

The gym gear, of course, is half shrunk, because the industrial dryers out here destroy clothes. Hot tip: don’t bring anything decent offshore. And yes, I am completely guilty of bringing decent stuff anyway, and now it’s shrunk, and either the dryer’s getting to it or I’m getting fat. Probably a bit from column A and a bit from column B.

09:00 – 10:00

Gym time.

Half nine, head down, weights. In and out, and going pretty well lately.

The big change is I stopped chopping and changing. For years I’d jump programs every few weeks, chasing whatever the latest guy on YouTube swore by. Now I’ve stuck to one program for a year, back on hypertrophy, going heavy, and it works because I actually follow it instead of constantly starting over.

I’ve almost always had a trainer. Ten years of them, a few different ones, and between them I’ve collected enough programs to keep me straight on my own now. But I’m still a big believer in having one. Someone to hold you accountable makes an enormous difference. And being a driller, I need a program to follow or I feel lost. I need the routine, the plan, the next thing written down. Probably leftover wiring from the Navy, where a plan was the whole religion. Take the structure away and I drift.

Half nine to ten is the walk. Laps of the heli deck, the ocean doing its enormous nothing in every direction.

Some mornings I walk with nothing in my ears at all. Clothes on, just quiet, the wind and the water and my own head. Some mornings I’ve got a podcast or whatever course I’m chewing through at the time. Some mornings I walk and talk, dictating into my phone, which is exactly how a lot of what you’re reading gets made. Depends how I feel that day, and I just roll with it.

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10:00

Ten is project time. Not work. The other thing.

I’ve set aside an hour, and that’s about all I’ve got before the day swallows me. It’s different every morning and I try not to get precious about what it’ll be. It always involves writing in some shape.

Some days I write up the day before. What I did on the floor, what went well, what didn’t, the lessons sitting inside it. Partly so I can learn from my own mistakes instead of repeating them, and partly because by the end of the hitch it’s quietly written my relief a proper handover without me ever sitting down to do it in one hit. A man keeping a record of his own work from the middle of the ocean so it doesn’t just evaporate at crew change.

Some days it’s this. Sitting here writing the newsletter, or a post. Some days it’s editing photos from the day before, because I’ve always got the camera out, and anyone who tells you processing images is quick has never done it. An hour disappears into a handful of frames and you’ve barely started.

Whatever it is, the point is the same. Keep moving forward on the things I love, the things that have value now and will have value later. My work and my passion projects are so wound together these days I couldn’t pull them apart if I tried.

11:00

Eleven o’clock and the gentle part of the day is over. Now it’s a rush.

Quick shower to get it out of the way. Wash your hole before work, same as after. Out by quarter past and down to the galley, which is supposed to be the heartbeat of the rig. A good cook is worth more to morale than any toolpusher, and every man out here knows it, because three hundred and fifty kilometres from the nearest anything, the food is the one thing that can make or break a hitch.

Where I am now, the food is rough. Chicken and rice, chicken and rice, and if you’re a fan of chicken and rice it’ll get you by. I’m not, so I’ve turned my cabin into a one-man galley. I flew out with about twenty kilos of my own food and most days I take the one feed in the galley of a morning and live off my own stash the rest of the time. Premade tuna and rice, smoked jerky, Chief protein bars, a big jar of crunchy dark-roasted peanut butter I’d take a bullet for, and the humble Continental cup-a-soup, which has rescued more offshore hitches than any safety briefing ever will. That’s the prepper locker. That’s how I get through.

I still sit down with one of the boys, have a quick chat, and shovel that feed into my face fast enough to make pre-tower.

11:25

Pre-tower is where the crew works out what we’ve got on for the day. Usually I’ve already been up to see the toolpusher, or had a wander outside, because you can see the drill floor from the heli deck and have a decent guess at where we’re at before anyone says a word. We sort out the plan, and then I head back up to the room.

There’s usually a cleaner in there giving it a good scrub, so I work around them. Brush my teeth, because there is nothing worse than morning breath, and nobody wants to spend twelve hours in a doghouse next to a man whose mouth smells like the ship cat’s backside. Teeth done. Coveralls back on. Up to the locker where this all started.

PPE on. Molded earplugs in, assuming I remembered them, which I usually don’t, so there’s a solid chance I’ve left them in the locker down in my room and have to go all the way back for them. Grab the day’s snacks out of the bag, enough to keep the engine running through a twelve-hour tour.

Then across the bridge, up the stairs to the PCWM, around onto the drill floor.

Now business starts.

11:45

The man in the chair’s at the end of his twelve and I’m at the start of mine. The doghouse at handover is a bustling, crowded thing. Eight of you in there some days, everyone with their slice of the day to pass on, all crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s at once, everyone trying to get their piece in. I hand over first. Always. I’m not the man who walks in and goes straight for the coffee pot before he’s taken the handover. I think that’s a bit disrespectful, and plenty do it and that’s their business, but not me. Take the handover first. Then, once they’ve cleared out, I get the coffee on and get myself correctly caffeinated. Now the day’s mine.

And every day starts the same. Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork. Permits first, handed over or started or into planning, whatever they need. Then the job packs, the big ones, a couple of the ADs put to work grinding through them. Then the daily checklists, main and aux, into the computer and then up and around the rig to lay eyes on the thing you just signed for. An hour, hour and a half before the real day even begins, and it gets longer every year.

I get why it’s there. It’s a tightrope. Compliant, legal, safe, the right checklist to tick the box that says you did the thing. And does it keep us safe? I have to say yes. I do say yes. But there’s a fine line in there, and you can feel it, the sheer volume of it tipping toward tick-and-flick, men ticking the box that says they did the thing instead of out there doing the thing. So we sit down, we do it, we get it out of the way.

Then it’s the day proper. The well in front of you, the program, the team around it.

People picture the danger as one big moment. It isn’t. It’s constant, and it’s quiet. Pipe rotating, the top drive running down at two point two metres a second, the racker ripping stands in and out of the fingerboard, nothing on the floor is ever still. You sit in the chair with your eyes on a trend screen, ten flat lines waiting for one of them to move when it shouldn’t, five screens at once, and you feel like you need eyes like a spider to catch the thing worth catching before it catches someone. Dropped objects. A man crushed between pipe. Fingers were currency out here once, and a few of the old boys are still short a couple. Some days you feel like you’re just getting lucky, and better to be lucky than good is a real thing, but luck isn’t a plan, and you can’t sit in that chair on luck.

What gets you through isn’t the screens. It’s twenty years in your skin. You become one with the MODU. The drawworks sit uncovered above and behind the doghouse, up on the motor shed roof, putting out this loud harmonic hum you stop hearing and start feeling. The tinny slap of the drill line on the sheave covers when you pick up off slips. The ST-160 biting in to break out a stand. The squeal of the spinner running the pipe out, then the thump as the connection drops back into the box. You know the whole sequence by sound with your eyes somewhere else, and the day one note in it comes in wrong, you’re up out of the chair before the alarm’s decided to go off. You don’t learn that. You absorb it, one tour at a time, until the rig is talking to you and you never noticed you’d learned the language.

And the part that took me longest. Running the equipment is the easy half. Running the men is the other half. From the chair you get a strange, total overview of the floor, and you see everything. You might not catch a word over the noise, but you read it in how they move. The one who’s there the second you need him, hands on, in the middle of it. And the one who hangs back, who finds something to look at when the work’s on and drifts the other way the moment no eyes are on him. You clock him out the corner of yours and you say nothing, and you file it. Most of them have their heads down in the work, where they should be. You’re the one with your head up over all of it, watching the whole thing breathe. You don’t pick these men. The roster picks them. And you’ll still put your body between them and a bad day on the floor, every time, because that’s the deal nobody signs and everybody keeps.

15:00

Three o’clock, if you’re lucky enough to get a smoko, I’m out of the chair. I’d sooner walk than sit, a lap down to the pump room or up onto the heli deck for fifteen minutes of weather on my face. And I’ll try to get the kids, wish them goodnight, tell them I love them. Sometimes I get them. Sometimes the routines and the time zones won’t line up and I miss them, so I go back to work having not heard their voices. You plan your toilet breaks around your smoko like a sensible man, but you’re no robot, so some days you just get the other pillar or an AD into the chair and go sort yourself out. There’s always enough bodies to cover a man for two minutes.

17:30

Coming back from lunch is the killer. You’ve scoffed your feed, maybe caught a bit of life back home, and now you’re fat, dumb, happy and full, and you’ve got to put all that back in the chair and concentrate. That’s the hardest hour of the tour. Shoot me another coffee, drag the head back into the game. Everyone runs it different. Some men only eat after work, some only at the top of the day, plenty of drillers run the whole twelve on caffeine and white ox. I like a feed and a walk and then back into it.

21:00

Nine o’clock, another walk if it’s there, maybe knock the report out. Your day is on the final stretch.

23:00

Happy hour, and you start squaring the day away. Handovers, permits, is everything ready for the men coming on. If there’s time you set them up, print their paperwork, get it ready, because everyone wants to be a good handover. Some days it’s not possible, everyone’s flat chat start to finish. But when you can, you do, and that’s the teamwork of it. Your brain flips into handover mode. Did we capture everything. The traps, the little things that could catch them out at three in the morning. Nobody wants to be a bad handover. You don’t want that reputation.

And then, somewhere in the noise, it’s quarter to twelve again.

23:45

My relief appears at the top of the stairs. There’s a coffee waiting for him if I’ve done right by him. I walk him through the day, try not to forget anything, knowing I probably have. I wait for the boys. We leave as a crew.

“Morning.”

“Morning.”

Boots off. Coveralls to the laundry. Scrub the day off. Catch home if I can. Melatonin, a few pages I won’t remember, the breathing.

00:00

And I shut it down.

That’s the day. It doesn’t have a start or a finish, not really. It’s a loop, and you live it twenty-eight times in a row before a plane takes you home, and then four weeks later it picks you back up and starts again. People ask what it’s like out here and they imagine the danger and the weather and the size of the thing, and all of that’s real. But the truth of it is smaller and stranger than that. The truth is the loop. The same shower, the same walk, the same eight-hour gap between me and my kids, the same boots, the same locker, over and over until the hitch is done.

You either make peace with the loop or it eats you. I’ve watched it do both.

Tonight I’ll shut it down again. And if I time it right, I’ll catch them.

J.

Driller. Photographer. Creature of Habit.

If you made it all the way through a day out here, thank you. If you work offshore, or fly-in fly-out, or any job that runs your life on a roster instead of a clock, you already know the loop. Tell me in the comments how you survive yours. The good tips travel.

I write here most weeks about life on the rigs, the work, the addiction, the faith, the family, and everything I’m still figuring out at forty-one. If this is your first one, subscribe and come along. If you’ve been here a while, you’re the reason I keep doing it.

A few weeks ago I wrote that I leave everything at eighty percent.

The print shop that sits unfinished. The photography business that’s always “almost” happening. The creative work I give away instead of charging for. I said finishing means it’s real, and real means it can be taken away, so I’d get close enough to see what something could be and then pull back.

The print shop is live now.

I hit publish standing at my single stand-up desk in the lounge room, eleven-thirty at night, the house dead quiet around me. Nobody to celebrate with. Just bedtime waiting. I didn’t punch the air or call anyone. I stood there and looked at the screen for a while and felt something I wasn’t ready for, which was loss. Like I’d put a kid on a bus.

Nobody warns you about that part.

You spend months building a thing inside your head. It becomes the project, the one you talk about, the one that’s always almost. It keeps you company. Then you finish it and it’s gone, and the next morning there’s nothing to carry. I’ve spent twenty years filling that empty space with the next thing. New rig. New country. New version of the man who’s about to get it right this time. This was the first time I let the space stay empty long enough to actually look into it.

It’s bittersweet, and I didn’t expect the bitter.

Getting there meant refusing every exit, and there are more of them than you’d think. I don’t have enough prints. I can’t get Prodigi to connect. These probably aren’t even my five best images. Every one of those is a perfectly reasonable place to close the laptop and tell yourself you’ll get to it next swing. I’ve used all of them. For years.

That’s the trap with creative work. The procrastination doesn’t feel like laziness. It feels like standards. You tell yourself you’re not stalling, you’re protecting the quality, waiting until it’s right. And the waiting can go on forever because there’s always one more image you could add, one more thing you could polish, one more reason it isn’t ready. The mind that wants to make the thing perfect and the mind that wants to never finish it are the same mind wearing two hats.

So this time I went with five. Five prints, for now, the ones friends had asked for. Are they the five best frames I’ve ever shot? Probably not. I’ve got a hard drive that could keep me second-guessing until I’m dead. But you can sit there all day talking yourself out of it, and that is the exact thing I’m trying to stop doing.

I built the smallest version that was still real. Prints only. No framing, no options, no rabbit hole. I test-printed them first and watched them come back off the paper better than I’d hoped, and there’s a particular feeling in holding an image you made in your hands instead of seeing it glow on a screen. They’d look nicer framed, sure. A good handmade frame with anti-glare glass is one of those things you buy once and keep for life, timeless, the kind of thing that makes an image look like it matters. But framing is a whole universe, everyone’s taste is different, and I wasn’t going to let a decision about glass stand between me and shipping. One thing at a time.

It’s live. You can buy a print. That sentence took me about three years longer than it should have.

I do care about the rest of it. I’d like the money. I’d like my images on walls in houses I’ll never visit. I’d like to take one step closer to being a photographer instead of a bloke who takes photos and won’t say the word out loud. But if you offered me the sales and took the finishing away, I’d hand the sales straight back. Getting out of my own head was the whole prize.

I built two more things while I was at it. A tax calculator and a guide, both of them vibe-coded together by a driller who had no business doing either. I spent the month learning words I’d never heard in my life. Top of funnel. Lead magnet. A forty-one-year-old offshore worker sitting at the kitchen table after the kids were asleep, teaching himself the language of an industry that has nothing to do with his own. I understood maybe half of it. Doesn’t matter. I learned.

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The reason for the tools is simple and it isn’t about me. The mission is to build cool, useful things for people like you and me, people who work offshore, because everyone in this game is confused about the same handful of things and nobody hands you a manual. How much to put away for tax. Where the money should sit. Which bank to trust. The honest answer to most of it is that if you’re getting paid in US dollars and you let it land raw in your home account, your bank is quietly robbing you, on the transfer and worse on the exchange rate you never see itemised. Park it in a US account, set an alarm on the rate, move it home on a good day. That’s it. That’s the whole secret nobody told me at twenty-five. So I made the thing I wish someone had handed me back then. It’s there if you want it.

Then Drillsafe asked me to speak at their event, and I said yes, the way I say yes to most things now. The Collide podcast, this newsletter, all of it. There’s real value in saying yes. You genuinely never know where it leads, and most of the good things in my life arrived through a door I almost didn’t walk through. I’m not saying have no boundaries. Learning where mine are, especially around photography, is a whole other story for another day. But when something new knocks, my default now is yes.

I’m not built to stand at a pew and give a TED talk to a hundred faces, so I asked if we could do it sitting down instead, a conversation, a live podcast. Pre-written questions so I knew what was coming. I was nervous, and the only cure I’ve ever found for nerves is being prepared. Same move as the print shop, now that I look at it. Find the smallest version of the terrifying thing and do that one.

Everything I talked about up there, I write about here anyway. But it lands differently coming out of your mouth in a room full of industry heavyweights than it does on a page they read alone in the dark. The mental health stuff. The addiction. On paper I’m the survivor with the story, the bloke who made it through. In that room I’m a man they work alongside, and there’s a voice that says you don’t want these people thinking you’ve got problems, that the wrong word in the wrong ear follows you around the patch for years. Most of that fear is in my own head. I know that. I said it anyway, and walking out afterward I felt lighter than I have in a long time.

Then we flew to Melbourne to see my brother.

I’ve only ever scratched the surface of that one here, and I don’t think time is the thing that fixes it. We were split up as babies, and the way that happened, and everything wrapped around it, might be more than any number of years can undo. I’m not going to pretend otherwise on a Sunday.

But my boys love their uncle. That’s the part he doesn’t quite know what to do with, the unconditional thing kids hand you whether you’ve earned it or not. They barely ever see him. Doesn’t matter. They walk into his place and they’re his.

It probably helps that he’s a brilliant cook and owns every console ever made. He made them fresh banana ice cream. They’d been hanging out for the mango he’d done for them five years ago, but mangoes were out of season, so lady finger bananas it was, and it was every bit as good as they remembered. They ate it and played Mario Kart until the sun came up, and there was no bedtime because nobody enforced one. Kids need that as much as they need the routine. A few days where the rules go soft and the regimented little lives they lead at home fall away and the only deadline is whenever they pass out. And I stood in his kitchen and watched my sons climb all over a man I can’t fully reach, taking something from him easily, freely, that I’ve never worked out how to take myself. I didn’t say anything about it. I just watched. Some nights that’s the whole job.

Melbourne’s a good city, if cities are your thing. We found a place called Code Black, and you knew it was good before you got through the door because there was an army of R.M. Williams boots and tailored suits queued down the footpath. Follow the crowd is never the worst call. Coffee like we don’t get out here in the west, served by people who say its name like it means something, a different planet from the rig and a different planet from home. The boys came back buzzing. My brother stayed where he is. So did the thing between us.

I keep turning over why finishing felt so heavy when it should have felt light.

I think it’s because finishing is a kind of leaving. And I’m not good at leaving. I’m good at being left. Different skill. You learn one of those very young in my house and spend the rest of your life pretending it’s the other one. When you finish something and put it out there, you let go of it. You stop controlling it. You hand it to people who might love it, ignore it, or tear it apart, and you don’t get a say anymore. For a man who built his whole system on gripping lightly so the fall can’t kill him, that’s the one move I trained myself never to make.

I made it four times this month. The shop. The calculator. The guide. The chair at the front of that room. Four things that used to live only in my head, out in the world now where I can’t take them back.

I’m still the bloke with the doubts. Still measuring myself by what I produce instead of who I am. Still bracing for the good things to get taken. There’s still a brother in Melbourne, and some doors don’t close no matter how badly you want them to.

But there are things out in the world now that weren’t there a month ago. And a houseful of kids who got to love their uncle for a weekend, and eat banana ice cream at three in the morning, and lose every race on the couch until sunrise.

I’ll take it.

Justin Forrest

If this one landed, the kindest thing you can do is hit the heart and share it with the one person you know who’s been sitting on something at eighty percent. They’ll know who they are.

The things I finished this month:

🖼️ The print shop is live.

🧮 The offshore tax calculator and the Wise guide — built so the next person doesn’t get robbed by their bank like I was.

The Link Tree

If you work offshore and you’ve ever stared at your bank statement wondering where the money went, start there……. or your pub bill.

I write here every week about life offshore. The work, the addiction, the faith, the kids, and everything I’m still trying to figure out at forty-one. If you’re new, subscribe and come along. If you’ve been here a while, thank you. I don’t take it for granted.

Tell me in the comments: what’s the thing you’ve been leaving at eighty percent? Name it. Sometimes that’s the whole first step.

Justin Forrest.
Driller. Photographer. Finisher.

Twenty-eight days on, twenty-eight off. If you set out to design a machine for hiding an addiction, you couldn’t do better.

I know. I hid in it.

The rig held us. The way a drunk holds a railing, steady right up until it isn’t.

I’ve written elsewhere about my own version of this. The substances. The mirror. The wife’s dresser. The five-year-old in the next room asking where Daddy went. That essay’s called Addiction. If you want my story, it’s there.

This one’s different. It’s about the lifestyle, not the man. About what the work does to whoever it gets its hands on. About why some of us never had a chance and the next round of boys won’t either.

Twenty years lending ears in smoko rooms and on helideck walks. Offering my story when asked. Listening when not. Accepting that nobody changes who doesn’t want to.

What I can do is name what I’ve watched.

The Start.

The Navy ran me through the same machine just earlier.

I joined at eighteen. Sober as a judge. Scared of substances because heroin had taken my mother, and I was well aware of the consequences. I’d seen the photo. I had no interest.

The Navy changed that fast. Nobody forced me. Fitting in mattered. At eighteen, junior seaman, trying to prove I belonged on a ship full of men who’d been doing this for years, fitting in meant drinking. If you weren’t into drinking, it meant other things.

Same structure as the rigs. Months at sea, short windows home, feast or famine mindset. Pay packet drops into your account, and you’ve got two weeks to be a person before the ship leaves again. You eat fast. Drink fast. Buy fast. Spend fast.

By twenty-two, I was AWOL with a serious substance abuse habit.

The lie I told myself for years was a four-word sentence.

At least it’s not heroin.

That was the badge of honour. The line that let me believe what I was doing wasn’t generational. The Sunday-morning math that gave me moral superiority over my own dead mother.

I was no different from her. I just didn’t have a needle in my arm and a spoon on the floor.

Every man in this industry tells himself a version of that sentence. “At least I’m not him.” “At least I’m not the person in cabin 505.” “At least I’m only on the bottle.” “At least I’m holding down a job.” Every man finds the rung beneath him on the ladder and points at it.

The institution gives you the conditions. Your own voice does the rest.

The rig is just the Navy with fewer rules.

Alachol

Let’s start with the substance the industry doesn’t think is a problem.

The classic story is the night before crew change. Twelve hours before the breath test. You’ve earned this one. You’ve had your twenty-eight days off, you’re flying back to work tomorrow, you’re going to have a few beers because that’s what you do.

Then you wake up at five in the morning, and you’re not sure.

The skulling of water. The chewing gum. “I stopped at ten o’clock, I’ll be fine.” The walk from the Airport to the Heliport to where the breath dectector is waiting for you. You blow. Nine times out of ten you pass. The tenth time you don’t, and they give you a fifteen-minute reprieve, and you sit there working out what you’ll say to your wife when you fly home and explain why you just lost your two-hundred-thousand-dollar job to one too many beers at the end of twenty-eight days off.

Everyone knows that person.

Now read the next sentence carefully. Notice how it sounds.

“He lost his job to one too many beers.”

Sympathetic. Almost tragic. A man caught out by the timing.

Now try it with a different substance.

“He lost his job to the bag.”

Same outcome. Different verdict.

The beer story gets sympathy. The bag gets a reputation. The substance with the worst body count is the one nobody’s allowed to call a problem.

That’s the cultural exemption.

It operates at the institutional level. I had a supervisor sit me down in a formal annual review and tell me my sobriety was the problem.

I was having issues with a crew. Communication. Friction. Lack of connection. He’d been watching. He gave me his honest read.

“You don’t drink with the boys on crew change”

I don’t. I never have. I sit with the crew. I buy rounds. I drink soda water and lemon and have a fine time. I don’t drink beer with them at the end of the hitch. I don’t want my kids to see me come home drunk. I don’t want that memory of me on the page when one of them tries to remember what I was like.

My supervisor wasn’t wrong about the friction. There was a lack of connection. He just thought beer was the way to fix it.

It wasn’t, and it didn’t.

What was interesting was the way the conversation got framed. In a formal performance review. The institution itself telling me my sobriety was the problem. The system codes drinking as cohesion. It codes its absence as a thing to be solved.

And it doesn’t stop at work.

My next-door neighbour and I have a catch-up every twenty-eight days off. Usually over a few bottles of red. The last one, I wasn’t drinking. I knew this would be a social faux pas. I tried to lay out my case for why.

I just didn’t want to.

That wasn’t enough. I felt like I needed to dress it up with Dry July or some other cute reason that rhymes that gives the room permission. I didn’t have it. I was coming over to catch up, and I wasn’t going to drink, and I couldn’t tell you why beyond “I don’t feel like it tonight.”

It felt off. Nearly offensive.

I worked out why later. The cultural exemption only allows you to opt out of drinking if you’ve earned the right. You need the sober badge. The 10-step program. The recovery story. The years-clean count you can pull out and show people so they know which kind of non-drinker you are.

Anyone else just not feeling like it tonight is suspect.

A man who wants to come catch up over a coffee instead of a wine should have a reason that makes the drinker comfortable about it. Otherwise, the drinker has to ask himself, briefly, why he’s pouring his fifth glass. That’s the question: alcohol is the last substance allowed to provoke.

I’ve always enjoyed pushing drinkers on their drinking. Some men have a moral superiority over substance users because their poison of choice is alcohol and not the bag. They look down on the cokehead and pour themselves a sixth beer of the night.

The bag has stigma. The bottle has tradition.

Same hunger. Different ritual.

Your Poison.

Some men switch poisons on rotation. The substance changes shape. The hunger underneath stays the same.

I’ve covered most of these in Addiction. The bloke on the cycle pinning testosterone in the cabin bathroom. The person who hammered the galley at midnight and gained twenty kilos in six months. The person riding every sports bet multi into the weekend on his phone. The person locked in his cabin with the laptop, a box of tissues, and a Bazzers subscription.

I’m not relitigating all of that here.

One observation Addiction didn’t get to.

The gym becomes the routine. Sometimes, the only place where you can clear your head. It’s the respectable vice. The one nobody flags because it looks like discipline.

The same people who roll their eyes at a recovering alcoholic are the ones doing ninety-minute sessions on the cross-trainer at six in the morning to outrun whatever’s chasing them. The mirror in the gym tells a story the breath test never will.

The lifestyle decides which poison catches you. Every person finds their own.

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The Youth.

The boys in their early twenties scare me more than the men my age ever did.

They’re doing exactly what I was doing at twenty-five. The partying. The big nights. The Hilux they can’t afford, and the watch they didn’t need. The girl whose name they say six times in one hitch and never again after that.

What’s different is the belief about the future.

I asked one of the boys recently about kids and starting a family. He laughed and shrugged.

“I need to keep a girlfriend first.”

I pressed a bit harder. What happened to so-and-so from last hitch, the one he’d talked about non-stop a month ago? Whirlwind month of love and travel, he said. Gone. Finished. No real substance to it.

“Girls don’t wait around for guys in jobs like this anymore.”

He said it like a fact. Like the math was settled and he’d already finished the arithmetic.

You can see why. Meet a girl on Tinder, fly out the next week, sit on a rig 350km from anywhere for twenty-eight days while her phone pings off the hook with men who can take her to dinner tonight. Maybe she waits. Probably she doesn’t. Either way, the relationship is being lived without you in it.

My generation rationalised the partying with “I’m doing this FOR my family.”

This generation rationalises it with “I’m never going to have one of those anyway.”

They’ve watched older guys lose marriages and the industry boom and bust. They’ve quietly decided family isn’t on the menu for them.

It’s math. The math says the lifestyle and a relationship can’t both exist in the same body without one of them buckling. The math says it would take a very specific kind of person to wait for you while you’re 350 kilometres offshore. Finding that person, in their generation, is a miracle. Most of them have already done the calculation.

It’s all temporary. So why bother taking it seriously?

That sentence is the next twenty years of broken men in this industry.

A Friend.

I had a friend at work. Fifteen years younger than me. A good person. I saw a lot of myself in him in the way he worked and the way he played.

I’ll admit something.

We had the same extracurricular proclivities on time off. I felt like I used him a little to scratch my own itch. I needed somebody to do the things with. The older guys had families to go home to. He didn’t. He was there. He was up for it. I told myself I was looking out for him. I was looking out for me. As long as he was up for it, I could tell myself I hadn’t aged out yet.

He had it lined up. Newly built house. Fiancée. Wedding on the horizon. Kids coming. Just not yet.

A gun at work. Got himself up to AD inside 5 years.

Then BAM.

The rig is gone. The work dried up. Five-year plan cut into pieces in a single phone call. House mortgaged on a salary that doesn’t exist anymore. Wedding deposit paid out for a date that suddenly belongs to a different version of his life.

“Do they come back when a rig calls again?” “Is it worth it?”

These are the questions the next round are asking. I don’t blame them.

You can feel the anger in those questions. The sense of being a tool the industry picks up when it needs you and drops when it doesn’t. The “not yet” that turns out to mean “not ever.”

That’s why the youth don’t think about kids, houses, and weddings.

The industry already told them.

Gone.

I’ve been to the funerals.

Coworkers. Friends. Men who took their own lives.

I don’t want to attribute that decision to substance abuse alone. Yes, some kind of vice was usually involved. There always is. To sit here and blame that one thing for what happened would be dishonest.

What you see at those funerals is always the same. Families destroyed. Lives altered forever. Kids in the front row.

You see pain and confusion.

How and why is the question you will never have the answer to.

I always look at the kids.

I know what it feels like to lose parents. I lost both of mine before I turned six. I know what the kid in the front row is about to walk into. The thirty years of wondering, the slow burn of trying to be a different kind of man than the one in the box. The decade somewhere in the middle, when the only way to stop wondering is to do whatever it takes to stop thinking.

I know what happens after the funeral.

Yes, suicide is a selfish act. And it’s a deeply personal act by someone who felt there was no other option. That is hell.

The funeral is a story about a man who ran out of options. The addiction was one of the doors that closed before he got there.

The Rig.

The industry tells itself a story about all of this.

The story is that the rig saves us. The forced sobriety. The structure. The twenty-eight days where you can’t get to the bottle even if you want to. The roster that takes the choice away from you. We tell ourselves this every time we talk about the lifestyle.

I’ve worked offshore for twenty years.

I cannot name a single man for whom the rig was the railing that held.

I can name plenty for whom it was the railing that broke. The person who passed his breath test by a breath, but didn’t pass the next one. The person whose marriage held for the four weeks he was away and collapsed in the four weeks he was home. The person who switched from coke to steroids to gym to gambling to porn and called each of them recovery from the last.

I can point to forced sobriety as a concept.

I cannot point to a man.

The rig is sold as a railing. The man it saved has stayed hypothetical.

I’ve been avoiding writing this part for two years.

If you’re reading this on your phone in a cabin at two in the morning, twelve hours before your breath test, with the bottle on the bedside table half empty and the wife you haven’t called back tonight again and the kid whose drawing you stopped looking at properly six months ago folded up in your wallet, I see you.

I was you. I am you.

I know what you’re going to tell yourself in the morning about why this is fine. I know the sentence at the back of your head that begins “at least I’m not.”

I’m not asking you to stop drinking. I’m not asking you to quit your job.

I’m asking you to sit with one question.

Is the lifestyle holding you, or are you holding on for the lifestyle?

Don’t answer it tonight. Don’t answer it surrounded by men who’d be uncomfortable with the answer.

Wait until you’re home and the kids are asleep and your wife is in the bath, and there’s nothing to distract you. Wait until you’re alone with the version of yourself nobody else gets to see. Then ask it.

Then ask the only question that matters after that one.

What’s going to be on the page when somebody writes your story?

The rig will be there. The work will be there. Your roster will keep turning whether you’re on it or not.

You’re the only thing in this picture that’s optional.

The End.

That’s all I’ve got.

I’m glad you read this far.

There’s a railing somewhere that will hold you.

The rig is not it.

Justin Forrest

Driller. Photographer. Witness.

The photographs behind the writing.

Print Shop

I’ve stood up publicly and told people I was addicted to cocaine and methamphetamines. I’ve written about my mother dying of a heroin overdose when I was six weeks old. I’ve shared that my father abandoned us, started a new life, and was killed in a car accident before I turned five. I’ve talked about being separated from my brother, being adopted, flying alone between countries at six years old, going AWOL from the navy, and spending twenty years trying to outrun all of it.

Faith.

None of that was easy. But none of it felt like this.

A few months ago, I asked God to reveal himself to me. I wasn’t being poetic. I was sitting with it, after years of railing against faith, sometimes aggressively. I asked to see a Kingfisher.

A few nights later I was alone on the helideck of the MS-1, middle of the Timor Sea. Ten-thirty at night, hot and humid, dead still. I threw my hands up and said out loud:

I’m listening.

An Australian Kingfisher landed next to me and flew around my head.

I know how that sounds. I know what I would have said about someone telling that story two years ago. I would have rolled my eyes. I would have thought they were weak, or deluded, or looking for something to cling to.

And now I’m that person. And I don’t know what to do with it.

When I talk about addiction, people respect it. There’s a narrative that makes sense to them. Rough childhood, self-medicated, working through it. It positions me as the survivor. The guy who made it through.

But faith? Faith doesn’t give you that. Faith makes you a beginner. You’re sharing something you’re in the middle of, that you can’t fully explain, and that you definitely can’t defend in a comments section. There’s no finished version of the story to stand behind.

With addiction, I’m the expert of my own experience. With faith, I’m a forty-one-year-old man who just started reading the Bible and doesn’t know what half of it means.

I have found it easier to tell the world I was a drug addict than to tell them I’m trying to believe in God. Sit with that for a second, because I have been, and it’s doing my head in.

Someone asked me recently where I was with all of it. A man named Kent, a LinkedIn connection I’ve never met. He’d read my Substack about the Kingfisher and left a comment asking about my journey. He asked it with kindness. And the answer surprised me. I told him I feel ashamed about it. Embarrassment. That I’ve railed against faith for so long that stepping into it now makes me feel like a hypocrite.

But that’s not the full truth. The full truth is harder.

I think the reason I can’t fully step into this is the same reason I leave everything at eighty percent. The print shop that sits unfinished. The photography business that’s always “almost” happening. The creative work I give away instead of charging for. I get close enough to see what something could be, and then I pull back. Finishing means it’s real. And real means it can be taken away.

And faith? Faith is the biggest version of that test.

Think about it from the perspective of a kid who lost everything before he could spell his own name. Mum gone. Dad gone. Brother gone. Home gone. If there is a God, the most logical thing that kid would feel is that God left too.

Everyone I was supposed to be able to trust disappeared.

Why would God be any different?

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There isn’t one moment I can point to. It was the whole life. The question ran underneath everything I did. Why me. Why would you let these things happen to me. To grow up never, ever feeling my mother’s love. To have a father who left us, started another life, and was killed in a car accident before I was old enough to know his face. You don’t wake up one morning and ask that question. You wake up every morning, and it’s already there. Waiting.

So maybe the shame I feel about faith is something else entirely. Letting God in means trusting someone who, in the mind of that six-week-old baby, already let me down.

My whole life has been a search for something that can’t be taken away. The constant moving. The working offshore. The travel. The building and rebuilding. Underneath all of it is a kid looking for solid ground. Something permanent. Something that stays.

Faith is that offer. The one thing that says: I’m not going anywhere.

And I can’t receive it. Not fully. Not yet. Because my whole system was built to survive a world where everything leaves. You don’t learn to hold on when holding on is what gets you hurt. You learn to grip lightly. You learn to leave first. You learn to keep things at eighty percent so the last twenty doesn’t destroy you when it falls apart.

When I pray, when I’m actually in it, not thinking about it but doing it, something different happens. I’m not bracing for anything. I just show up. I say thank you for what I have. I ask for guidance. And I trust that the signs will come.

I don’t do that anywhere else in my life.

At home I can’t relax. I’m always waiting for the next thing to go wrong. With money I never feel like I have enough. As a father I’m constantly on edge, terrified of getting it wrong. But in prayer, in the one space that should feel the most exposed, I’m still. I’m just there.

The one place in my life where I’m not running on the old wiring is the one I feel most ashamed to talk about.

I’ve spent my whole life building walls that look like independence. Moving fast. Saying yes to everything. Working offshore, travelling the world, never staying still long enough for anything to catch up. Underneath the drugs and the work and the constant starting of new things, there’s a kid standing very still, wondering why everyone keeps leaving.

Faith asks you to stop moving. To trust something you can’t see, can’t control, and can’t earn. For someone wired the way I’m wired, that’s an existential challenge.

Can I let something matter this much?

Can I trust that this one won’t be taken away?

I don’t have the answer. I’m reading the Bible. I’m praying. I’m looking for a men’s group to join when I’m home. I’m trying to figure out how to be a beginner at something when my whole identity has been built on surviving, adapting, and figuring things out on my own.

I’m not even sure I’d call myself a Christian yet. I don’t know enough to claim that.

I’m writing this because I realised something today that I think matters. I’ve been carrying shame about faith. And the shame is about me. It’s the same voice that says I don’t deserve the print shop, don’t deserve to call myself a photographer, don’t deserve the good life I’m quietly building with Casey and the boys.

Who the fuck are you to even attempt this?

That voice has followed me into every room I’ve ever walked into. And now it’s followed me here, into the one room where the whole point is that you don’t have to earn your place.

I’m not over any of it. I’m forty-one, and I still cry about my parents. I still fight the urge to pull back from good things before they can be taken. I still measure myself by what I’ve produced instead of who I am.

But something is shifting. Slowly. In a direction I didn’t expect and can’t fully explain.

I asked God to show up. And he did. The least I can do is stop pretending he didn’t.

Justin

Driller. Photographer. Beginner.

The End.

This is one of the hardest pieces I’ve written. If any of this is in your life, in any form, I’d be glad to hear from you. Hit reply or drop a comment below.

If you think it might land for someone you know, send it on. That’s the only ask.

Justin

P.S. The Kingfisher essay Kent commented on is linked here.

This isn’t my usual type of post. This is a rant, and it’s something I feel strongly about. I usually try to be level-headed and see both sides. This isn’t one of those times.

If that’s not what you came here for, I get it. Come back next week. I’ll be back to my normal self.

The Rant

If you supervise people and somebody comes to you with something heavy, anything from work to home to marriage to kids to the inside of his own head, and your first instinct is to shut it down, change the subject, mutter something about leaving your problems at the gangway, let me say this clearly.

You are part of the problem.

Whatever story you tell yourself about being the firm hand, about being the old-school discipline this industry needs more of, the problem is what you are.

I’m not going to be careful about this one. I’ve been thinking about it for too long.

It is free.

Empathy is free. It doesn’t cost you a dollar, it doesn’t cost the company a minute, and the rig keeps turning either way. The man comes to you, you look him in the eye, you say mate, that sounds hard, what do you need. That’s it. That’s the whole skill. Five seconds. There’s no training course for it, no HR policy, no safety meeting. Just five seconds of being a human being.

And you can’t manage it.

It isn’t hard. Somewhere along the way you decided that being cold was the same thing as being strong, and you’ve been performing that confusion in front of your crew for so long you’ve forgotten there’s another way to do it.

I know how you got here. I grew up in the same decade you did.

Your dad didn’t hug you. Didn’t tell you he loved you. You were seen and not heard. Big boys don’t cry. Walk it off. Harden up. Yes, I get it. I lived it. Most of the men I’ve worked with for twenty years lived it. The 80s did its work on a generation of us, and we are still paying the bill.

You’re a grown man now. You make your own choices. The fact that nobody showed you how to feel things doesn’t oblige you to pass that gift on to the next person. You don’t have to carry that bullshit forward. You can put it down. Other men have. Other men do, every day.

The fact that you choose not to, the fact that you actively choose to be the cold one, the one who shuts it down, the one who makes other men eat it, that isn’t toughness. It’s a choice you’re making. And the choice has consequences.

Rigs love telling you you’re a family. Families don’t fire you on a downturn.

I know. I’m not a subscriber to the family model either. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t tell a man on his induction that this is a family, one team, brothers, we look after each other, and then when he comes to you eighteen months later with something hard, look at him like he’s wasting your time.

Pick one. Tell him on day one that this is a job and only a job. Don’t sell him the family line, don’t put it in the corporate values, don’t paint it on the banner in the doghouse, and don’t have the OIM say it at the safety meeting.

Or actually mean it. That’s the harder option.

This job takes a toll. The higher up you go, the bigger the toll. That’s a fact, not a complaint. We signed up for it. The day rate reflects it.

But the toll doesn’t get smaller because you refuse to look at it. The toll gets bigger. Stress builds, and cortisol stays up. Sleep goes. Drinking goes up, marriage goes sideways, kids notice. Eventually, the body breaks down. None of this is a mystery. It isn’t even controversial. It’s the basic biology of carrying something heavy for too long without putting it down.

And then one day, somebody on your crew can’t carry it anymore.

I’m not going to dress this up. Men in this country are killing themselves at a rate that should stop traffic. The numbers are public. You can look them up. The trades are over-represented. FIFO is over-represented. The men who do the hardest work in the most isolated places are the ones least likely to ask for help and most likely to die by their own hand.

And the supervisors who shut them down when they try to talk are part of the chain that gets them there.

You’re a link in that chain. The man came to you. He tried. You shut him down. He went back to his cabin and decided not to try again. Maybe he tried somebody else. Maybe he didn’t.

That is the math. It is not abstract.

The version of manhood you are performing is the weak one. Hear that if you hear nothing else today.

Real toughness is the capacity to sit with something hard, your own or somebody else’s, and not flinch. It’s looking a man in the eye when he’s struggling and not needing the conversation to be over. It’s being the one a kid on the floor can come to.

What you’re doing is the opposite of that. You’re avoiding and flinching, scared of the feeling, scared of the conversation, scared of being seen to care because you think being seen to care will cost you something.

It won’t.

The men who can sit with it are the ones the crew respects. The men who can’t are the ones the crew tolerates. The crew knows the difference. The crew has always known the difference. You can ask any roughneck who’s worked under both kinds, and he’ll tell you which one he’d take a bullet for.

It’s not the cold one.

A man comes to you with something heavy. You have a choice in that moment. You don’t get many of these.

You can shut him down. Not now, mate, take it home, that’s not for here. Watch him put the lid back on something that is going to keep eating him, whether you look at it or not.

Or you can say, "Mate, sit down.” Tell me what’s going on.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. You don’t have to fix it, find an answer, or take any action. You just have to let him say it out loud to another human being who isn’t going to flinch.

It is free.

It costs you nothing.

If the man needs time off, the rig will keep going. The position will get filled. The work will get done. Nobody is irreplaceable, including you, including me. We’ve all known that since week one. The crew rolls, the well gets drilled, and the day rate keeps clocking. The fact that you can’t spare a man for a week to sort his head out is a story you’ve been telling yourself, not a fact about the work.

I’m not asking you to be a therapist. I’m not asking you to host a feelings circle in the doghouse. I’m not asking you to hug anyone.

I’m asking you to be a human being for five seconds when another human being needs you to be one.

If you can’t manage that, get out of supervision. Go back on the tools. Run a piece of equipment. Be useful in a way that doesn’t require you to be responsible for other men. Because the role you’re in right now requires something you don’t have, and you are causing damage by staying in it.

Be a human fucking being. It is free.

End of Rant.

If you read that and the heavy thing is yours, not somebody else’s on your crew, pick up the phone tonight. Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14. UK: Samaritans 116 123. US: dial 988. Pick the one that fits and call it. Not next month. Tonight.

If you’re a supervisor and something in here landed, you know what to do with it. Be the one your crew can come to next time.

If you know somebody in this industry who needs to read this, send it on. The list of people who’d benefit is longer than you think.

I write about offshore life, from the middle of living it. Subscribe if that’s your thing.

— Justin

I’ve written about my father in the urn.

I’ve written about lying to a toolpusher in Africa when I was twenty-something. The smell of a cremation in Goa. Snorting lines off a makeup mirror at the height of it. The kids forgetting who I was when I came back from a long one.

I’ve written about everything…… (maybe to much)

Except her.

Her name is Casey. She’s the mother of our two boys, and she’s seen what’s actually happened.

I haven’t written her down because I’m scared.

Not the regular kind of scared. I’ve written my way through most of those. This is the older kind. The kind that’s been sat in me since I was a baby and my mother left with a hot spoon and a needle on the floor and didn’t come back. Some part of me decided forty years ago that any woman I loved was going to leave the same way. I haven’t told Casey this. Never said it out loud. It’s just there, low in the back of every plane I get on and every door I shut behind me when I’m leaving.

Writing her down feels like giving the universe a target. So I haven’t.

I’ve written everything else. She’s what’s left.

Her day starts at three thirty.

She’s on the alarm before the rest of the house has any idea it’s morning. She trains before the kids wake up because if she doesn’t train then, she doesn’t train, and the days when she doesn’t train are the days the rest of it gets harder. The kids are up at five thirty. By the time they’re up the workout is done.

Then it’s lunches. Bags. Breakfast. The school run. Two boys with two different temperaments. The older one holds it in. The younger one wears it on the outside, and the longer I’m gone the heavier his outside gets. He takes it out on her because she’s the one in the room. She holds him. Doesn’t tell me most of it. The kids tell me.

Mummy cries sometimes.

I’ve never heard her cry on a phone call. I’ve heard the day in the first second of hello. Sometimes a phone call has to start or end with one of us going hard with the boys. She handles that bit too.

Pick-ups in the afternoon. The window between school and bed where two boys need two parents and she has one. Her mother helps when she can. We’re lucky for that. There’s still a stretch of every day where she’s outnumbered and there’s nobody to tap to.

Bed at six thirty. They go down early because they wake early.

Then the hours after. The dishwasher. The lunchboxes for tomorrow. The bills. The thinking. The cold side of the bed.

She’d never describe any of that as hard. She’d say she signed up for it. Which she did.

She’s traded. I told myself she hadn’t, when I was answering this question for myself. She has.

She’s traded sleep. She’s traded the version of her life where her partner is home on Tuesday. She’s traded the ten years she’d had off the basin. Casey has been a hairdresser since she was sixteen. She got a decade away from it raising the boys, and now she’s back at it part-time because the cost of food and school and a roof in this country took the choice off the table. I’d have liked her to have the choice. It wasn’t mine to give.

Cracked hands from years at the basin, washing colour out of other people’s hair. Half therapist, half hairdresser.

The shit people say over a 3-hour hair consult is mind-boggling to me.

The rest of her is soft. Her hands aren’t.

What she hasn’t traded is her support of me.

I’ve watched plenty of marriages in this industry break under exactly this load. You hear it in the smoko room. The wife who finally said enough. The ultimatum after the third hitch in a row. The rule that came down when he got home. Quit, or I’m gone.

Casey has never given me one of those. Not once. Not when I was a young AD on a rig in Africa and a connection went sideways. Not when I was at the airport again. Not when I was on a phone in a galley and the kids were on the other end asking when I was coming home.

She’s never used my work as leverage. She’s never asked me to stop. She’s never told me the price.

She knows the price. She’s decided to carry it without making me hold it for her.

That’s love. I don’t know what to do with it.

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I don’t know why she’s still with me.

That sentence sits in the back of my head at the end of every flight home. The doorway opens. Kids come at me from three angles. The smell of dinner. And somewhere underneath all of it, a small voice asking why this woman is still there.

I know what the voice is. My mother left when I was a baby. Some part of me has been waiting four decades for the next chapter of the same story. I know it’s not Casey. It’s a child still scanning for danger in a kitchen that’s been safe for years.

Knowing the voice doesn’t switch it off. It just gives me the language for what I’m hearing.

What the voice can’t argue with is the way she looks at me when I land. The way her hand goes to my back when I walk through the door. The clean sheets. The meal. The butterflies still there on the tarmac. She wants me to be there.

Last year I came home after a rough stretch. We were lying in bed at midnight. She could feel it.

She asked me if I’d ever tried to leave.

She didn’t mean a flight.

I had to tell her that something had happened, once, before. That it had failed. That I was here.

She balled her eyes out and squeezed me until my ribs hurt. Made me promise.

“Promise me you’ll never leave us”,

I can still hear the sadness in her voice. The thing underneath the sadness I still don’t have a word for. The cost of a fear she’d been carrying that I hadn’t known she was carrying.

She lets me leave for hitches because she’s held the other kind of leaving and knows the difference.

She just also lets me leave.

Casey gave me a second chance at a life.

The first time I really saw her was three in the morning on a mate’s couch. We’d been friends for a while and I hadn’t looked at her that way. That night we’d hung out and kissed for the first time. Now she was asleep there. She was crashing at my mate’s place and she had to be a slave to the basin in a few hours. There’s no rest for hairdressers on a Saturday. I sat on the floor and stared at her peacefully sleeping……like a weirdo.

They say you fall in love at first sight. Mine was the first kiss.

She woke up. With a confused look on her face.

“Have you been staring at me the whole time?”

I denied it. (of course) I had been.

I had the materials of a man who could go either way. She didn’t try to fix me. She zigged and zagged with me, all over the world, then into kids, then around Australia for two years, possibly Melbourne next, god knows where after that. She has always been by my side, ride or die!

The two boys are my do-over. A father who’s there. Or there as much as a man on this kind of rotation can be. She made it possible.

That’s a debt that doesn’t accept payment.

She doesn’t see herself the way I see her. This is me telling her how I do.

I’ve written about everything (maybe too much)

Now I’ve written about her.

The universe didn’t take the bait. She’s still in the kitchen.

Casey. The one I was scared to write down.

This is the first thing I’ve written for Casey to read.

If you’ve got someone you’ve been scared to write down, write them.

Happy Mother's Day to all the FIFO mums holding it down while your significant other is halfway around the world.

Subscribe to get the next one.

Justin

Twenty years of bringing energy to the world. Australia treats it like a secret. Egypt treats it like a gift.

The other parents are barefoot.

Linen, hand-knitted jumpers, real food in the lunchboxes that someone packed that morning. Actual sandwiches. None of it wrapped in plastic. I’m in a Valaris polo because I came straight from the airport. They look at me. I look at them.

And what do you do?

I’m at a Steiner school drop-off in suburban Australia, working out how to answer a question I’ve been getting wrong for twenty years.

I drill oil wells. Offshore. For a living.

You can feel the room shift a quarter turn when you say it. The polite Australian sideways look. The one that says oh, that’s interesting, and means let’s talk about something else. You learn to read it before you learn to drill.

I picked the school. Nobody put my kids there but me. The contradiction is the whole position. I’m a driller and I send my kids to a Steiner school. Nine words. Whole life.

Widen out. Perth airport, any morning of any week.

High-vis everywhere. Mining boys heading north and east and inland. Posters on every wall: the resources industry, building Australia, feeding the country, the future. Smiling faces in clean coveralls. Blokes at the bar in branded shirts, nobody pretending to hide it. The whole airport is a press release for one industry.

You will never see a poster for an offshore rig.

Not at Perth. Not at Sydney. Not anywhere. You will see production platforms occasionally, in a corporate ad, far away at sunset. You will not see a drillship, a derrick, or a man on a brake. The exploration side of the industry, the part that actually goes and finds the resource, is not in the marketing budget. It is not on the wall.

We’re the red-headed stepchild. Mining got the PR. We got the sideways look.

I’m in plain clothes at the bar hoping the bloke next to me doesn’t ask.

Cairo

Different country, different rules.

The hotel staff know where I’m going before I tell them. Valaris, yes? You are with the rig? It’s a kind way of asking. There’s a thank-you running underneath the hospitality that I’ve never had at home. The real kind.

When we got into country, the Minister of Energy came out to the rig. Stood in the doghouse, listened to a few of the boys explain what we were there to do, then walked the floor and shook hands. Management reinforced it back to the crew afterwards. Yes, this is real. Yes, this matters.

A hundred and twenty million people. That’s the country. At nine in the evening, in some areas, the lights go off. Power gets cut to preserve supply. It’s a fact of life. The gas isn’t flowing the way it needs to, the wells aren’t online yet, and we haven’t done our job.

There is one Egyptian assistant driller on my floor with triplets at home. Three babies. One income. He doesn’t talk much about it. He doesn’t have to. Every shift he runs is a few more hours toward those wells coming back online. A few more hours toward the lights staying on for the people he goes home to. He is the most invisible man on the rig and he is carrying the most visible weight.

Nobody at home would know his name. Here, the man at the front desk of the hotel knows what he does for a living and thanks him for it.

I’m twenty years into this job and I had never had that. I felt proud, and I didn’t know I needed to.

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Maybe That’s by Design

Why is the industry invisible at home?

I’ve been turning this over for a few weeks now. There are three answers and I’m not sure which one is right. Maybe all of them.

The first one is on us. The industry chose this. Keep your head down, do the work, don’t make noise. Don’t poke the bear. Mining went and got itself a marketing budget and a PR firm and a high-vis identity. Oil and gas, exploration side especially, decided it was easier to be quiet. Fly under the radar. Be the resource everybody uses and nobody wants to talk about.

The second one is on the public. People don’t want to know where their petrol comes from. They don’t want to look at the rig. They want the lights to come on when they flick the switch and the car to start when they turn the key, and the bit in the middle is somebody else’s problem. It’s just easier not to look.

The third one is political. It is much easier to demonise an industry when nobody can see it. You can’t put a face on it. You can’t introduce the public to a man on a brake, or to the AD with triplets. The invisibility makes the industry abstract, and the abstract is easier to argue against than the concrete.

I don’t know which of those three is the biggest one. I suspect it’s all three at once. I suspect they reinforce each other. We don’t show up. The public doesn’t want us to. The politicians prefer it that way. The whole thing locks into place.

And maybe that’s by design.

What Visibility Costs and What It Gives

Visibility comes with weight. In Egypt, when you know there are a hundred and twenty million people downstream of your shift, the work doesn’t feel the same. The pressure comes from the country, not the company or the day rate. You feel it in the doghouse and on the brake. You feel it when you walk past the AD and remember he’s got triplets and the lights at his place might go off at nine.

Some guys would call that pressure. I call it responsibility. There’s a difference. Pressure is something done to you. Responsibility is something you accept. After twenty years of being the red-headed stepchild, having the work matter to somebody, out loud and in public, is a thing I didn’t know I’d been missing.

Invisibility comes with comfort. In Australia, nobody asks. Nobody sees the rig. Nobody puts a face on it. You can drop your kids at school in a Valaris polo and have the conversation slide past it. You can be at the bar in plain clothes and nobody knows what you do. There is a quiet in that. There is also a smallness in it. You start to wonder if the work matters to anyone outside the gate.

Both have a cost. Both have a comfort. I’ve been on both sides of it now and I don’t think one is right and the other wrong. They’re just two rooms. Same job. Different reception.

I’m not saying the industry is perfect.

We’ve got things to answer for. The environmental record is what it is. The boom-and-bust cycles wreck families. The PR side could do a better job of telling the truth about what we do, but then again, so could everyone else who covers us. There’s plenty of fault to go around and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise.

The wells in Egypt go back online and the lights stay on for the AD with triplets and the man at the hotel front desk and the hundred and twenty million people in between. That’s the work. A country with the lights on, not a poster at the airport.

The petrol in your car, the power in your phone, the gas in your kitchen, all of it came from somewhere. Most of it came from a man you’ll never meet, on a rig you’ll never see, in a country whose lights you’ll never have to think about.

The things you don’t want to look at are the things that make your life possible.

Maybe that’s by design too.

There’s always one.

What are you doing that nobody sees?

Not rhetorical. Actual question.

Maybe it’s the work itself. Maybe it’s the version of yourself you only show at home, or the part of your life that doesn’t fit the room you’re in.

I don’t have a clean answer. I’m still working out what to say at the school gate.

I’m Justin. Twenty years offshore. Still figuring it out.

If this one hit, send it to someone who’d get it.

Sebastião Salgado. Kuwait. A Desert on Fire

I still know the procedures cold.

Twenty years in, half a planet from where I learned them, and I can recite the well control numbers in my sleep. Mud weight. Kill rate. Surface pressures. The math behind the math. Don’t think about it. It’s just there. Three in the morning, something sideways, the company man asking questions, the green kid on the floor looking at me like I’m supposed to know.

I know.

I know because of one man, fifteen years ago, who would have crucified me if I didn’t.

That’s how this kind of debt works. The interest never stops compounding.

They stopped supervising me a long time ago. They’re still in my head every shift. I’ve never thanked them. They’d hate it. So would I.

You know the type.

Walks into smoko and the room straightens up. Doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t have to. You stop hammering on the bench. Sit a little taller. Look a little busier. Somebody at the back stops the story they were telling halfway through. The whole room shifts a quarter turn and stays there until they leave.

Call it fear. Call it respect. Call it intimidation. Same word in that room.

They’re ten years ahead of you. Sometimes more. Driller, toolpusher, chief mechanic, the crane op who’s been on the same rig longer than the paint. Whatever their title is, that’s not really what they do.

What they do is decide whether you make it.

Every man offshore has one. If you don’t, you didn’t last long enough to need one. Or you had one and didn’t notice. Which is its own kind of tragedy.

Mine was hard but fair

They could be cruel. Cutting in a way that made grown men go quiet for a shift. They had a particular gift for finding the one thing you’d missed and holding it up to the light in front of everyone. Never raised their voice. Didn’t have to. The disappointment did the work.

You’d hear them called a prick by people whose opinion you respected. Those people weren’t wrong.

You’d defend them anyway and get looked at like you were lying. You weren’t. You’d seen the other side.

Both things were true. They didn’t pick one. You didn’t get to either.

The classic chewing out

Phone call to the cabin.

Are you busy? Alright. Come up to my office.

You walk up there. Door’s already open.

Take a seat on the couch.

You knew what was coming before you sat down. Most of the time you’d already figured out what you’d done before they picked up the phone. When you’ve made the mistake, you know it more than anybody else. You feel it in your guts. Sometimes you don’t even need the talking-to. Just sitting on their couch is enough.

The look got you. The disappointment. The sense that you’d let them down again, and you were going to have to wear it.

These people are never wrong. You can sit there and run your mouth, and I’m a mouth-runner. Always have been. Shoot from the hip, get emotional, say things I shouldn’t. Doesn’t matter. They’ve been doing this since before you knew what BOP stood for. You’re going to wear it. You’re going to walk back to the change room. You’re going to feel it for three days.

And you’d think you’d done it. Ticked every box.

Then they’d find the thing you missed.

Every time.

Fuck. Start again.

That’s how the standard gets installed. You don’t get given it. You get measured against it until you stop falling short.

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The other side was the helideck

Lunch break, you’d see them heading out for a lap, and somehow you’d end up walking with them.

Sometimes it was work. Most times it wasn’t. Your missus. Your kids. The house you were trying to sell back home. They’d been through it ten years before. They’d seen the marriage strain. Seen their kids forget who they were for a hitch and remember again three days into leave. They had pearls of wisdom you didn’t ask for and didn’t know you needed.

The part nobody outside saw. The seriousness. The pressure. The room straightening up when they walked in. Underneath it, a softness. The type who’d get you home if you needed to be home. No questions, no paperwork. The type who’d take a phone call from your wife and tell her not to worry without ever telling you they’d done it.

They’re the type who could break you in front of a crew of fifteen and ten hours later sit in a plastic chair on the helideck and tell you to go easy on your wife when you got home.

Both things were true. Both were them.

That’s what mentorship actually is. Not the warm version they sell at the leadership seminars.

The split. The same person on both sides of you.

The trust came in small ways

I was a derrickhand. Green as grass. Scared of pumping the wrong volume.

Came up to the floor to do a displacement and watched them slide the mud engineer’s plan to one side and ask me what I was doing. In front of everybody. The mud engineer. The company man. The toolpusher.

Run me through it.

I did. We did it my way. It was right.

I won’t pretend I wasn’t shaking. But it was right.

Or just — come up here and update the well control board. What are you doing? Get on the brake. Picking up casing with the driller and the toolpusher and the company man watching, somebody saying yeah, get him on the brake.

Small stuff to them. Big stuff to me.

You don’t know what you’re being given when you’re being given it. You think you’re just doing the job. You don’t realise until later that they could have given the brake to anyone and they gave it to you. That they could have humiliated you in front of the company man, and instead, they handed you the floor.

That’s the trick. The ones who break you in private are the ones who back you in public.

The ones who do it the other way around aren’t mentors. They’re cowards.

I didn’t know any of it until I left

Went overseas. Got out from under them. Stood on my own two feet for the first time and started comparing myself to the guys around me. Different rig. Different country. Different crew.

I’d never thought I stacked up. Not as smart as some of them. Not as mechanically minded. No trade behind me. A lot of these blokes seemed to absorb the work in a way I had to grind for.

Then I started noticing something.

I knew the policies and procedures cold. The fine print I’d hated as a derrickhand. Fucking paperwork, I just want to do the job. I was fluent in it. Something went sideways, I had it. Didn’t have to think. It was just there.

That was them. Not the drilling. Drilling, you can learn from anyone. They gave me the unsexy thing. Respect for the document. The understanding that the paperwork is the job. That fifty percent of what you do up there is knowing what’s written down and why. They’d ask you a question on it, and you knew there was no point lying because they’d know you were lying.

So you learned it. Not because you wanted to. Because they were going to ask, and they were going to ask in front of someone whose opinion mattered.

You don’t know you have it until you need it. You reach for it, and it’s there.

Do I do this for green kids now?

Some of it. Not all of it.

I took the teaching part. I’ll sit with a guy and walk him through well control. I’ll make time. I believe in it. If I’m not responsible for getting my crew up to speed, who is? You can’t sit in the chair and complain that nobody knows anything if you’ve never taught anybody anything.

You pay it forward, or the trade dies.

But I can’t do the chewing out.

Don’t like conflict. Never have. Maybe that’s a flaw. Maybe it’s just me. You’re never going to walk into a leadership seminar and hear the bloke at the front say

Yeah, just scream at them and belittle them; it’ll work out fine.

It’s always mentoring, communication, and two-way respect. All the buzzwords.

None of those buzzwords are what got me here.

The screaming worked. On me. I’m honest about that. The disappointment worked. The fear of letting them down was the engine that drove me to learn the things I needed to know. I’m not romantic about it. It costs something.

But it built something too, and the something it built is what I’m using right now to keep tight lines on drill floor half a world away.

I can’t be that person. I’m not built for it. So I take what I can carry. The teaching, the standard, and the respect for the document. I leave the rest behind.

The crews I run get a softer version of what I got.

Whether that’s better or worse, I don’t know. Some days I think I’m running a kinder floor than the one I came up on. Some days I think I’m running a worse one and calling it kinder so I can sleep.

I used to wonder if I was failing them by not being them

I don’t anymore.

They installed the standard. The standard is mine now. What I do with it is on me. They were meant to be them. I’m meant to be me. Both of those are fine.

There’s one of these people in your life. I don’t care what job you’re in. Trade. Office. Military. Kitchen. Deck.

There’s one.

The person who held you to a standard you didn’t think you could meet. Who chewed you out when you needed it and walked the helideck with you when you needed that instead. Who was hard on you because they saw something you didn’t.

You don’t have to copy them. They had a role. Whoever you turned out to be is on you. Take the credit.

But it’s worth knowing who had a hand in it.

Worth saying so. Even if you never say it to them.

Especially if you never say it to them.

There’s always one.

This one cost me something to write. They usually do.

The Driller’s Digest is the offshore life as it actually is — the freedom, the cost, the men who keep showing up. Written from the inside. No agenda. No PR.

If it spoke to you, send it to someone who’d recognise themselves in it. That’s the only marketing I do.

Justin.

It’s been a while.

Life offshore doesn’t slow down to let you write about it. Four weeks on, four weeks of trying to remember what it felt like, and somewhere in there, the post doesn’t get written.

This one’s lighter than what I usually send. No heavy subject matter, no dark corners. Just a story about names, and what they mean on a rig, and a bloke called Rambo who really should have known better.

Sometimes that’s enough.

Part I: Rambo

A five-foot-nothing ex-Marine rolls onto my first rig. Balding, loud, USMC tattooed across his right forearm. He tells everyone to call him Rambo.

Said it on the chopper. Said it at the safety induction. Kept saying it.

Bad move.

You don’t give yourself a nickname offshore. It’s the first unspoken rule of the rig, and Rambo didn’t know it.

So the boys adjusted it. Rainbow.

He did not take it well. He is, last I heard, in jail. Not for the nickname. But I wouldn’t call the two things unrelated either.

Your nickname is given to you. By a driller. By a toolpusher. By a rigger with a gift for cruelty and an eye for what sticks.

If you try to hand it to yourself, the tribe will correct it. They’ll correct it fast. They’ll correct it in front of everybody. The new version will stick harder than anything you came up with.

In Australia, most nicknames are just lazy. Your last name with an o on the end. Robbo. Johno. Richo. Effort-free identification. The country runs on them.

Mine wasn’t lazy.

Mine was Fluffy.

Part II: BFR

I came out of the Navy into the drilling game in my early twenties. Fresh off the boat.

In the Navy, I’d been Forrest. Last name, military standard, no imagination required. I figured offshore would be the same.

It wasn’t.

My first rotation, the toolpusher was a bloke named Doug. Everyone called him BFR. Big Fat Ranga. A ranga, in Australia, is what we call a ginger-haired individual. Picture the belly and the hair, and you’ve got the man.

He’d relieve the driller every morning and make it his personal mission to harass the new kid over smoko. The new kid was me.

I’d walk past his office on the way to the galley and catch him in there, leaning back in his chair, writing the daily report, one eye on the door. He’d see me coming.

“Hey, Fluffy. You’re my little bit of fluff, boy. Come sit on Daddy’s lap”, he’d say, grinning from ear to ear.

He said it the first day. He said it every day after that.

I was twenty-something, fresh out of a ship’s company where hazing was a second language, and I knew exactly what BFR was doing. Testing the new kid. Fishing for a flinch.

I did not flinch.

I stopped in the doorway one morning and told him I’d be happy to oblige. Told him I was fresh off the boat, and if he wanted to play gay chicken, I was all for it.

BFR laughed so hard he spilled his coffee. He never asked me to sit on his lap again.

From then on, I was just Fluffy.

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Three rigs. Northwest Shelf to Angola to Egypt. Twenty years of being Fluffy.

I’ve worked entire campaigns, six months on, six off, alongside blokes who did not know my legal name was Justin. The paycheck said, Justin. The passport said, Justin.

The crew called me Fluffy.

I’ll be honest. It’s not my favourite.

You hit a point, somewhere around the time you make Assistant Driller, where being called Fluffy in front of a client rep feels like wearing a clown nose to a funeral.

I’ve tried to kill it. New rig, new crew, introduce myself as Justin, let the name die clean. Never worked. Never does. Someone always knows someone who worked with me before. The name shows up on the chopper before I do.

Three days in, I’m Fluffy again.

That’s how you know it’s real.

Part III: What It Means

You don’t choose it. You can’t shake it. You’ll be Fluffy when you’re a driller, when you’re an OIM, when you retire, when you’re dead.

The tribe has watched you long enough to find a word. A behaviour, a face, a moment. Something that revealed who you were, and the crew turned it into language.

Giving you a name is the way they say you belong.

Giving you a name is the only welcome ceremony we have. Nobody writes it down.

If you’ve been on a rig for a year and you’re still just your last name on a whiteboard, pay attention. The crew hasn’t decided about you yet. They’re still watching.

If they’ve given you a name, even a cruel one, even one you hate, that’s them saying: we see you, we’ve got you, you’re in.

Rambo didn’t get that. He rocked up trying to write his own story.

That’s not how it works out here. You don’t hold the pen.

I know because I tried.

Angola. Big move, international AD, half a world away from the Northwest Shelf. I told myself this was the reset. Fresh rig, fresh crew, nobody knows me. I’d walk off that chopper as Justin. Fluffy could stay in Australia.

I walked into the heli briefing room. Senior toolpusher put his hand out, a big grin on his face.

Hello Fluffy.

That was it. That was the moment. I shook his hand, and I let it roll.

What do the guys call you when you’re not in the room?

Do you know?

Did you earn that name, some behaviour, some moment, some joke that landed, or did you try to hand it to them?

If you don’t know what they call you, the answer is probably the new guy. And that’s fine. That’s the entry level. Keep showing up. Keep doing the work. One day, someone will say a word about you, and it’ll stick, and that’s the day you’ve arrived.

I’m Fluffy. BFR gave it to me. Twenty years offshore. Still Fluffy.

That’s enough.

I’m Justin. Twenty years on the rigs. Still figuring it out.

If this one hit, share it with someone who’d get it.