Dirty business

person by the Norwegian Petroleum Museum
There was once a superintendent, a small fellow with a short fuse who could really bark. The job of delivering the morning report to him fell to the biggest practical jokers.
— The slips being mounted. Photo: Husmo Foto/Norwegian Petroleum Museum
© Norsk Oljemuseum

This report’s contents were relayed to land over the phone. On one occasion, an operator had pulled down his trousers, seated himself on a photocopier and pressed the button.

The result was slipped between the other pages in the morning report. While the superintendent sat reading over the document to land, this image suddenly appeared.

“I would really have liked to be a fly on the wall then,” laughs Maggi Knutsen. “He almost certainly hit the ceiling.”

Another tale concerns an operator on Ekofisk 2/4 P, an odd type. The toilet there was right down on the first storey, with the control room on the third.

He (and others) could not be bothered to walk down the stairs to relieve himself. He simply took a newspaper with them, walked between the turbines and squatted down. Then he went over the railings and disposed of the paper and its contents.

On one occasion, he glanced over the rail after tossing the paper away and saw that a supply ship was lying there. The package landed in the middle of deck, one of the crew went over to open the newspaper, looked up and saw the operator just waving at him.

“That was really nasty, you know, but such things happened …” Knutsen observes.

Related by Margaret Knutsen

Published 4. July 2019   •   Updated 1. November 2019
© Norsk Oljemuseum
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