In 1999, I was working on a municipal water well in Hillsborough County, Florida. It was a Monday through Friday, days-only work schedule, and that particular week required us to work on a Saturday to set casing. We set the casing, and instead of making the hour-long drive to the shop followed by the three-and-a-half-hour drive to my house on the east coast, I chose to keep my hotel room in town and spend my day off in Plant City. Maybe I could do some drinking with my friend JR. He lived there then and still does today.

I didn’t have any luck getting in touch with JR., but I was able to call a taxi that took me to a bar with a dirt parking lot filled with motorcycles and pickup trucks. It reminded me of the bar that Driller Mike used to drop Raydar off at after work when I was a kid.

Not long after I walked in, I saw this girl that I was interested in and thought I’d give it a shot. So I bought her drinks and danced with her until last call at three A.M.

We left the bar in her car with me at the wheel after twelve hours of drinking shots of whisky and draught beer chasers. It was definitely not a good idea. I had been lucky at drinking and driving other times, but not this time.

I couldn’t steer into a curve and left the road, crashing into a tree that was wider across than her little Mitsubishi was long. Both of her femur bones broke, the ones that connected her hips to her knees. I broke both of the bones in my forearm, ulna and radius, I had to look that up, and I broke a rib that punctured my lung.

After that, I spent a week in the hospital and fifty-one months in prison.

I was sent to a prison camp in Gainesville, Florida, that was exclusively for men with D.U.I. or drug charges. I was in there with two baseball players from the New York Mets who got busted for cocaine possession while in spring training, a pilot for Delta Airlines, a Hillsborough County deputy that was helping himself to the drugs in the evidence locker, a few lawyers, and a bail bondsman.

I changed the address for my subscription of The National Driller to my prison address, and they sent me a copy every month.

My release date was getting close, and in the employment section of the big newspaper-ish publication that it was at the time was an ad from a company named Florida Design Drilling. The ad said that they were looking for drillers and helpers and gave a phone number to call.

I called my mom and asked her to find their address and mail it to me. She did, and I wrote them a letter stating my then-current living situation and why, along with a description of my well drilling experience, and also noted that I was a hard worker and of average to slightly above average intelligence.

Three weeks later came a handwritten letter from the owner of the company, and it said to call him when they let me out.

I got out in early 2004 made the call, and went to work straight away.

One night I was working the night shift on a dual zone A.S.R. well in Okeechobee, Florida. It was the first of its kind, and I was mighty proud to be drilling on it. I had to trip out about eleven hundred feet or so of four-and-a-half-inch drill pipe and four or five eight-inch collars, all singles.

I was only out of prison for about two months at the time, and working with a worm hand that was released from a ten-year federal prison sentence at about the same amount of time that I was. My other hand was a no-show. We were two-manning it.

It had to be done because the loggers were going to be there in the morning to run a full sweep of logs, and the casing run would fall on me the next night.

The joints were breaking with the breakout tongs and the rotary table. We were going slow, laying them down using the winch line that was connected to a headache rack on the end of a catwalk with a snatch block that had a pelican hook on it that we would just put into the pin end of the drill pipe, tighten up on the winch line, and voila, drill pipe zip line.

The string started to get light, and the slips were slipping in the table when I would try to break them, so we had to start using the backup tongs and the cathead that pulled the breakout tongs.

At about two A.M. we had the first collar in the slips, changed the jaw on the backup tongs, set the tongs, I pulled on the clutch for the breakout, and for some reason the worm tried to pull slack out of the cathead cable from the deadman side, and his little finger got sucked into the little snatch block on the tong.

He threw his gloves down and did the pain dance for a few seconds while holding his pinky and singing a song of profanities.

I walked over to him and said, “Let me see it.”

He cussed and said, "the streets are safer than this," then he walked to his car, and I never saw him again.

Are the streets really safer than working on a rig?

At the beginning of last year, a driller at the company I work for now, with more than thirty years of experience was on days off and at a party with a bonfire. He was walking close to the fire and stumbled on something, causing him to fall into the fire, and stopped his fall with his hands directly in the fire. It took three months for him to heal enough to work again.

Also, last year, a hand that used to work for us quit and went to work for another company. He was on his days off riding a dirt bike and crashed. He was not wearing a helmet and died from a head injury a week after the wreck.

Before I broke my arm and went to prison on days off, I had a driller who lost his eye using a Dremel tool in his garage. He was not wearing safety glasses.

I have a friend in Plant City, Florida, who owns a residential drilling company. He woke up one morning in his driveway with three broken ribs and all of the skin on his nose and forehead gone. When I asked him how it happened, he said, “I think it was evil spirits, Jimbo.”

And then there’s Rocky, A.K.A. Dennis Clayton Roxbury. He used to work with me on Driller Mike’s rig when I was a kid. He was a Vietnam War hero who grew up with my stepdad, Driller Mike. He took some time off to go back home to Michigan. He got drunk, pointed an unloaded shotgun at the police, and was shot dead. He had fifteen bullet holes in him.

No. We are usually safer working on the rig than we are on the streets.

Yesterday I was at the shop working alone because it was Saturday, and I just wanted to clean up the cabin of a truck-mounted drilling rig that I have to drive to Arizona tomorrow. I don’t like to drive dirty trucks. They seem to be harder to drive for some reason.

After cleaning the cabin and all of the glass inside of it, I noticed that the outside of the windshield was super dirty. I flipped the hood open and got a ladder so that I could climb onto the tire, then the engine, and give it a good cleaning using glass cleaner and shop towels.

With the towels stuffed into my back pocket and the can of glass cleaner in my hand, I took the first step up the ladder and then back down. I probably could have done it, but what if I fell? Nobody was coming in until Monday morning.

I guess I did a quick risk assessment and decided that it wasn’t worth it.

On the other hand, I was at home alone last summer, and I set up an extension ladder to climb onto the roof of my R.V. so that I could clean it and apply the annual coat of U.V. protection. I climbed the ladder with a bucket, soap, mop, towel, and the hose hooked into my belt loop barefoot while nobody was home.

I did the same risk assessment in my mind, thinking that I could fall from the ladder, and even worse, I could get the roof slippery with soapy water and fall from the roof.

That time I decided to take the risk.

There are several different reasons why we get hurt at home more so than we do on the job.

Here are some of them.

Risk divided by desire equals the probability of behaving in an unsafe manner.

Maybe I just didn’t really want to wash the windshield of that truck enough to risk getting hurt, and really wanted to wash the R.V. and decided that the risk was less than the desire. I think that we are more likely to do things that aren’t safe at home because we are doing things that we want to do.

The money factor.

I don’t want to go on workers’ comp. It will pay me about half of my wages, but if I get hurt at home, my short- and long-term disability policies will pay me more than double what workers’ comp will pay me.

Loyalty to the brand.

I don’t want to lower the safety score of the company I work for or do things that I was trained not to do because they paid a lot of money to train me to behave in a safe manner at work.

We don’t drink at work.

After a few drinks, dancing at the edge of a fire pit doesn’t seem like a bad idea. Driving a car impaired at three A.M. from an Olive Oil look-alike, to me at the time, was an inspired thought and had to be done at all cost.

None of these things would have been done if not for being drunk.

Evil spirits.

This just happens, and other than a few terrible things, there is nothing we can do to prevent spirits from the underworld kicking in our ribs and dragging us face down by our feet across the concrete.

Thanks for taking the time to read this story, and until the next one and beyond, remember to always stay safe on the streets.