Mar 06 2008
‘Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs…’
The full title of this little gem of a book is Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs: She Thinks I’m a Piano Player in a Whorehouse, written by Paul Carter. He’s a slightly jaded oil rig worker who’s been to a lot of terrifying and absurd places in the name of Big Oil.
There isn’t much in the book about the process of digging or the oil industry. Mostly it’s tales of derring-do and idiocy. For instance, you learn what happens if you sneak into a mosque at night and change the pre-recorded call to prayer for a recording of Ring of Fire. (The answer, in this case, is get thrown out the country as a religious undesirable.)
But you also get a picture of some of the scarier ends of the nearly civilised world — where you need a code word to exchange with your driver to ensure he’s not some random person who wants to rob and kill you.
I can’t pretend this is the best written book in the world. A somewhat scattergun approach to punctuation and the like. But it’s certainly entertaining.