Stephen Lebel Made Great Money Drilling for Oil. He Just Got Laid Off. So Why Isn’t He Complaining?

Stephen Lebel of Fort Collins, Colorado, picked me up recently in an Uber. A few weeks earlier he’d lost a lucrative job drilling oil wells. Here is his story, drawn from the transcript of an interview, edited and condensed for clarity.

I was a delivery driver for Best Buy. I would deliver appliances, install TVs. You know real hard manual labor.

I think that job was paying me $25,000 a year. My wife was also working full time. We had our second kid on the way. She’s a hairstylist. She was working at a kids’ salon at the time. That gave her the flexibility she needed during the pregnancy, but she was barely making enough to cover daycare.

And that’s the reason why I went to the oil industry, where at an entry level position, I was making about $90,000. We didn’t have to stress about the food anymore. Or whether we were going to be able to pay our rent or our mortgage.

I started back in May of 2012. You know it was a pretty cool job for a while, because it was always challenging, especially with it being math intensive. I had struggled with math in school. But the funny thing is, on this job we had to use algebra and calculus, all kinds of stuff to figure out the formulas to drill correctly. Being able to get it, that was, I think, one of the more gratifying things about this job.

But the catch is that you’re gone constantly. After my second son was born, the day that we got home from the hospital I had to take off for a 41 day well in North Dakota. I got the wife into the house, got the new baby into the house, then they called me. ‘Gotta go. See you later.’ Having a brand new baby, she was there all by herself.

My younger son, I missed the first birthday, the second birthday, and his third birthday. It really did start to take its toll.

As an American oil worker, I call us victims of our own success. Oil is plentiful. Oil was $100 per barrel and then everyone got in there pumping it out. Obviously we pumped too much, and that’s the reason we’re in the situation we’re in. It’s a problem if you’re laid off and can’t find any work.

It was January 18thwhen my boss called me and said, We’re going to have to let you go. My heart did sink quite a bit, even though I knew it was coming. I had never been laid off before.

I am keeping one eye on energy and the industry overall, but I’m also keeping one eye out — maybe a bigger eye out — for my future. The money was great and everything, but it’s such a volatile industry that it’s really hard to raise a family.

I did recently get a job with the Post Office. It’s not the best amount of money, but they’re offering quite a bit of overtime. They’re offering career positions for those that qualify. A big thing about it, I’m happy to be home every night. Maybe this summer I finally have the chance to go to my son’s birthday.

Originally published at west.energy on March 1, 2016.