I'm surrounded by assholes

Okay, maybe "surrounded" is too strong a word. That said, there do seem to be a lot of them. The latest one, whom I met this week, really takes the cake I think. This particular asshole worked for an auto-parts store (nothing wrong with that) until our customer hired him as a field consultant. He had NO experience in the oil patch before hired for this job that is grossly under qualified for. Now, a year and a half later, he seems to think that he knows everything about his job, when he proves his incompetence every time he opens his mouth (any consultant who doesn't know what an isolation valve is should be shot). This gets him my scorn and derision, but what really pisses me off about him is an incident that happened a couple of days ago.

We had a line part earlier this week. For those of you who do not know a line part occurs when, for various reasons (worn iron, too high pressure, human error, etc), a steel line that we are pumping through bursts under pressure. There are a lot of safety controls to limit this (regular iron inspections, check valves, pressure relief valves, etc), but they still do happen infrequently and they are always dangerous. We were fortunate that nobody was seriously hurt (one guy was shaken up and a little bruised, but that's it). This particular asshole, immediately after the line part, asks simply: "When can we start pumping again?". Yup, this guy's a real class act. Honestly, it's people like that that cause the oil patch to have such a shitty reputation.

In completely unrelated news, when I came to work this morning, I saw that somebody had actually plugged in the block heater on their truck.

Also, for your amusement, I present the following picture. It was the response from one of the guys in our lab when asked by our Calgary for some pictures of the pumps running some of our testing equipment (a really stupid request, for reasons that I won't go in to here). I hope you get as much enjoyment out of it as I did, since it's the funniest thing that I've seen in a long time.