Category Archives: Wisdom

Sagacious stuff.

How Stuff Works

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The internet makes it possible to find out more information than you can possibly use, much less absorb. Information, which is supposed to enable us, disables us due to overwhelming volume. I can spend so much time learning about something that there’s no time left to use what I learned. On top of that, for any piece of information in support of one viewpoint, I can find another piece of information in support of the opposite viewpoint. Information is supposed to enable us to find the “truth”, find the “facts”, and make “informed” decisions. Instead, it’s making us more confused than ever; possibly to the point of becoming catatonic.

But, that’s not what this post is about. I wanted to show you some places to learn about oil wells. There’s a nice explanation at the How Stuff Works website; there’s a good presentation at Wikipedia; and, if you need to decipher oilfield terminology, Schlumberger provides the The Oilfield Glossary. 

There are no doubt many other websites with similar information. The How Stuff Works and the Wikipedia articles themselves present numerous links to other resources. No doubt, if you follow them, you’ll find even more links, and if you follow them you’ll find…

At some point, hopefully, before you become catatonic from oil well information overload, you’ll decide you’ve learned enough.

Whatever happened to…

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Anybody besides me ever feel like they’re missing something in life because they don’t know “the rest of the story”? I think so because, once in a while, I see blurbs about such things on those TV magazine shows. Usually, after a while, I tend to just forget that there was something more I wanted to know. Just now, though, I was reminded of one such item, because I happened to take a look at the Ernie the Attorney Blog, which I think is the first “blawger” I noticed some time back in the early days of blogs. As a tangential thought to what he was actually writing about, he provided a link about the guy who took a ride in a lawn chair attached to helium weather balloons. I’d long since forgotten about that event; on seeing his reference to it, I was immediately fascinated, and decided to do my part to further immortalize it with another link on the web.

And, now, I find myself pondering something else I often wonder about, that being somebody else’s story; especially given the tragic conclusion of the lawn chair balloon guy’s story. As a lawyer, I’m often aware that I play a direct part in other peoples’ lives (hopefully helping and/or improving them in some way); yet, their lives had stories both before my entrance and after my exit from their books. After 30 years of this, I’m incredulated (I just made up that word!) by the thought of how much life I may have changed. It seems to me that lawyers ought to stop and remind themselves, occasionally, of the responsibility they carry by involving themselves in peoples’ lives the way we do.

Heh, and here I’ve been wondering why I don’t have enough time to get things done any more! Too much time rendered unproductive as a result of pondering irrelevant and forgettable things.

The Fool Who Asks

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Without going into particulars, I’ll just say that I was recently struggling with a dilemma that was escalating to undesireable levels of psyhchological distress. It was a situation where I was trying to decide whether to ask for a special favor. I knew that asking would not only be futile, but would also be embarrassing and demeaning. On the other hand, if I could get the favor, it would be really great.

In the course of some number of days during which I agitated over whether to ask for the favor or just let it go and move on, I stumbled across a collection of “quotations” I had saved once upon a time in an obscure subdirectory on my computer. It was a pretty pithy and amusing collection, and included this:

“The person who asks may be a fool for five minutes. The person who doesn’t ask will be a fool for life.”

So, I picked up the phone and asked.

Turned out, my premise was totally incorrect. What I was asking for was routine and did not even amount to a favor – it was freely available to anyone, simply for the asking.

So, there y’go! :jesors: