Posted 10 months ago
One notepad is all that it takes.
The oilfield is bloody cruel.
How would you feel when you are lifting boxes and moving pipes with a 30-odd year old laborer from the sub-continent, when you know you draw in more than 50 times his salary? Well, I feel pained. As the both of us toil away in the Arabian sun, taking breaks over chai and cursing the sytem; I can see the pain in his eyes. The pain of getting to see his wife and children once every 2 years for a couple of weeks; sending almost everything that he earns to his family back home and being content with a laugh or two with a few folks over a game of cards.
All that it took for me to sweep that pain off his eyes for a few seconds, was me giving him a new hard-bound pocket notepad that I’d got myself from the store. That’s all it took to make him happy again.
It most definitely wasn’t the tiny notepad. It was just the fact that he felt a sense of belonging to the place he worked for, a feeling that people cared about him and his work.
All that it takes to make your crew take pride in their work, is a little tap on the shoulder.
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