Our Sales Engineer, Dan Parsons, has been around a long time. Well, not that long. But he has a lot of wisdom and stories to share. Join us for his three part series, The Perils of the Paper Field Ticket and How to Avoid Them. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy Part 1 today, The Lost Ticket.
Part 1 of 3
We are all familiar with the paper field ticket – the most common way to record activity out in the oilfield. They’ve been around as long as the oilfield itself. Texas oil patch folklore has it that the very first paper field ticket was used at Spindletop, and that it was promptly disputed for having the wrong AFE number. Legend also has it that AFE is still open!
The paper field ticket has been used for writing down labor, equipment and material for over 100 years. In many ways, it has not changed since that first one at Spindletop, and while it is a cheap and easy method, problems are inherent with a paper-based process. They were a good idea back when Howard Hughes Sr. was selling drill bits, but now they are better ways to do record field activity.
The Lost Ticket
Table Rock is between Wamsutter and Rock Springs, Wyoming and is a wide, barren alkali scrub land in the middle of the Great Divide Basin. In Wyoming, the wind always blows, the winters are brutally cold and it’s scorching hot in the summer. I remember being there one fine spring day, a typical 40/40 day, which is to say 40°F and a 40 m/h wind blowing from the west.
My partner and I had just installed a centrifuge at a new rig and needed to write up our paper ticket. Our truck was parked sideways to the wind and we both opened our doors at the same time. The wind tore through the cab and blew out everything that wasn’t fixed in place. Hamburger wrappers, empty cans and cigarette packs flew out of the cab. Before we could react, the paper field tickets on the dashboard went flying out the truck and into the desert.
Some of the tickets went up in the air and were literally scattered in the wind. A few got snagged in a sage brush, but most of them were well on their way to Nebraska. We tried to catch as many as we could, but no man or beast alive would have been fast enough. We ended up only getting a few of the tickets back.
I spent the next few days back tracking to all the rigs I had worked on that week and found myself begging the company men for their copies of the tickets. Thankfully, we used a triplicate ticket book, (which is still the standard format to this day), so I was able to get copies. Still, it took a lot of time…and a lot of begging.
At that point, I started thinking that there had to be a better way than using paper field tickets.
Have you ever lost paper field tickets before? Leave a comment below and share your story! And then,tune in October 31st for the next installment in this series, The Damaged, the Inaccurate and the Illegible Ticket.
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