by Bobby D. Weaver
Oil well drillers tell a host of stories on themselves. One of my favorites is the story of the driller and the monkey.
It seems that some years ago a driller from West Texas took a job in South America. It paid extraordinarily well, but the location was deep in the Amazon jungle. What with the sweltering heat and everything else that went with working in a jungle climate, the driller had a devil of a time keeping hands. Eventually, all the roughnecks from the States quit. He tried to replace them with men from the local labor pool, but they had never handled anything more complicated than a sugar cane knife and had absolutely no experience with heavy drilling machinery, and repair bills began to mount up.
In exasperation, the driller proclaimed to the tool pusher that he believed he could train a monkey from the surrounding jungle and make a better hand than the local boll weevils. One thing led to another, and soon it became a bet that neither man could resist.
Before long the driller captured a good strong monkey he thought might have a natural talent for roughnecking. Because of the monkey’s natural climbing ability, the driller soon promoted him to derrick man. Within a couple of months that critter was able to do almost every job on the rig. He became the best hand that driller had. Then one day the tool pusher showed up expecting to collect his winnings. Instead he was so impressed with what he saw that he fired the driller and gave his job to the monkey.
The humiliated driller could do nothing but go home in disgrace. He had not been back in West Texas more than a few months when he received a letter from the Amazon. It was from the monkey, who by then had replaced the tool pusher and wanted the driller to come back down to South America and work for him.
Spending 20 years laboring in greasy overalls in the oil patch and doing a hard time stretch collecting oral histories for Texas Tech has provided Bobby Weaver with a wealth of oil field yarns. He can be contacted at bobby-weaver@cox.net.