A related question

Recently I received a question from my friend Samantha, who was on my study abroad program in Cyprus and now works as a Study Abroad Adviser at SUNY:

Do you work with many other young people on the rigs? What is social life like?

As for people my age, there are a number of them. The lowest positions on the totem pole, "roustabouts", generally hire recent high school graduates or drop-outs. The less ambitious of these will get promoted to "roughneck" eventually and remain there for decades. The more advanced positions of drillers, directional drillers, and company men tend to be held by older and older men as they go higher and higher (yes, men. I have only ever met one female directional driller, but that was socially and not through work). But overall on the rig there is a great variety of ages, from 16 to 70 and everywhere in between.

Regarding the social life, for me it kind of "is and it isn't". I don't have the sort of schedule that lends well to making friends normally or dating, especially. But there are about 150 other field engineers in my office in Louisiana who are mostly my age group and are in the same predicament, so there's always someone in town to hang out with and commiserate on the craziness of the job when I do get home.

Sometimes I do make new friends when I'm in Lafayette during my days off. I did some volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity back in August when I was waiting around for this job to start. It would have been a good way to get acquainted with non-oilfield people (a first!), but then I spent the next four weeks offshore, my two weeks away from the rig mostly in Boston, the next five weeks offshore again, and I'm intending to spend the next week up in Boston for Thanksgiving, so any potential friends I could have made would barely remember me by the time I was in Lafayette again for more than 36 hours.

Does it get lonely? Occasionally. Does it bother me? Rarely. I know it's not a permanent situation, and I have the internet to keep me in contact with all the friendships I'd like to maintain. What more could a girl ask for?