Introducing Not So Old Fashioned, a show about the people who run field operations
A few years back I was standing in a yard in Houston looking at a stack of safety forms that had to be redone. Oil, dirt, rain. Unreadable. The crew had done the work. They’d documented it. Somebody still had to drive back out and do the whole thing over, because the paper didn’t survive the day.
It’s 2026 and that still happens every day. My biggest competitor is a clipboard.
That’s the old-fashioned part of this business.
The People Doing the Work Aren’t
The people running field operations are some of the sharpest operators I’ve met. There’s no degree for this job. You learn it standing in the weather. You learn it the first time an audit lands and the paperwork doesn’t match what actually happened on site.
They’ve run crews. They’ve passed the audits. They’ve trained the person who’s now their boss. A lot of them have taken an entire operation off paper without ever stopping the work, which is one of the hardest things you can do in this industry.
And they’re the ones deciding what their crews actually use. Those are the most useful conversations I have all year. I wanted more of them on the record, so I started Not So Old Fashioned.
Every episode I make my guest an Old Fashioned and we talk about the job. The name means both things at once: the drink, and the fact that it’s the paperwork in this business that’s old fashioned, not the people running it.
Listen Thursdays
Not So Old Fashioned launches Thursday, October 8. New episodes every other Thursday.
If you run field operations and you’ve got a story about the job, I’d like to have you on. Send me a note. And check out the links below to subscribe and listen/watch on your platform of choice.
