Sunday story time: At my last company we had a lot of oil and natural gas customers, they always kept me busy and it wouldn’t be uncommon to get emergency calls at 2am that the crane was stuck over a well head. Usually it was simple enough issues I could walk the operator through over the phone to at least limp the crane through the night until the morning when I could get there. The first thing I would always do would be to have the customer tell me pump pressures on the display. If it was all 0s I knew I’d be in for a long night/day. This was one of those calls, I got home from my 12hr shift at 6pm, by 6:30 I was on the road to Pampa, TX 6hrs away. After arriving closer to 1:30am with fuel stops I finally began the daunting task of replacing the PTO/pump on a 50ton manitex stuck over a well head. With a bunch of setbacks and finally lining everything out I had the crane back up and running by 7:45am. I drove to a hotel to sleep for just a couple hours than drove the 6hrs home and started all over again. This was one of the days/nights that made me question why I chose this career path, why I willing choose to put myself through these brutal calls. The simple answer, crane field service takes a different breed of technician. The feeling of satisfaction of taking something that most other techs would turn away and making it work again is worth it all. You truly feel on top of the world when you’re the “hero” who got it up and running. From completing this job stemmed a bunch of internal awards for job dedication, skill level etc and helped shape my career path in field service.