When we used to fly single-pilot back in the early Eighties I would usually have a passenger in the right front seat of my Cessna, and we would often chat.
One day we were headed back to Lagos from Escravos, with a fellow Yank next to me. He seemed a bit down in the dumps, so I asked him how it was going, once I had got the 402 settled into that groove we had worn in the sky, doing that 136º/316º back-and-forth run, Lagos-Escravos-Lagos, repeat as necessary.
He told me that he'd been in Vietnam and that somehow he just never caught on afterwards with anything better than working in the oil patch.
He said that he worked on a rig, looking after its big diesel engines. I think he was called a wiper and it sounded like a pretty grim job, down there in the engine room where it was hot, noisy and dirty.
I told him to cheer up, that there were a lot of other things he could do if he just put his mind to it, that I'd been working in garages for quite a few years until I got my pilot's license. Okay, it wasn't flying for Pan Am, but it wasn't exactly work either, being an air taxi pilot, so maybe he should try aviation instead? You got to see more than you would shut up in the engine room of an oil rig, anyway.
There was no cheering this guy up ... it was just moan, moan, moan. He was only making $7,000 per month on 2 weeks on and 2 weeks off, and life was hard, very hard.
When I heard those numbers I thought, "Say what? I spent years getting qualified as a pilot, building enough hours to get this job, and I'm on $2,000 per month doing 2 months and 1 month!"
I asked him then, "So this 'wiper' thing ... how did you get this job?" Well, it turned out that he was from somewhere down in Louisiana and his uncle knew somebody and ....
Somehow, moving to Louisiana and trying to pass as a coon-ass did not seem to be on the cards, so I stayed in aviation, but if I had got an offer I might have wanted to become a wiper instead!