The Aberdeen Scotch-Trader

This is my FAVORITE Ted story because it is indicative of the creativity that he applied to everyday life to solve problems in ways that most people don't think of... or even if they do, don't have the guts to try.

Ted was a wireline Field Engineer for Schlumberger early in his career. Later, he joined his good friend Ron Balliet at a startup oilfield company called Numar as one of their first field engineers (I think Ron was the first and Ted was the second). Ted, Ron and many others enjoyed the pleasure of working at a small, but well funded startup company where they got to write their own rules of how things were run and travel the world on the company's nickel. What a job!!!

Several years ago, Ted told me the story about a time when he was working for Numar on a job in Aberdeen, Scotland. I believe that Numar had a shop there to run operations, but they were having trouble getting some of the electronics that they needed to repair their tools in a timely manner. Ted, having been a former Schlumberger field engineer came up with a uniqe solution.

There was a Schlumberger shop nearby that he knew had many if not all of the parts that they needed. So Ted put on a pair of old Schlumberger coveralls (still with his name stitched on them) rented a car that looked like one of the vanilla Schlumberger company cars and took a trip to the Schlumberger shop. I believe that he told the guards some line of BS about being newly in from the states, and they let him right in.

Ted drives up to the open-hole tech lab at the shop and proceeds inside. Without knowing a soul in there, he plops a case of good scotch on the counter and starts handing out bottles. He then pulls out a laundry list of electronic parts that he needed, and says "Alright boys, think you can help me out with some of these?"

Ted left the Sclumberger shop about 30 minutes later with a carboard box that was once filled with scotch, and was now filled with transistors, capacitors, resistors, op-amps and other electronics that he needed to fix his tools.

He got everything on his list and drove back to the Numar shop with a smile bigger than Texas!