A friend called me in 2010 and told me he was making over five thousand dollars a week. He sent me his pay stubs. I was hired the next week.
What nobody told me was that the number wasn't a wage. It was an outcome. Or that days ran sixteen hours. Or that the nearest hospital was forty to a hundred miles away, which I found out when my appendix ruptured on the job.
I hauled frac sand out of Midland, Texas. Then I spent a year hauling water in Killdeer, North Dakota. Sand pays by the load, so you push until you're dangerous. Water pays steadier. Texas gets hot. North Dakota gets thirty below, and a loaded truck on those grades on ice is the most frightening driving I've done in twenty years behind the wheel.
I wrote a book about what it's like. This is the part the book couldn't hold — the current company list, the phone scripts, the applications, and me on a call once a month answering whatever you're stuck on.