What's your typical day like?

If I’m working day shift, I usually get up around 5.15am and head down to the camp kitchen. It’s always a rush in the mornings, so I have about 15 minutes to get as much food into me as possible. Eggs and bacon, lumberjack type stuff.

At 6am the crew truck shows up at camp, and we pile in and head off for our 6.30am safety meeting. Once that’s done we head out onto the rig to find our cross-shifts, get a brief run down on whatever they’re working on and pick up where they left off.

Daily duties depend entirely on what the rig is doing. If we’re drilling, the days tend to be a bit more relaxed – keep an eye on the motors, the gens, the pumps, and head up to the drill floor whenever another pipe has to be connected to the drill string.

If there’s problems down hole, it means we might have to trip – pull all the pipe out of the hole and fix the problem. A drill bit might need to be changed, or we may need to adjust the setting on the tool that steers the drill bit. Tripping can take a lot out of you. It’s a routine of extreme physical exertion followed by brief periods of rest, doing the same thing over and over until all the pipe is out of the hole and the problem can be fixed. When it is, it’s the same thing again in reverse order until the bit is back on bottom and we can drill again.

At 6.30pm, the other crew shows up for their safety meeting, and by 7.15pm we’re usually headed back to camp. A quick shower and a shave, dinner in the kitchen, and then the gym or a book until bed time. There’s all sorts of operations that might be happening on any given day, so it’s pretty difficult to describe a ‘typical’ day.

There's been a lot of talk lately about people wanting work/life balance. Does your job provide that?

Yikes – this is a question I don’t like thinking about. We work out of town on a two-and-one rotation – that is, 14 days on followed by seven days off. That means if I were to work a full year, I’d spend eight months away at work, and four at home. It’s tough. Because this line of work requires a lot of traveling, I often go months on end without seeing certain friends or family members, it makes it hard to have a normal social life. It’s strange, a rig hand spends all his time at work wanting his hitch to end so he can get home, but when he does it seems like your week off goes by twice as fast. I've managed to alienate a lot of friends and girlfriends working where I work.

So no, oil rigs don’t provide what you’d call a healthy balance of work and life. I had a cousin tell me once that you sell your soul to make money in the oil field, and sometimes it seems like he was right.

What's the craziest/most unexpected thing that's ever happened to you while working?

This is a hard one to pin down. Take a handful of strange people, put them in the middle of nowhere and have them operate a giant machine, and weird things happen. We’ve had bears chase workers across the lease, planes skidding sideways down snow-packed airstrips, helicopters losing altitude, and too many cases of people coming very close to getting seriously hurt or killed. But it’s not all bad – the northern lights can be spectacular if you’re working in the arctic, and Alberta sunrises are always nice at the end of a long shift.

What makes for a really good day at work?

The weather, the work and the people. You spend just about all of your time working closely with your crewmates, so if you’re lucky, it gets to be like a family after a while. If the temperature is just cool enough so you don’t sweat, tripping pipe out of the hole all day with your brothers is just about as good as working on an oil rig can get. If everyone knows what they’re doing and gets into a groove, the whole thing clicks and the crew operates like a well-oiled machine. After a good trip you can leave the rig with a sense of accomplishment, puff your chest out a bit when the other crew comes and sees how fast you were. On days like that, it’s always nice to head down to a river after work, get a bon fire going and have a beer or two with the guys. But depending on which oil company you’re working for, alcohol of any type might be contraband, so beer is out of the question. Which can kind of put a damper on things when you’ve worked all day in the heat.

What's your annual salary? Do you get benefits?

Most rig hands are paid hourly, only the brass gets salary. We’re paid quite well though, and working 84 hours a week makes for some nice overtime. A derrick hand gets a base wage of $37/hour. We also get a living allowance, $50 a day if we’re living in camp, $140 a day if we have to find our own accommodations.

Depending on how much of the year a rig spends working (or how much a rig hand wants to work, if the industry is busy), a guy can make anywhere from $70,000 a year up to a couple hundred thousand. I’m still relatively low on the food chain in the grand scheme of things, but I’m fortunate enough to work steady. A derrick hand working year round typically makes over six figures.

The benefits vary from company to company, but they tend to be quite good. It’s a rough line of work, and companies need to treat their guys pretty well or the guys will jump ship to another company. I’m lucky – the company I work for treats us right.

What's the biggest mistake you've ever made on the job?

Whatever it was, I’ve probably purged it from my mind. However, there are three cardinal sins on oil rigs, as follows:

1 Do not, ever, under any circumstances, drop an object down the hole. Hammers, wrenches, chains, and pretty much anything made of hardened metal can destroy a drill bit, and drill bits can be quite pricy. The wells we drill cost millions of dollars, and pulling the pipe and going fishing for a tool down hole can cost into the hundreds of thousands, and take days to do.

2 Do not, ever, under any circumstances, hurt someone. This one should need no explaining, but it’s surprisingly easy to do something that could put someone else in danger without even realizing it.

3 Don’t get hurt. This is a touchy one, but unfortunately it’s still true. Getting hurt doesn’t just ruin your week/year/life, it costs a lot of people a lot of money. Settlements might have to be paid, bonuses are lost, investigations have to happen, and someone must be held accountable.. Sometimes entire rig crews will get drug tested after an accident. They test us to ensure drugs or alcohol didn’t contribute to the cause of the accident, but it comes across like a punishment: “If you get hurt, you might cost someone else their job.” Unfortunately, it causes a lot of guys to sweep injuries under the rug. It doesn’t happen so much at my company, but it’s depressingly common in the industry.

Regardless, you couldn’t pay me enough money to put myself or my crew mates in harms way.

Doing any one of the three things above is liable to give a guy a reputation, and a reputation can follow a guy from rig to rig, company to company. It’s a relatively tight knit industry and word travels fast. It’s not uncommon to find yourself working beside someone you heard about years ago on a different rig, if he’s got that reputation following him … I’ve managed to stay rep-free to date, and hopefully I can keep it that way.

Here are some highlights from Tyson's Q&A session in the comments below: