It amazes me that the people you thought were your friends would turn their back on you so quickly. I am sure now that the integrity of some of my so called friends was questionable. Cowboy and I had been playing poker with these guys for months. Here’s how it went down. Rain on an oil slick highway will always be a problem for local Halliburton bulk drivers in Saudi Arabia. For some reason most of these bulk trucks slide off the road when it gets wet. I was on IDC-5 in the desert of Saudi Arabia. This rig had two toolpushers. One was named Bill and the other I don’t remember. They were fun to play poker with because Cowboy and I were gonna get their money. They had drilled the 12 ¼ in. hole for the 9 5/8 in. casing but did not have enough cement for both stages of the job on location. When you have a weak zone deep the best way to cement it is to do a two stage cement job. You cement the first stage and drop a series of plugs to displace the cement and then open up the ports in the DV tool to circulate and clean any cement that comes that far up in the annulus. Normally, once you circulate clean, you do the second stage cement job through the ports in the DV tool to surface. As I mentioned earlier, we only had enough cement for the shoe job. I told them to be sure to continue to circulate with the rig pump until we had the new cement on location. The poker game started again and Cowboy and I were tearing them up. Then Buck called me on the radio. He needed me to pump 500 gallons of HCL acid on an Inter-Air Drill workover rig. Buck’s rig wasn’t far away so the Aramco Company Man let me go help Buck. I would return before our bulk cement got there from Abqaiq so that we could finish cementing the second stage DV tool cement job. The last thing I said as I walked out the door was to keep the rig pump on the hole because the ports in the DV tool are not very large and could pack off if they shut the rig pump off. Everyone assured me that they were all smart enough to not ever let that sort of thing happen on any rig they were taking care of. Buck’s rig wasn’t quite ready for me so Buck relieved me of my bankroll by teaching me how to play cribbage. Even though this wasn’t a big job it still took most of the night. I arrived back on the IDC rig right after day light. When I got out of the pickup I sensed that something was wrong but couldn’t figure it out. Then it hit me. The rig pump wasn’t pumping. I walked into the Aramco man’s office and ask him why the pump was not on the hole. He told me that he had them shut it off. It was making too much noise. I respectfully ask him to put the pump back on the hole until the bulk cement arrived. He picked up the intercom as the two toolpushers walked in the door with Cowboy who was just pulling up on location ready to resume the poker game with “The Boys”. Every time I went over to Cowboy’s house he would show me what “The Boys” had bought for him. The Aramco man told Bill, the pusher, to kick the pump in just to keep me happy. Bill then picked up the intercom and told the rig floor to kick the pump in and to circulate the hole until the cement arrived. I thought that we had that all clear last night before I left. The driller kicked the pump in and the nail blew on the pop off relief valve. The DV cementer ports were plugged. The only thing to do now was to call Schlumberger to perforate the casing, then do the cement job from the perforations and not the DV ports that were plugged due to shutting down the rig pumps. One of the toolpushers asked if we could pressure up on the annulus. I immediately told him that Cowboy and I had just looked up the collapse strength on that pipe and it wasn’t anymore than about 1200 psi . There was no way in the world that they would do that. The Aramco man was repeatedly told that he should never allow anybody to pressure up on the annulus. Bill, the senior of the two toolpushers along with the Aramco man decided to pressure up on the annulus anyway. They just couldn’t help themselves. There was no way they wanted to call Bud and tell him what they had done. Cowboy looked at me and said, “Do you think they’ll pressure up on it?” I didn’t have to answer that. Bill walked through the door and said, “That did it!”. I asked ,“What did you put on it?” Bill said that it wouldn’t circulate at first but when they first pressured up on it, then with just a little more, it circulated. I again asked him what it took and he said, “2,500 psi to make it circulate”. Cowboy and I both said,” You collapsed the pipe, that’s why it’s circulating”. At that moment the bulk cement showed up. The Aramco man said, “Let’s cement!” I told him he was nuts, and that we needed to call Bud and get something out here to clean up the mess. I started the cement job and circulated cement to surface before mixing more than 150 sacks of cement. The hole calculated at about 700 ft. I told him that we needed to circulate all the cement out of the hole before we messed it up even more. He said drop the plug. I said you got to be kidding. The plug won’t bump, it will be just one more thing in the hole to contend with. I dropped the plug and began pumping it down counting the barrels as we went. It didn’t take long for all of the cement to wash out of the hole. The pipe was split up high. He finally said I could shut down because the plug did not bump. He then had me drop the closing tool. Imagine that. After speaking with Bud they went in the hole with a mill to dress off the casing that they knew was split. Bud told them to go in the hole with a bit to find the plug. We tagged up at 700 ft. +/-. Bud then wanted to run an RTTS to check where the hole was. Fred, the Halliburton tool operator, brought out the RTTS and asked me what happened. As I was explaining the situation to him he asked me a very important question, “Did You Write it Down?” I said no. He told me that I needed to write down who said what and when for the entire time all of this was going on. He told me not to leave the location before putting it all on paper. The point is to CYA with the facts and only the facts. The good thing about the waiting time was that it gave me time to replenish my spending money from “The Boys”. The next morning I was in Abqaiq. My boss ,Don, called me into his office and told me that he was going to have to let me go. I asked him why and he said for my performance on the rig where I split the pipe. Bud had told him that I would not be allowed to go to anymore Aramco rigs. I reached into my pocket and handed him my talley book that had the entire story in it blow by blow, just the facts. Who said what, when and where it happened. After reading my side of the story, Don asked me if Cowboy would back me up. I told him that I knew Cowboy would tell him the truth. Don called Cowboy and he drove down to the Halliburton offices in Abqaig and backed me up on everything. Don called Bud and told him the real story of what happened. I went back to work and the Aramco man in question was promoted out of the dessert to offshore and out of Bud’s way. I met Bill’s son in Houston one time but didn’t tell him what I thought of his father. Bill’s gone now, so why stir the bucket. Ask Cowboy.