Oil rig worker, of course

Usage examples of roughneck.

This is being done with roughnecks, cactus-men, and assorted other wage slaves, but also with an abundant supply of Remade slave labor confined in pens when they are not working, a kind of ultimate bottomline lumpenproletariat, feared, despised, and looked down upon by the humans and aliens who are at least getting paid.

Now that we were in softish country it was only necessary to pull pipe every other day and about all that was required of a roughneck on each shift was to add a length of pipe when the travelling block was down to the turntable.

But somehow he was always in there with the roughnecks and workover crews, cranking on three-foot wrenches, lifting pumps and motors, thrusting himself into the dirty middle of things.

And these, his comrades, these dirty-faced roughnecks, these dangerous brutalized amoral little creatures with pinched faces and ragged trousers, spattered with snot and rheum and urban dirt, girls in stained shifts and boys with jackets too big, grabbed cobblestones from the earth and pelted me where I lay in the darkness of a decaying threshold.

The last Tyli saw of the Boss Canvasman, he was leaping through the air to tackle the roughneck who had disobeyed his orders.

By noon, the keelboatmen, filibusters, and roughnecks who inhabited its coarse boarding-houses and canvas-roofed taverns were awake and stirring but not yet drunk enough to make trouble.

Marston can discuss the finer points of obscure wines with vintners vacationing in Natchez, and an hour later put a crew of roughnecks on the floor of an oil rig with jokes that would make a sailor blush.

As roughnecked as ever, despite her late-found femininity, she had just demonstrated her prowess by downing a distant game bird.

The nightmare would be reserved for all of those thousands of people on the fringe of the effects, the ones having to deal with radioactive rain or soot from the North Sea oil fires, for the fishermen and roughnecks and workboat crews swamped by the radioactive base surge, for the kids made sick by contaminated milk and grain and livestock ashore.

Armed with shovels, the four roughnecks were digging up the thorny prickle-bushes near the hollow where Andrew had fallen, while Reade, in the lee of a rock, was scowling over the fine print of an Army manual of Martio-biology.

But, less than a week later when we had made one combat drop with them, we were full fledged Roughnecks, members of the family, called by our first names, chewed out on occasion without any feeling on either side that we were less than blood brothers thereby, borrowed from and lent to, included in bull sessions and privileged to express our own silly opinions with complete freedomand have them slapped down just as freely.

Lieutenantthere was never a court-martial among the Roughnecks and no man was ever flogged.

But so far as the Roughnecks were concerned, these gas bombings were simply another drill, to be done according to orders, by the numbers, and on the bounce.

Which was the way it should be, of coursewhy, if they let the Roughnecks vote, the idiots might vote not to make a drop.

In many respects they were very similar to the pioneers of the past, the oil-field roughnecks of the previous century, or the trailblazers who had opened up the American continent a hundred years earlier.