Interview with MWD Manager Brad Barevich

Welcome to the official Erdos Miller podcast, where we spend our nonproductive time talking about everything good in tech and featuring the latest insight and distributors on our show. I'm Ken Miller.

I'm David Erdos. Today we brought on a good friend, Dave Harry from Drillers Directional up in Edmonton, Canada.

Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on.

Thank you for being brave enough to join us. I know we can be an intimidating bunch.

I'm not worried.

So Dave, tell us a bit about your path to the industry. We always love to hear how people got into the industry, and I'm sure the people on the podcast are tired of hearing my path, because I think I keep sharing it every time someone shares theirs. But how did you get into this fun little industry we're all in?

Well, I started off going to post-secondary school. That was neat, Northern Alberta Institute of Technology here in Edmonton. Once I graduated, the allure of the oil patch is pretty strong, mainly the money, and getting the fancy new truck is always a good thing, too. So my brother was already in the industry, working for a company called Sperry Son. They were actually just recently bought at the time by Halliburton. So I spent about a year working in the city and then decided that, "Yeah, you know what? I could probably handle some of the oil patch money."

So I got hired on with Sperry Son back in 2001. So that makes this 20 years of directional experience for me now. I spent about six, seven years there, working in the field, doing projects anywhere from southeast Saskatchewan up to northeast BC all through Alberta, working on several different tool systems that they had at the time. From there, I jumped over. It was a new startup company called Departure. A few of the guys from Sperry Son started to another directional company. I think that was in 2007, I believe. Jumped over with them and helped them get that company running.

Partway through my time there, I eventually moved into the office and started taking on some of the roles of coordinator. I spent a lot of time in the shop as well. Their philosophy there was that we would integrate coordinating with maintenance of tools. Therefore you kind of take that roadblock out so that the guys that are coordinating also have an in-depth knowledge of the tools, and hence the troubleshooting and stuff like that, it gets out much better when you actually service the tools and have a good idea of what's going on with them.

So it was pretty good there. I learned a lot from the guys there. They had a ton of experience. But unfortunately, they eventually sold to a little company called Enzyme, and I'm not much for big companies after my experience with Halliburton. So I opted out of that and went out. Just kind of freelanced for a little bit and then eventually found Drillers Directional. I was actually working in the field again. So once I started on with Drillers Directional, they were a new startup at the time as well. I think once they saw that I had the experience of coordinating and a lot of the shop technician stuff and stuff like that, they eventually decided that I'd be a good fit for a role in the office, in a management position. So that's how I ended up becoming the manager here at Drillers Directional for the NWT department.

Nice.

So that's the background.

Fantastic questions come out of that. I as well do not work well with big companies. I don't think I'd last six weeks inside of a big company anymore. I think I'd lose my mind. I am not somebody you want to have employed at a 100,000-person organization or whatever, right?

I agree.

I spent four years working for Texas Instruments, and I learned a lot, but one of my favorite moments from TI was we had a brand new tester for the semiconductors that we were bringing online. This is what really made me want to start ... One of the things that led to me wanting to start my own company and run things really efficiently was we had a tester. It was not working. We had, I don't know, 10, 12 engineers, PhDs or whatever, on the line from probably three PM in the afternoon until about seven PM, right? It's all getting late. We haven't made any progress. Everybody's trying everything out, right? I'm sitting here, going like, "Yeah, what is the amount of money we're burning per minute here on the phone?" I'm just doing that calculation on the side while I listen to these guys. I'd written some test software that's for the tester. That's why I'm on the call.

Finally, one of these PhDs at the end goes, "Did you plug it in?" The guy was like ... He goes ... "Oh, that does it. Thanks, guys."

That's awesome. Yeah. That's a good one.

I was like, "Oh, you're kidding me. I just wasted five hours of my life and 50, 60, 70 hours down the drain there," right?

Yeah.

Well, I have to ask, could you compare and contrast for us what is it like from your perspective of what Sperry had back in the day, I guess, because they're always kind of legendary for having really good tools and service compared to what the independent technology groups have to offer today, right? What's the biggest differences, in your mind?

Yeah. I mean, just a little bit of the background with Sperry, when I first started with them, they're a well-run company. I honestly thought they were the only directional company in the game. I mean, I didn't know what a tensor tool was until like 2007. So yeah, I mean, it was well-run, and the equipment was all built in-house, so of course anything that goes wrong with that equipment, you get instant feedback direct to the engineers that know how to either fix it or make it better. So, I mean, you can imagine the advancements in the system when everything is done in-house like that.

Obviously, being a big company, there were certain things that held back certain advancements and stuff like that. There's always the bean counter, so to speak, that wouldn't let you run away with stuff. But yeah, I mean, it was really good tools. The MTBF there was just amazing. With the right people involved on the operation side, that equipment just ran flawlessly, and so much more advanced than this stuff we even run today. Battery management, things like that, with the feedback that they got and stuff, it was just amazing. I still compare the tools that I ran back then to what some of the tools today should be like. The third-party industry is obviously catching up leaps and bounds now, which is nice to see. But yeah, that's all I can say, is that it was excellent equipment back in the day, just because it was done in-house.

Yeah. I love that tight feedback cycle, but what's been really interesting to me is, I mean, if you look even at the majors today, I mean, you could make some argument that they're kind of struggling to keep up with technology, right? So anybody who's tried to have service and technology under one roof, it's been a big challenge, right? Nobody's been able to really keep it consistently ahead of the game for a long time, and you even kind of see Slumber J starting to fade in that respect, right? Becoming less competitive in the independent industry. I don't know if I'm just talking bullshit because that's what I hope is going on or whatever.

Yeah, you notice I said back in the day, right?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Right.

It's definitely changed lately. I mean, since my brother was still over there, he just got laid off last year with all these slowdowns up here. But he was telling me that they were starting to adopt some of the third-party stuff at Sperry Son. I'm like, "What? Since when does Sperry go out and buy tools from third-party vendors?" I was just shocked. So yeah, I mean, this is back in the day, obviously.

Well, but you might find some parallel even to the semiconductor industry, because there was really big news this week in the semiconductor industry that Intel replaced their CEO. They're falling behind AMD and ARM and Apple and everybody else with all these processors. I mean, hell has already frozen over twice now. I mean, Apple went from two Intel processors and now they're making their own processor that's the fastest, as opposed to the Mac being really nice, but slow, right? But even Intel now is looking like they're going to start outsourcing some of their production, right? So forever it's been you design the semiconductors and you fabricate them under the same roof. That trend started tearing apart 10 years ago, and now it's kind of culminating with Intel looking like they're going to go that direction. So you even see some sort of separation of the company, your responsibilities there, right? Service and technology, chip design and fabrication. It's just really interesting to wonder if there isn't some parallel there, right?

Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I think a lot of it is how the ship is being steered, obviously. I mean some of these big companies, they're just not run properly, and they lose sight of what's important. I mean, you're going through your big company story, and I was thinking of mine, is we're having an operations meeting or we're supposed to have an operations meeting first thing Monday morning. Part of that's always a safety moment. We're in the safety moment, and we're getting calls, because we've got problems on the rig, and we're talking about choking babies. I mean, that's horrible. I don't want to see babies choke any more than the next person. I want to know what to do about it. But I think we should probably answer the phone and deal with our customer's problems before we worry about this topic, right?

So, I mean, the big companies, they lose sight of what's important, and what's important is to deliver a good product to their customers. So I think that's what I'm seeing more and more with these big companies, is they're losing sight. Other companies that are focused on delivering good products are getting ahead leaps and bounds.

No, I fully agree with you that the top leadership in the company has to have a product focus. Come on, Dave. Tell me, what would you think?

Yeah, I was going to say it's so important, like you mentioned early on with Sperry Son, where the engineers had direct feedback from the field. Having that direct feedback loop between the field and the engineers we've found is so critical. If there's an in-between layer, it just slows down everything, and there's additional confusion and ...

Complexity.

But it's so much more than that, right? Because so much of human communication is non-verbal, right? It's body language. It's how you say something. It's the inflection or whatever else that you use, right? So when there's someone that goes out and talks to the field and then there's a layer of communication in between the engineers in the field like that, even if you just transcribe exactly the words that are said, so much is lost, right? If the engineers can hear directly what's going on, I mean, they can learn so much more, and there's so much more insight. Then there's this natural human ability to capture and infer a lot more information when you hear it from the source, right? It's worse than a game of telephone, right? Because it's not even like the words are getting lost like the game of telephone teaches you, but it's just so much worse than that, because you're missing out on so much communication that was never transcribed in the first place, right?

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's not just that. It's the impression you're leaving on the people that you're working with as well. I mean, just motivation comes from seeing the person above you work just as hard as you do, right, and being involved and there, dealing with the same problems. So there's so many levels that are missed out on if a company's not steered the proper way and management doesn't take that upon themselves to be involved.

So I really appreciate what Elon Musk said the other day, which was, "We've had way too many MBAs get ahold of companies and start running them from the numbers," right? So I couldn't agree with that more, right? I think that one of the things that pissed me off when I got into entrepreneurship was I read a whole bunch of articles, and they were saying, "Oh, yeah, the best thing for a company to do is ... After the founder gets it up and running, it's really the best thing to replace them with a professional CEO." I'm like, "No, that sounds like a terrible idea. That sounds like the worst idea you could possibly imagine." But I kept reading that over and over and over again in business textbooks, and I just utterly emotionally rejected that. I was like, "No, I'm pretty sure it's more important for the founder to figure out how to become a good CEO after they figure out how to get the damn thing running," right?

Luckily, I think the whole business world is kind of coming around to that, right, and kind of thinking that that's actually the better way to do things and kind of losing some of that bad habits of the past, right? So I couldn't help it. You talked about the company that you went to work for after Sperry. It was kind of the Sperry ex-pat startup. They tried this combined coordinator tool service mindset. How did that go overall?

It was excellent. I mean, the tools we were running at the time were the pilots, basically the Bluestar tools, and I really admire the guys that were running the MWD side of that. They were basically my mentors, and why I became what I did in the industry is because of seeing them work. Just the basic philosophies that they had were excellent, one of them being that every problem needs an answer and a fix. So no matter how small the issue, there's always a reason why it happened, is provided, and then some sort of fix for it. So we make some sort of modification to the tools, and fleet-wide. I mean, I remember spending many nights there just trying to ... We'd find a major issue, and it was priority one to upgrade the entire fleet to make sure that we had that fixed so that we didn't see that problem reoccur anytime soon.

That was just one of the great philosophies. The other one, like we touched on, was just having coordinators out, turning around tools. I mean, what a great idea. It seems like it's beneath the coordinator to spend his time servicing tools, but you know what? When problems arise and they're thinking of ways to come for solutions to fix issues in the field, having an in-depth knowledge of those tools, it puts you above the rest when it comes to trying to figure out what the issues are. Not only that, a lot of problems are just stupid little problems, like, "Hey, can you check if that O-ring was on there?" or "Did you remember to check this setting on the tool?" or whatever.

Field experience alone does not make a good coordinator. A good coordinator needs to be rounded completely out with the maintenance side of things as well. I haven't worked for too many NWD companies, but I don't think that's entirely true for a lot of people that coordinate. I think a lot of coordinators just come right in out of the field, and they're expected to do their job without any real understanding of how the tool works in depth.

No, that's a fantastic point. This is going to sound a little arrogant, but I kind of feel like that if you feel like anything's beneath you, you're probably doing something wrong, right? It's one thing to know that you're capable of more and that you could do a whole lot better, but to think that something is just not ... I'm all for being efficient with your time, right? But you've got to have the CEO will sweep the floors if you have to kind of mindset, right?

Yeah, and having that in-depth understanding, I think, at least at a system level within the organization is critical for brainstorming and troubleshooting and finding solutions to the problems that do come up.

If I had my way, I'd even have the techs in the shop spend time in the field. I actually like it when there's a technician that has some field experience. They always seem to make the best technicians, because when you do get troubleshooting or ... They just see things that ... because they understand how the tools are being used, and then when they're servicing them, they catch things that wouldn't necessarily be looked at by a guy that really has no understanding of how the tools are used downhole or how they're built or how they're treated or any of that. So just company-wide involvement in all aspects is important.

Then, again, the field hands coming and spending some time in the shop, too. I think a lot of companies do that. I hope they do, but definitely I like to have my field technicians come and spend some time in servicing tools and seeing the insides of the tools. I hire a lot of guys that have worked at other companies that say that they ... I'll roll out to the field to do some sort of modification. I'll crack open a barrel, and, "I've never seen the inside guts of that thing before," right? You're a 10-year hand and you've never seen an electronics package opened up? You've only looked at beryllium tubes your entire career? Wow. [Crosstalk 00:17:59].

I'm really glad you said that, sending everybody out to the field, because we actually have a ... We were joking about getting a school bus or something, because we're sending even our software developers and everybody else out to the rig now so they can really get that hands-on experience. We've believed in that for a long time. We believed in that back when I worked with Teledrill, and we hired this young kid out of college to be our IT guy. Even though he was never going to have any responsibility whatsoever as far as designing the tools or whatever else, he was just there to manage the IT for the company, and we still wouldn't have to have rig experience and understand what it is we're up against, right?

It was really hilarious. We brought him out to the rig, and he went up to the rig floor with brand-new boots on, brand spanking new boots. It was a Pemex rig. So it was a bunch of guys that ... I don't think the guys spoke English, right? They all had the [inaudible 00:18:52] kind of, FRs on and everything. They thought that clean boots were the funniest thing in the world. They grabbed a big old thing of pipe dope and just rubbed it on his boots.

Clean hard hats are always good. We haven't brought anybody new into the industry in a long time, but when we were bringing green hands in, I think back at Departure was the last time we hired guys straight out of school and stuff like that. Yeah, I'd always take their hard hat, and I'd just kind of scuff it up a little for them. They'd be like, "Oh, why are you doing that?" I'm like, "Don't worry. I'm doing you a favor. I'm wrecking your hard hat for a reason. You're safer this way."

That's pretty funny. I have a secret to getting around that, which is I'd just forget my hard hat every time and had to bum from somebody else. I'll get a nasty, sweaty, [crosstalk 00:19:42] hard hat [crosstalk 00:19:43].

[crosstalk 00:19:43] look like you've been working on the rigs for 20 years when you borrow a hard hat. Yeah. That's a great idea. Yeah.

All the stickers on it and stuff, and you're ready to go. Yep.

Yeah, I'm really curious. Were the tools that you ran with Sperry Son easier to run? You mentioned reliability was excellent, but what about ease of use? How was that on those tools versus today's tools?

Yeah, I think some of their legacy stuff, like their pulse tool wasn't the easiest to run. The reliability was excellent on it, but the technology was older, right? So it required more maintenance and things like that. It was a turbine-driven pulse tool. But yeah, you had to know what you're doing. I mean, it's not like the tensor tools these days, where pretty much anybody can run them and everybody's familiar with them in some aspect. You throw one of the old Sperry pulse tools in front of somebody today, and they're going to be lost. You have to have the technical background to work on those tools.

Yeah. It seems like the amount of technical expertise and training required for tools back in the day or at these big companies seems to be so much higher than some of these modern tools. You're getting field hands with very little training, and they have to get up to speed on whatever's handed to them very quickly.

Yeah, exactly. But, I mean, it's just the way technology is in general, too, right. I mean, to own a vehicle 35 years ago took a lot more hands-on effort than it does these days. So it's kind of the same way. Technology makes life easier. That's what it comes down to.

I did want to go back to-

But also, when you don't have to rely on the guys ... and let's face it. Human error is always going to be there. If you can take that away, then you're going to have more reliable tools yet. But they were rugged tools. They were meant to last, for sure.

I want to go back to something you said about the failures, right, and even one little thing requiring a fix and an explanation. I've seen this time and time again to where most MWD companies, they keep a spreadsheet or something of the failure modes, right? So the basic idea is group the most common failure modes, modes, sort the list, see what's the worst, tackle it in priority order, right? I think a big thing everybody's kind of missing there is most of the time, your little one-off failures make up 40 or 50% of your overall failures, right? Your next biggest failure mode is maybe 10% of the failures, right? Those one-off failures always get sorted to the bottom of the spreadsheet, right? Because it's just one or two, right, compared to all the other ones.

I think ignoring those and putting them to the last priority and the bottom is the absolute wrong way to think about it. I think what you should do is kind of lump all those together, consider those failures that come from inconsistent service or inconsistent servicing of the tools or service in the field or whatever, and say, "Guys, look, we've got to find a way to make our organization work more consistently, better processes, all that kind of stuff and tackle that big bucket first," I mean, because let's be honest. The ones like, "Oh my driver failure fails all the time. Okay, that's an easy solution, right? Let's go work with the driver manufacturer and figure out what the hell is failing," those always have straightforward answers, right? Make it stronger. Make a little bit better, right? It's the one-offs. It's that big group of miscellaneous stuff that really is the hardest to solve and takes the absolute most creativity.

Yeah, absolutely. But, I mean, I think sometimes people look at those the wrong way as well. Sometimes it's not a very hard fix. Just a case in point is on one particular job, we had the poppet tip, the circle poppet tip in the pulser had unscrewed, right? It's funny, because I'd never, ever seen that before in all the years that I've done this, and it must've just taken ... Either maybe it was assembled wrong, but I don't think so, because we double-check everything, or it was just some weird harmonic and maybe a bit of stick slip, and the mass of the carbide poppet tip on that tiny little thread managed to wiggle loose. Then it unspun, and then of course we had a failure because of it.

I think there are some companies out there that might look at that and go, "That was a fluke. That'll never happen again. We're not going to change that." But in reality, it's a simple procedural or just a change and a new revision of the poppet and poppet tip down the line, right? So maybe it won't happen again right away. But in the short term, we can make a quick procedural change and use a stronger Loctite in that solution, and we just change that across the board. Then down the line, we actually just make a parts revision change and we go to a stronger thread, a beefier thread. I mean, how hard is that to do? I mean, it's not going to cost a lot of money to make a procedural change, but why wouldn't we change something? Why wouldn't we just say, "Oh, that was a fluke" and change nothing about the way we do things? We're not going to [crosstalk 00:25:09] that way.

Just my own personal experience, I develop a lot of software and have throughout my career. Every time, every single time, and I hate talking in absolutes, because there's almost no absolutes in his life, but I feel like this is one. Every time I ignore a little bug and think, "You know what? That was a flute. It probably won't come back to bite me," it comes back to bite me every single time. So I've just had to really learn to look for any little anomaly in my software operation and go, "Okay, there's something there. There's something there that's got to get fixed, or it's just going to keep coming back," because it's never just gone away. So I think that speaks a lot to the poppet becoming unscrewed. A fluke, I don't know. I mean, this industry sure is full of flukes, right?

Yeah. Maybe a fluke on that rig, but then you go down to the next rig, and that fluke happens every single run. You have a back-to-back-to-back failure because you didn't address it on the one time it happened before. So yeah, and I looked at the tools that we had at Departure, and they were so reworked. I wouldn't even call them Bluestar tools by the time that we got through with them. Towards the end, when we were buying a new Bluestar tool, the first thing we had to do was take it apart and rebuild it to our specifications. So I think we were taking brand new tools and sending them out for re-machining on half the parts and then installing-

Really?

... those parts in it and just doing things that ... All the hard lessons we learned, we had to do all those upgrades, and you know what? It wasn't expensive, though. It was just maybe $500 worth of machining and add-on parts, but boy, oh boy, did it make those tools 10 times more reliable. It was just amazing, the little things that we could do to increase the reliability of that pulser.

I hate to keep analogizing mechanical devices that are undergoing extreme pressures, extreme temperatures, extreme forces with software, but I keep finding parallels, right? So, I mean, in software, I mean, if you're off by one bit, right, I mean, you're done. You might as well be ... If it's an inch or the distance from here to the moon, it doesn't matter. You're still just as equally screwed, right? So you guys are making the modification that makes that pulser reliable. Well, I mean, yeah, it's a cheap, simple little modification, but it's the last little inch, right? It's all or nothing. It's absolutely all or nothing, right? So that's what makes it work, makes the tool reliable, makes your service work, right? So I totally get that.

So the last thing I kind of want to wrap up on is I was hoping to compare and contrast a little bit about traditionally what the differences have been between the US and the Canadian oil field, right? So maybe there's not much difference, and maybe we'll discover a little bit of difference, but I've always been a little bit curious, right? Because my experience in Canada has been pretty limited.

Yeah. I mean, and my experience in the US is a bit limited, too. So, I mean, I guess the big thing, I mean, obviously, the cycle. Down in the US, you don't see as much of a cycle, a yearly cycle of reactivity and stuff like that. This is pretty common knowledge up here. I think even a lot of the guys in the States understand this, too, is that up here, we have what's called a breakup. Basically, a lot of the northern areas are in areas where it's like ... We call it muskeg. I don't know if you've heard that term before, but the muskeg-y areas, where it's basically just big lakes, so slews and stuff like that, and there are just hundreds of square kilometers of this in northern Alberta. Yet there's really good oil plays under the [inaudible 00:29:02] stuff, right? So, I mean, you can't move a rig over these areas unless you wait for it to freeze up.

So that's what it's based on. We wait for everything to freeze up. We get as many rigs into areas that we normally can't access as we can. Then we go like crazy while everything's frozen, and then we try and pull it all out of there before it all melts. They make ice roads and things like that and get all this stuff out. If you make an ice road, it can last right into April, and I wouldn't say May. Usually break-up is done by the end of April. But we pull all that equipment out as quickly as we can in any way we can. Sometimes they get left in there. If they really want to get a whole drill, the rig will get stuck in an area for the entire summer because they can't move it out of there.

I think that's probably the biggest difference between the Canadian oil [inaudible 00:29:57] and the US market, is that there's not much of a cycle down there. I've heard that sometimes in the winters, maybe it slows down down in the States a little bit. Maybe I'm off on that, or maybe it picks up a little bit there as well.

I think the activity here is entirely based on the price of oil and not the time of day or anything.

I think so. Yeah. I mean, the oil price is doing not as horrible right now, but, I mean, still, January 1st every year, our rig count doubles. I think it tripled this year, which is still not saying much. It's still way under par, but yeah, and the activity always goes up in the winter. That's the reason why. That's pretty simple.

I got a lot of exposure to the river crossing. HED industry, municipal drilling are all kinds of things that's called by. One of the wildest things to me was that they only worked from 12 hour shifts, seven to seven or something, unless there was an extreme case, or sometimes they'd flip over and they'd work during the nights, but not the days. It was just so weird. Six o'clock, seven o'clock rolls around, and they start shutting everything down. They're like, "Oh, we're going to the hotel for the night." I'm like, "What are you talking about? We're drilling, right? What do you mean we're going to stop? This makes no sense."

Different world.

One of my observations is I felt like when I went up to Canada that the rigs were run much more like ... and forgive the analogy, but it felt like there was a much clearer command structure and that the command structure was a lot more formal and more run like a naval ship or something. At least that was my impression versus just a bunch of cowboys and there's one lead cowboy that's in charge down here in the States, right? It's funny. I remember one of the first times I was on a Canadian rig, we were trying to get into the company man's shack to sign in or whatever. I was coming in, and I tripped over the doorframe. I accidentally slammed the door to the company man's trailer, right?

All of the guys that had brought me on that rig, they looked at me like I had just done something absolutely horrible. I froze in my spot, waiting to get yelled at or whatever. We all just kind of stood perfectly still like little kids who got caught doing something bad, waiting for our dad to yell at us or something. Luckily, it didn't wake him up, but they were scared shitless that that slamming door was going to wait the company man up and we were all going to be screwed. They were like, they're like, "Ken, if that guy got woken up. you might've just been off this site." That's how bad that was.

Yeah. It can definitely ... I mean, I'm not sure how it is down there, but, I mean, yeah, I mean, all the guys are working double shifts and they have 50/50 shacks, where there's one guy sleeping, one guy working. So it's always the polite thing to do to lightly knock on the door, poke your head in, and then yeah, the doors are always shut super quietly. So yeah, you've got to be extra careful. As far as the command structure and stuff like that, yeah, I like the way it's run. It was a bit more cowboy-ish, like you say, when I first got into the industry, but lately it's like a well-oiled machine out there. I think that the rig crews take their jobs pretty seriously.

One thing I did notice is with Departure, we did set up some operations down in Casper, Wyoming and stuff, and I noticed that just the people themselves that are working in the various positions, we get graduates and stuff taking on MWD jobs. I mean, I've got post-secondary. Most of the guys working for me have some form of post-secondary, stuff like that. It's a career that's taken pretty seriously, whereas in the States, I'm like, "Well, why don't we go to the local college and hire guys out of college or something like that for MWD positions?" They're just like, "No, no. No, we don't put guys like that to work on the rigs and stuff." I was kind of shocked that just the level of the people that are working out on the rigs is a different kind of mentality. We do get graduates and stuff like that in these positions. So yeah.

Yeah. Unfortunately, it does tend to be that way down here. I'll tell you one of the most important lessons I learned working up there was I learned the value of laceless steel toes, because when you're surrounded by snow and you're trying to tie your freaking shoes on and off to get in and out of those trailers, it was miserable. So I got my cowboy boots now that had the steel toes and no laces, and that made life much easier.

Yeah. Yeah. Either you need those big Dunlop boots or rubber boots or cowboy boots or whatever it is, especially as an MWD hand when you're in and out of that shack, constantly sending out [inaudible 00:34:43] and testing on the computers. Yeah, I mean, you need basically slip-on shoes to get in and out of those shacks, as much as to do with the weather and stuff, and our locations can get pretty muddy. The oil companies are better and better and making sure the location stay cleaned up and try and keep them as nice as possible, but there's always going to be mud and snow up here. It's all the time.

You can't control the weather that well, man.

Well, I don't think we envy your winter, but we do envy your summers a little bit in Alberta.

Yeah. We get the good and the bad.

All right. Well, I think that's all the time we have for today. Thanks again, Dave, from Drillers Directional for joining us. For any of our new listeners, please leave a review on Spotify, iTunes, or YouTube. Let us know what you think. Give us your feedback, and be sure to check out our podcast and like and subscribe. Thank you. (silence)