Quote:
Originally Posted by LJJohnson
Mine came over to Texas (from Louisiana) in the early 1930s, following the oil field. The oilfield was much rougher and tougher than now. To this day, if you visit a bar frequently by drilling folks, you can figure 90% probability that anyone who is missing fingers worked on the rig floor at some time..
When I was training to be a drilling foreman, part of my apprentiship was to work as a floor hand (roughneck) on 3 kinds of offshore rigs: submersibles, semi-submersible, and floaters (i.e., drillships) for 3 months on each.
While on the drillship, when we were desperately trying to get the drillpipe down to the leave of the last casing. The ship was doing a fair imitation Joe Cocker dancing, and the rain made everything slick. I managed to use one of my fingers to pad two pieces of drill pipe coming together at speed.
They flew me to the nearest emergency room, and my finger survived. At the beginning I had only 45% mobility at the beginning. After I couple (3, I think) og months of therapy I got mobility back to 80%+. Since I wound up going into programming/support within 10 years of that time, glad I worked so hard on the therapy.
|
I met a guy once with a deformed finger. I asked if it was oilfield related, he said he worked the oilfield but that was where his wife shot him.
Oh and I know a guy whose hand met with the traveling blocks. He lost 2/3 of one finger and the other two were broken. All the fingers were taped together at first. (Mid 1970's)