To keep from having to file an embarrassing police report, the driller and the policeman agreed to just keep the whole incident to themselves. I wonder if those who planned this birthday surprise now know the rest of the story – surprise!

This driller and two of his driller friends told me this story recently at the South Atlantic Well Drillers Jubilee in Myrtle Beach, S.C. They don’t seem to know who did the deed – but we have a pretty good idea of who it was!

I grew up around drillers, and they love to have fun. I’ve heard so many stories and have been involved in a few of those stories over my 70 years. Most are funny and many are unprintable. My parents always said that I never was a kid: I grew up with adults, or kind of adults – drillers!


Occasionally, drillers tell me informative, sad and/or sometimes funny stories. This story recently was told to me by a driller from southern Virginia. The names will be withheld to protect those involved.

It was this bachelor driller’s birthday, so some of his friends – who still remain anonymous – went into his home while he was away. (They live in an area where the doors seldom are locked.) They put a blow-up lady doll in his bed of his upstairs bedroom. They covered up the doll with the sheets, closed the curtains, turned on the bed lamp and overhead fan, and closed the door.

When the driller came home, he sensed someone had been there, so he crept up the stairs and opened the bedroom door a little to peek in – the door usually wasn’t closed. He saw what he thought was a woman sleeping in his bed, so he closed the door quietly, crept down the stairs and hurriedly called the police.


When I was about eight years old, the drill crew put me up to jacking up the back wheels of my dad’s company pickup while he was sleeping in the doghouse. When it wouldn’t go anywhere, my dad asked, “Who did that?” The crew pointed at me. Who showed me how? The drill crew.

My uncle gave me a BB gun when I was about five years old. I was taught to be careful with the gun and never to point it at anyone, whether it was loaded or empty. When around the drill rig, I carried it everywhere. The crew would ask to see my BB gun and pull some prank on other crew members. Once they shot the derrick man in the butt and handed me the gun real quick. When the derrick man looked down, who had the BB gun? Me! Boy, did I hear some naughty words. I left the area fast before he could catch me.

I would shoot grasshoppers – no animals or birds. Once, we were drilling in Florida near a big orange tree and the drill crew would pick oranges to eat. Occasionally, they would bite into something hard – a BB. How’d a BB get into this #$@%^&* orange – Porky’s BB gun! I couldn’t climb the tree to get an orange to eat, so I’d shoot at an orange until I would hit the stem and it would fall. But, unlike the drillers, I knew it had BBs in it.

I grew up on a rig and around drillers from age two. Today, it’s against the law for a person under 18 to work on a drill. Therefore, many of our young people today have other interests by age 18 and don’t have the opportunity to learn about drilling. Many kids today think fun is computer games – they don’t have a clue that work can be fun. That’s another story!

ND