The Oil Boom is over in North Dakota.  It has been over for at least a year and a half.

I did not like it when lies were told in order to lure people here during the Oil Boom, and I don’t like it when lies are told now in order to prop up businesses and real estate.

The Big Lie that was told to lure people here during the Oil Boom was, “Everybody is making $100,000 per year in the oil field.”  I have lived in Dickinson for over four years now, and I only ever met three people who made close to $100,000 per year in the oil field:  a drill rig boss, a wireline operator, and a union electrician.

The second Big Lie that was going around was, “This Oil Boom is going to last for twenty years.”  This lie was told in order to get the out of state workers to bring their families here and buy a home here.

These two Big Lies hurt people.  I met many truck drivers that were never paid during the Oil Boom, and they left North Dakota worse off than when they came.  I met many other out of state workers who left North Dakota broke.

Currently, the local people who own property like to say, “Things are starting to pick up again, the oil field work is coming back.”  No, it is not. The local people keep saying this because they don’t want all the out of state workers to leave, and cause the local businesses to fail and real estate prices to collapse.

The local people, business owners, and real estate agents don’t like what I have to say and what I write.  I think, “Don’t try to save yourself from going broke by tricking other people.  What you are doing is no better than picking someone’s pocket or perpetuating some kind of fraud on other people.  Don’t think that there is no harm in it, because there is.”

What I have seen in Dickinson and Williston for the past several years, is that a business will make a big deal about advertising jobs or announcing a job fair.  Often times, this is mostly propaganda in order to promote a business or make a business appear to be doing well.  My room mate falls for this every single time without fail.

If you want free advertising, because your business is doing so poorly that you can’t afford to pay for advertising, contact the chamber of commerce, North Dakota Job Service, and the newspaper, and say that you want to have a job fair.  All the stupid people in Dickinson and Williston get so excited when there is a job fair, just like when a state lottery jack pot gets big, they think “This is my big chance!”

If you are a good mechanic, good crane operator, good heavy equipment operator, good plumber, good electrician, or good auto body person, you already know that you can walk into any business and talk to the owner or manager, and probably get a job in Dickinson or Williston within a couple of days, if you are good at what you do.  This does not work if you are an idiot, a drug fiend, or so severely overweight and out of shape that you have a hard time walking and standing upright.

The people that get excited about a job fair, are people that normally can’t get hired, and they think of a job fair as an occasion where the normal rules don’t apply:  “They’re giving away free jobs!”, “My brother got a job, my sister got a job, my mother got a job, that guy that pushes his shopping cart around town got a job!”, “They want to fly me out to Denver for two weeks to swamper school, then when I get out I get a $1,000 bonus, and I start out at $30 per hour, they told me it didn’t matter about my hemoroids, I even showed them!”

Throw in some free hot dogs and free hamburgers, and your business will be the most widely known and successful business in town in the minds of the idiots and people who can’t get a job.  They will not realize no one got hired or one or two people got hired to work in the warehouse.