My job was in one of the services Halliburton provides known as wireline or slickline services. Wireline involves lowering specialized tools down into the well on a 1/8" steel wire to as deep as 20,000 feet, and then operating the tools from the surface. (I soon found that oil wells are incredibly more complex than I had once thought--it's much more than just sticking a pipe in the ground and turning on the tap.) Anyway, with wireline, you can perform a number of functions, such as depth measurements, installation/removal of valves, pressure tests, and sample retrieval, to name a few. Wireliners work on 3-man crews consisting of a tree hand or "worm" (<-- Texas oilfield culture), a lead hand / crane operator, and a unit operator who works the control console and is the head of the crew. The vast majority of wireline work consists of just getting rigged up to perform the job, plus all the many, many maintenance tasks that must be performed on all the field equipment. It is extremely hard, dirty, dangerous, tiresome and miserable work which isn't very well compensated compared to all the other Prudhoe Bay occupations. That's why I'm not there anymore.
Memorial Day on "the beach" at Point Mac. Our wireline crew is rigged up on a well, with me as the crane operator that day. Just over my right shoulder is the Arctic Ocean.
