Well in Louisiana, the oil field is prominent down there. So I started off as a welders helper in a shipyard, building ships. And then I ended up going offshore when I turned 18, and I worked offshore for about two years, seven on, seven off. I was on a maintenance crew. We had five people. We had a foreman, two roustabouts and two welders, which roustabouts are like welder helpers. So, we did maintenance out on the platform. So we, sometimes pipelines and stuff would, you know, start leaking. So we'd pull them up and, and redo them reweld them. Just kind, of any kind of maintenance that came up. So it was steady work and you know, and it was different type of work. Sometimes in the wintertime there would be rough seas, you know, eight ten foot seas out there. And boats are bouncing around. You're trying to jump on them from a rope, hanging on a rope.

When something goes down, you work till it gets fixed. It doesn't matter if it's 24 hours, 36 hours, whatever it is, you work to get it fixed. I slept on racks of pipe when I worked offshore, you know? One guy would be welding or something like that, and then the other one might sleep for an hour while he's doing something. So it was off and on. But I've worked from Friday, Friday mornings all the way through Sunday afternoons, you know, napping on a, napping on a pipe rack or something.

We had, in fact, I had my arm, my hand caught in an air tugger. What had happened was there was a three level deck, and the pipes that, the riser pipes that go down underneath and they go to other platforms and they transfer oil back and forth, and we had one that had was bubbling up and leaking. So we had to get a chain and a air tugger, which was up on the top deck. It's a big, it's like a winch, but big. And it might have, maybe one inch cable on it or something. And the air tugger, what would happen is I would be down on the bottom sliding the chain down, down the pipe. And then when he would hit the air tugger, it would pull that pipe up out of the casing. So I was hand signaling the guy on the center who was relaying the hand signals up to the guy on the top.

Somehow we got crossed up. He tugged when he wasn't supposed to tug. My hand was stuck in the chain. And I didn't have gloves on that morning. And we'd already been working, like, I don't know, 30 hours or so. And it got my hand stuck in there. So I, naturally, you know, when I got it stuck in here, I had to relay the message to the center guy to back it off. The guy on the top backed it off. I rolled around and then I had pulled the skin off, I think it was this hand here. I pulled the skin off of these two fingers out here. So they had to call a helicopter to come get me.

Went to the doctor's office and, you thought that hurt? Doctor, you know, they grabbed a hold of my arm, pulled it up like behind, under their arm and went to scrubbing it. Because it had grease all in it. And then I got it wrapped up and went back to work a week later or so. But yeah. So it, offshore work can be dangerous, you know?

 And the issue is if you don't have a means to get it out there, you're stuck out there until, you know, and if it would have been bad weather and they couldn't have flown, then I’d have ended up on an eight hour boat ride, or waiting until the weather cleared up. So it can, yeah, it can be, can be dangerous.