Don't Tell Mom I Work on the Rigs

Don't Tell Mom I Work on the Rigs: She Thinks I'm a Piano Player in a Whorehouse, by Paul Carter (2005)

Paul Carter's short biography primarily concerns his travels, often to remote corners of the earth, as a worker on oil rigs. The author and his co-workers work hard and live hard, and their stories are sometimes hard to believe and often laugh-out-loud funny.

The author was born in England to his mother and a stern father, a navigator in the Royal Air Force. His early childhood was not a happy one and the mother would later move with her children to Scotland. Still later, following a job opportunity for his mother's new boyfriend, the family moved to Australia.

Carter's career in the oil industry started in Western Australia but would later took him to Brunei, The Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, and many other places. He writes about the challenges of traveling in dangerous places like Nigeria. In some places, the rigs themselves are attacked by locals with muskets, or worse, shoulder-launched missiles.

If rigging is a rough life for men, animals often fare even worse. Carter writes of co-workers maimed and killed working on the rigs. Readers who are readily squeamish should also know that a number of animals meet a violent end in this short book. Even so, the author has produced a compact, authentic, and often hilarious volume that should appeal to a wide array of readers.