Chuck Chandler: three generations around the Baytown refinery (ExxonMobil instrument technician, 1989–2006)

QWhat incentivized you to go into the oil and gas industry in the first place?

AI grew up in Baytown. Both of my grandparents worked at Humble. My first one got there about 1928 or 1929, and my second one hired in the thirties. Both of them retired from Humble. My dad did not; he was an electrician. When I went in the Navy, I actually didn't intend on returning to Baytown. I left the Navy, worked at a plastic pipe plant in Corsicana for a year, got laid off, and then moved back to Baytown. I worked at Pepsi for six years, and then I quit that and got hired on at ExxonMobil. That was in 1989, and I retired from ExxonMobil in 2006. I hired on there because, of course, I knew a bunch of people who worked there, and it was a good-paying job. It was something I enjoyed doing.

QGoing into the oil and gas industry relies on specialized knowledge. How did you obtain that knowledge when you transitioned? Was it more from reading books or from field experience?

AExxonMobil has a training program. You go through an apprenticeship. You're in that for four years, and then when you graduate from the apprenticeship, you do your own work. I actually had a little bit of an advantage because I was an instrument technician with a lot of electrical and instrumentation experience from previous jobs. Like I said, my dad was an electrician, and I got some training working through the electrical union. So I was pretty prepared for what I was going into, and I went into it with my eyes open.

QDid your dad train you in electrician skills when you were little, so you were already very familiar with this work?

AIt wasn't so much that he trained me, but he did instill an interest in the field in me. I worked summers through the electrical union as an electrical apprentice. Then when I went to A&M and got my degree in engineering technology, I had a lot of control systems classes and that type of thing. So I was pretty well-versed in that aspect of it. When I worked at Pepsi, I was a maintenance supervisor, but I knew as much about electrical work as anybody on the team, and I held a Houston maintenance electrician's license for several years while I was working there.

QWhat made electrical engineering and being an electrician interesting to you? What made you want to stay in that career?

AI was working on control systems. When something breaks, you have to figure out what's wrong with it before you can fix it. There are troubleshooting steps that you have to go through, and that was really interesting for me. It wasn't like you just went in and painted something. You had to figure out what was wrong with it and then figure out how to fix it. That was really interesting. I tell people that it's fun because you get to spend other people's money.

QWhen you were at ExxonMobil, there was obviously a very large group of employees. Did the employees, including yourself, form a close community? For example, when someone had hardships, would other people in the company help out?

AAbsolutely. We actually got pretty close. You tend to work in a control center. If you're a process technician, you work in the same control center your entire career. But in mechanical—and I was in instrumentation—I worked at almost every control center in the refinery over the years. You develop a relationship with the people that you work with because you rely on them. A lot of times you're paired up and work that way. You tell jokes, cut up, and get pretty close with a lot of people. That's a big part of what was fun about working there.

QSo one control center was kind of like one big friend group or family? The people worked together, ate together, and supported each other?

AYes, it was. They had Exxon Day, and once a year there was a big Exxon company picnic. It was kind of like that.

QIf someone in that group got laid off by ExxonMobil or something bad happened to them, would the other people in the control center help them get another job so they could maintain financial stability?

AWhile I was there, there weren't any layoffs. There were a couple of guys who got fired, but they kind of needed to get fired. As far as helping people get a job, that's really not something we did, because you worked somewhere for so long and you didn't know what other jobs were out there.

QObviously finding a new job is hard back then, because LinkedIn did not exist back then, right?

ANo, we didn't have LinkedIn. In fact, when I was working there, we just barely had computers. We did get computers toward the end of my time there. They gave us some freedom to learn how to use a mouse and fiddle around with the computers a little bit. One of the ladies in my work group figured out that in Excel there was a little game you could play if you knew which keys to punch. She was an electrician, but she would come over to the instrument side and play the game on the instrument computer. One day I created a little bitmap image of the Excel icon, put it as the wallpaper, and tiled it over the entire screen. She came in and couldn't figure out which icon to click, so she quit doing that. We played a lot and had a lot of fun. People had a sense of humor and knew how to take a joke. It was a lot of fun working there with people.

QSpeaking of computers and technology, automation has become a big trend in many companies, including oil and gas—not just AI, but machinery as well. Did the jobs of people around you ever face the risk of automation or being replaced by machines?

AI retired in 2006, so that was never really an issue for me. Automation was really never a thing for me. What was more concerning to me was that, after I retired, I worked as a contractor for a couple of engineering companies, and they were exporting jobs offshore to companies in India. That was a big issue.

QHow did that work? If the instruments were in America, were they shipping them to India to save costs?

ANo. For construction jobs, renovation jobs, and things like that, the company in India would do the design work, and we would have to go out and take pictures, take measurements, and do their field work for them. Then they would do the easier office work using computer graphics to come up with the shop plans for building the equipment. It was really frustrating because I never got much back that I could actually use without having to redraw things. By that time, I wasn't working for Exxon. I was working for an engineering contracting company doing design work.

QIf you don't mind disclosing it, what was the name of that company?

ASNC Lavalin was the name of the company. But they were sending the work off because of instructions from Exxon. Exxon was the one mandating the offshore design work.

QSo you were still involved with Exxon even after you took another job?

ARight. I actually retired from Exxon and worked for a couple of different contracting companies, but all of the jobs that I did were at Exxon. A lot of that was because I had retired from there and knew the plant. In fact, the last job I did before I finally retired for good was with a company called Paton Controls. We were replacing the control system at the control center that I used to work in when I was an employee. We were replacing the control system that I had replaced as an employee about fifteen years before. That was really a fun job.

QBecause of your experience, were you still very valuable to Exxon?

AYes.

QDo you still keep in contact with the people you used to work with at Exxon?

AYes. In fact, I'm a member of the Exxon Retiree Club in Baytown. We get together once a month, and a lot of people there are people I used to work with. That's really pretty cool.

QCan you tell me more about the ExxonMobil retirement club in Baytown? What is the general agenda of the club, and do you receive any benefits from it?

AWe get together once a month. There's a program, and they have a speaker who comes in. Sometimes the speaker talks about things happening in the refinery, and sometimes about things happening in the city. I've actually given a presentation myself about Baytown history. We've also had presentations about things happening in the refinery. They have donuts and coffee, and it's just a get-together that we do once a month.

QSo it's kind of like a party?

AKind of a party, yes. We usually have it at the Civic Center in Baytown.

QBecause you have been so closely associated with ExxonMobil, do you think the oil and gas industry defines who you are as a person?

AI wouldn't say it defines who I am, because I have other interests. But I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of working in the industry, and it's been really fun, actually.

QAre you still involved with ExxonMobil other than through the retirement club? Do they ever ask you to come back and help fix machines or do any other work?

ANo. I haven't really had any dealings with them since I retired. But the ExxonMobil Retiree Club has been a lot of fun.

QWas there much competition among employees—for example, people competing for raises—or was the workplace generally more relaxed?

AThe raises came as part of the labor agreements in the union. You just got what you got.

QWere you part of a labor union when you were working?

AWhen I took retirement, I took a lump-sum retirement, so I'm not getting a pension per se. I took a lump sum and rolled it over into an IRA. When I was working, in Texas you had an option whether you wanted to be in the union or not. I was not a union member.

QBut the union still protected people who were not union members in terms of basic rights, right?

AThat's correct.

QWhat did someone have to do to become a union member? Was there a membership fee or meetings to attend?

AThere's a membership fee, and they have meetings, but I don't really know how many union members actually go to the meetings. They do have meetings.

QDo you think part of the reason you had stability in your job was because the unions could push companies to provide workers with proper benefits? Did unions protect workers at the company?

AI believe so. I think unions definitely protect people and their jobs.

QDo you know how many people you worked with were members of labor unions?

AI really wouldn't be able to give you an idea about that. I don't have a clue.

QSo people didn't regularly talk about whether they were in a union?

ANo. Some people, you know that they're union members, but it was never really a big deal.

QDid it feel like everybody working together at the company was almost like a union itself?

AYes.

QEarlier, you said that the people who were fired deserved to be fired. Was that because they failed to do what they were supposed to do?

AOne of the people who was fired got drunk one night and called the supervisor and harassed him. He did that several times. He wouldn't leave him alone. He was warned, and then he didn't heed the warning. There were also a lot of people who should have been fired who never were. It's hard to get fired from Exxon. You really have to do something stupid.

QSo it wasn't a situation where you might get fired simply because you didn't work as hard as another person?

ANo. Nothing like that. You had to really do something bad to get fired at Exxon.

QCan you talk about your daily routine when you were working at Exxon?

AWe'd usually have a morning meeting at about 7:30. When I first started, we were working five eight-hour days. We'd get there, have a 7:30 lineup meeting, get our job assignments for the day, and then head out and spend the rest of the day doing the jobs we were assigned. We'd work with the console operators on any problems that cropped up during the day. We used to have a break in the morning at nine or 9:30, come back for lunch at twelve, have another afternoon break, and get off at, I think, four or 4:30. I can't remember exactly. Basically, you were just out there doing your job pretty much unsupervised.

QReally?

AYes. As instrument techs and electricians, we had very little supervision. If the job was mechanical and there were a lot of people working on the same project, you might have a supervisor there. But for us, everybody had their own truck, and we were all doing our own thing with very little supervision.

QWould you describe it as a really good job because the workload was manageable and it paid well?

AIt's kind of like the story about the guy who came out when a machine was acting up, hit it with a hammer, and charged them a thousand dollars. They asked him to break down the bill, so he revised it to fifty dollars for fixing the job and nine hundred and fifty dollars for knowing how to fix it. Basically, you're getting paid for what you know, because you can't just throw somebody untrained out there and have them repair equipment like that. It takes a lot of training and a lot of intuitive thinking to repair instrumentation equipment.

QIf you already knew what was wrong with an instrument, you usually didn't need to work on it all day, right?

ANo. Once you finish your troubleshooting, it might take ten or fifteen minutes to fix something. But it might take a long time beforehand to figure out what's wrong and what needs to be fixed.

QDid you get all of that experience from training alone, or did you also become better over time? Which contributed more?

AYou get better as time goes on. I learned an awful lot about instrumentation at two o'clock in the morning when I came out on a call-out. If something breaks in the middle of the night, the night supervisor will start making phone calls until he can get hold of somebody to come out and fix it. I lived close enough to the plant that I made a lot of call-outs. A lot of times, you'd get there and it would be a piece of equipment you may have never seen before. Then you'd go into the manuals and brochures, learn how it works, and then figure out how to fix it.

QSo was it a lot of trial and error?

AIt wasn't so much trial and error. With experience, you can tell from the symptoms what's probably causing the problem. Then it's just a matter of the different brands of instrumentation...

QIf the supervisor called you at midnight and you came in to fix an instrument, would you receive extra compensation even though you weren't technically on the clock?

AYes. When you make a call-out, you get an automatic 2.7 hours regardless of how long it takes. If it takes longer than 2.7 hours, of course you get paid more. If you come out and fix something in twenty minutes, you'll still get 2.7 hours.

QDid that ever result in you being paid for multiple call-outs in the same night?

AYes. There was one time that I made a call-out, came out, and fixed it really quickly. When I got home, my wife said, "You just got another call-out." So I went back to the refinery. I only lived about ten minutes from the refinery. I fixed that one, and then when I was checking out, the night supervisor said, "We've got another problem. Do you want to work on it?" For a little while, I was getting paid for three different call-outs at the same time, and each one was 2.7 hours.

QSo that was a lot of money in one night?

AYes.

QWas this job the primary income and primary financial support for your family?

AYes. I was the only one working.

QDo you have any children?

AI have one son.

QDid you want your son to join the oil and gas industry, or did he go in a different direction?

AHe went a different route, but it would have behooved him to do that, actually.

QSo you think he should have gone into oil and gas?

AHe should have done something other than what he did. He got a degree in psychology. Oil and gas would have been good, but he'll do fine.

QHe must be very smart.

AHe is.

QOverall, did you really enjoy your experience working at the company? Do you have any regrets in your career where you think you should have chosen a different sector, or do you think oil and gas was the right fit for you?

AI think oil and gas was fine for me. I wish I would have stayed in the Navy and retired, but other than that, my career has turned out pretty well.

QThank you for sharing your experience and for educating me about the industry. I really appreciate your time.

AThank you, and good luck on your project.