Tag Archives: working in Dickinson North Dakota

I Want To Beat The Chamber of Commerce In Dickinson, North Dakota

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I want to beat the Chamber of Commerce in Dickinson, North Dakota.  I want to get to you, before they do.  I want to tell you the truth, rather than have you listen to lies and bullshit.

The individuals in the Dickinson Chamber of Commerce may not be bad people, but they have a job to do, and that job is to lie to you about Dickinson.

When I first wrote this blog post in November of 2015, the housing prices in Dickinson were very, very high.  Extremely high.  This was the result of greed, lack of human decency, and stupidity.  There was this lie going around that everybody in the oil field was making $100,000 per year.  In the five years that I have lived in Dickinson, I have only ever met three people who made over $100,000 per year in the oil field.

The Oil Boom was over in western North Dakota by the end of 2015, due to the price of oil falling from over $100 per barrel down to $40 per barrel.  Many oil field jobs went away, and many out of state workers returned to the states where they came from.  Once the apartments, manufactured home parks, and trailer parks in Dickinson became less than half occupied, the rents throughout Dickinson dropped greatly.

During the Oil Boom, the people in Dickinson were not friendly, not helpful, and not cooperative.  Now that the Oil Boom is over, the people in Dickinson are even meaner, in part due to increased competition for fewer jobs, and also because they want people to leave Dickinson.

The people in Dickinson dislike people who are from someplace else, and they also dislike each other.  Anything you say to people in Dickinson, will probably make them dislike you more.  If you arrive in Dickinson now, you are better off staying away from people.  Remain in your hotel, or your home, there isn’t anything to do or anywhere to go anyway, and you will likely be followed and stopped by the Dickinson Police.

There is a shortage of women in Dickinson, and a lack of attractive women.  The ratio of men to women in Dickinson is probably 3:1.  The Dickinson Police Department try as hard as they can to not allow prostitution in Dickinson, though it is needed.  The Dickinson Police create fake advertisement for women wanting to have sex, and then arrest people when they show up.

You can not safely go out to bars or restaurants in Dickinson at night, because the Dickinson Police try as hard as they can to arrest people for DUI.  In Dickinson, the Police are so eager to arrest people for DUI or other charges, that they will follow you and stop you for any reason that they can think of.  The Police try to encourage people to leave Dickinson.

In Dickinson, all of the restaurants have employees and servers that don’t like their jobs.  All of the restaurant employees think that everyone else is making over $100,000 per year, and they aren’t, and they are mad about it.  The servers are disappointed and can’t understand why people don’t spend $50 per meal and leave them a $20 tip, like they all heard about.  How are they ever going to make $300 a night at Applebees like they planned?

There is not a lot to do in Dickinson.  It is cold and grey from about October through April, at least seven months of cold weather.

The oil field work has been reduced by about 80% over the past several years.  Most of the oil field workers who lost their jobs went back to the states where they came from because housing prices were so high here, the people are unfriendly, there is a shortage of women, you can’t go out to bars or restaurants at night, the restaurants have terrible service, there is not a lot to do, the Police encourage people to leave Dickinson, and it is cold for at least seven months of the year.

The people in Dickinson, and the employers in Dickinson, hate people with an education.  The employers in Dickinson would much rather hire someone with several felony convictions, than someone with a college degree.  In Dickinson, your supervisors and co-workers will be people convicted of robbery, theft, assault, and drug charges.  Perform a Google search and look up your company owners, managers, and personnel on www.ndcourts.gov/publicsearch/default.html before you accept a job with a company in Dickinson.

What do I want?  I want the truth to be known.  I had thought that Dickinson could change, but once the Oil Boom was over, the local people in Dickinson became ever meaner.  I had not realized that the local people in Dickinson were on their best behavior during the Oil Boom.  All I can do now is warn people what Dickinson is like.

2nd Post About Prostitution In Dickinson, North Dakota

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This will be the second blog post that I have written about prostitution in Dickinson, North Dakota.  The first blog post that I wrote about prostitution, was written about six weeks ago.

So far, I have written approximately thirty-four blog posts.  In about half of them, I mention that there is a shortage of women in Dickinson, North Dakota.  There are way more men in Dickinson than women.  I think that the ratio of men to women here in Dickinson is probably 3:1.

Since 2011, I have lived in Dickinson for about thirty-two months, almost three years.  For about the first year, I did not think that there were any attractive women in Dickinson.  I thought that few attractive women were born in Dickinson due to the make up of the local population and the cold weather.  I thought that if there were any attractive women born here, they probably moved away right after high school graduation.  But for the first year that I was here, I mostly worked on oil field sites outside of town.

When I came back to Dickinson in May of 2013, I worked in town more.  When I went to the grocery store during the week, before 5 p.m., I saw some attractive women.  I also saw a few attractive women at the West River Community Center during the week, before 5 p.m.  It turns out that there were a few attractive women in Dickinson, but they were trying not to be seen out in public when the men got off of work in the evening.

The women that I saw at the grocery store and the West River Community Center before 5 p.m., who were attractive, I got the impression that they wanted to be left alone, that they did not want to be bothered, and that they were trying their best to get home before 5 p.m.  I felt sorry for them, they kind of acted like deer.  I think that about 80 percent of them must have been married or were in a committed relationship, and that the other 20 percent were just not wanting to mate.

After 5 p.m., you did not see hardly any attractive women in Dickinson.  You did not see hardly any attractive women in the bars.  From my own personal experience, and from what I saw other men doing, after work, the only attractive women you could talk to in all of Dickinson, were maybe a few bartender women, maybe a few waitresses, and maybe a few convenience store clerks, that was it.  There was a bartender girl that I liked, she did not want to talk to me, I told her that I liked her, but she never would talk to me.  I think that she liked me a little.  In 2011, on some nights this bar would serve about three hundred people, I think that she made about $300 to $400 in tips on those nights.  One night, about an hour before closing, a young guy said to her, that he would pay her $500 to have sex with him, he was serious.  She said,”It will cost you more than $500 to have sex with me.”, and I think she too was serious.

I nearly got into a lot of trouble going to this bar to see her.  One night she made me so mad, that I went outside and turned off the electric power to this bar, and went home.  Another night, she was flirting with this guy in front of me and letting him feel her, I had already warned the guy that I really liked her. I waited for him outside, when he went to his truck, I blocked his truck in with my truck, so that he could not leave.  He was much bigger than me, and he had two guys with him.  He realized that I was very angry, that I had blocked his truck in so that he could not get away, that I probably had a gun, and that I was possibly going to kill him.  He never came back, and she never fucked with me again.

I thought about it the following day, and some times after that.  I was ready to kill the guy.  I had only come to Dickinson to work.  Back home, I had a house on five acres, cars, trucks, motorcycles, everything I had ever wanted to have, but I almost lost it all, and would have spent the rest of my life in prison for shooting a guy at bar because he and the bartender girl had disrespected me, and angered me.

I can not explain everything that makes me who I am.  I know that I have some things in common with the other construction workers, oil field workers, and truck drivers that have come to Dickinson to work, especially those over forty years of age.  It is likely that at some point in our lives, each of us has had successes and failures, good jobs and bad jobs, plenty of money and lack of money, happy homes and broken homes, being in love and being lonely, feeling optimistic and feeling hopeless.  We have all had to deal with ups and downs in life, disappointment, and personal tragedies.  It is not that I can not deal with difficulties and problems, or handle not getting what I want, I have had to deal with these things many times.  But in Dickinson, I had left my home, my friends, and the day-to-day life that I liked.  I had left a place that I enjoyed and felt comfortable in, to come to a place that is cold and inhospitable.  I had had to deal with the shortage of housing in Dickinson where they wanted $1,500 per month for an old, small one bedroom apartment, that amount of money would rent a nice 3 bedroom/2 bathroom house back home.  I was acting as a foreman, getting to the shop early to load all the tools, equipment, and material, hooking up the trailer, going and picking up the DUI and drug probation crew workers around Dickinson, getting the job started, laying out the work, solving problems, pretty much what I had done in the past as a superintendent and project manager, but the local company that I was working for wasn’t paying me as a foreman.  I had to deal with local people, co-workers, site contractors, and company owners who were hateful and uncooperative.  So every morning that I woke up in Dickinson, I was already dealing with about six or seven adverse life conditions, just by being here.  Adding on top of that, working for a shitty company, not being paid very well, not ever seeing any attractive women, being ignored and disrespected by the bartender girl, and being disrespected by some guy, made me angry enough to want to kill the guy.

I went home for several months.  Then I went to work in Utah and Texas for a year.  I returned to Dickinson in May of 2013.  I knew that I should probably stay out of bars in Dickinson, and I did mostly stay out of bars.  I had a job as a foreman, it paid O.K.  I soon began to enjoy my work.  After work, and on the weekends, I could not find any attractive women.  I went to Patterson Lake on nice sunny days, and there were no attractive women there.  I went to a new upscale bar and restaurant in Dickinson called “Players Club” several times, the bartender men and women were not friendly.  I tried to speak to a waitress that I thought was very pretty, and she did not like me talking to her at all.  I went to work at a different company that had a very cute and smart girl working there that I liked, she did not want to talk to me.

In my previous blog post about prostitution in Dickinson, I wrote that the first time that I ever had any interest in internet dating sites, was when I came to Dickinson.  There was such a shortage of women, I could not find attractive women anywhere.  I looked at five different internet dating sites for women within 100 miles of Dickinson, and there were very few attractive women.  All of the attractive women had a list of requirements that I did not meet.  I looked and looked on the internet dating sites for women in North Dakota, and then I looked at the profiles of women in other states.  After I had read the profiles of about several hundred women, I found that they all had a list of requirements that would be hard for me to meet, I thought that they were being unrealistic.  In addition to me thinking that the requirements that these women had were unrealistic, and unlikely to be met, I felt that women were fucked up for even getting the idea in their head that you could make such unilateral and inequitable demands from another human being.

Some out-of-state truck drivers told me to go look on the website “Back Page” under escorts.  When I looked at the escorts, some were sleazy, some were not.  Even if you had to pay $250 per hour for an escort, it was beginning to appear to be a much better idea to pay for a prostitute for company, than to waste any  more time trying to find women in Dickinson or on an internet dating site.  Also, from the several hundred profiles of women that I had read, I could see that these women would have griped and complained about everything, wasted my time, tried to get everything they could from me, made me feel inadequate, and would have caused me all kinds of problems.  The only thing stopping me from hiring an escort was that it was not appealing to me to be with a woman that had already been with several guys that day, and I did not want to get arrested.

In 2014, I began to do work where it was important for me not to get into any kind of trouble, or I would lose my job.  I had to stay in Bismarck in a nice business hotel for a couple of weeks.  Most of the attractive escorts on the website “Back Page”, were based in Bismarck.  I was so tempted.  I had a belief that this particular hotel would have absolutely not liked having a prostitute walk through the door, and getting asked to leave this hotel, which was being paid for by my employer, would have caused me to lose my job.  I was also aware that police often try to entrap people by creating false advertisements for escorts on the internet.

In my previous blog post about prostitution, I wrote about seeing on the evening news in Dickinson, that the Bismarck police had placed an advertisement for an escort on the internet, and that they had received sixty calls for an appointment.  They were only able to arrest sixteen of the callers when they showed up to meet the prostitute because they ran out of time.  I was very angry about this.  I just got done explaining in this blog post how difficult it was for me to meet women in Dickinson, there was a shortage of women.  Women in Dickinson did not want me talking to them.  I had gone to a bar many times because I liked the bartender girl, and got so mad that I nearly got into a lot of trouble for turning their electric power off, and for nearly killing a guy.  I tried to see if I could find a girl by looking at five different internet dating sites, and there were very few women in this area.  The police are so fucking god damn stupid, what the fuck do they think they are doing?

What caused me to write this second blog post about prostitution, was what I heard from a friend of mine this week.  My friend is a construction foreman in Williston.  The project that he is working on has about one hundred workmen every day.  The company that he works for, has had most of their workers working ten hours each day, seven days a week, for the past three months.  One unmarried out-of-state worker on this project, looked on the internet for an escort.  He arranged to meet her at a restaurant.  When he got to the restaurant, it was a set-up, the police were hiding in the bathroom, when he had said enough, the police came out and arrested him.  His name was published in the newspaper, but nothing about where he worked.  He had to request time off from his company to appear in court, he was fired from his job.  I think that this was very unfair.  If you are an unmarried out-of-state worker, and you have worked ten hours a day, seven days a week, for the past three months, and you live in Williston or Dickinson where there is a shortage of women, you have not been able to meet women.

Why are you even alive if all you are going to do is get up, get dressed, drive an hour to your job site, work ten hours, drive an hour back home, eat, take a shower, and go to sleep, day after day after day?  If you work construction every day like this, you don’t have the time or the energy to do anything after work.  One day you stop and get groceries after work, one day you do laundry after work, one day you do dishes and cleaning after work, you are too tired to do much else, and there isn’t time.  Well, I guess this guy has some time now, he got fired from his job.

Oil Field Speculation in Dickinson, Part I

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I arrived in Dickinson, North Dakota, in May of 2011, stayed for eight months, then came back in May of 2013, and have been here since.  I have become friends or acquaintances of several long time residents who are now in their 60s, “DS”, “IB”, and “CL”.  I have to use these initials to protect their identities.  Each of these individuals had business and social dealings with each other, so I have been able to cross check what each of them has told me.

In approximately the mid 1980s, there was an oil boom in Dickinson.  Many local people were making a great deal of money.  “CL” was about thirty years old, and at this time he bought a new truck, a new car, and a manufactured home in a twelve month period.  His friends and acquaintances did the same thing.  Within a few years, “CL” had to move back in with his parents, and had to go to work at a grocery store, because that was the only job he could get.  The same thing happened to his friends, they went from having their own homes and new cars, to living in apartments and driving beaters.  The oil field jobs went away, and it was hard to find even a low paying job in Dickinson.

Within a couple of years of the oil field jobs going away, property prices had fallen tremendously in Dickinson.  “IB” and a business partner were able to scrape enough money together to buy some warehouses on several acres of land for about $6,000 each, even though it was very hard to earn money in Dickinson at that time.  “IB” and his business partner had worked in the oil field and they strongly believed that eventually the oil drilling would have to come back to Dickinson.  “DS” was about forty years old, and he was able to buy 30 acres of land that nobody wanted for about $20,000.

When I got here in 2011, “IB” and his business partner were getting about $30,000  per month in rent from the different warehouse buildings that they had bought, I was told.  Once I found out which warehouse buildings they were, and what they were charging for rent, that dollar amount was approximately correct.  “DS” had his property for sale for about $3 million.

Both “IB” and “DS” were stressed individuals.  They had had to go through a lot to buy their properties when money was scarce, and hold onto their properties through bad economic times, over about twenty years.  Nobody knew when or if the oil drilling would come back.  If it would have been a sure thing, real estate prices would not have gone down, and everybody would have bought property.

Rather than this being a lesson in investment, I want this to be a warning.  The oil drilling came to Dickinson in the past, everybody was making money for a few years, and then the oil drilling went away, leaving many people broke.  Many people spent the money they had made very quickly because they thought that their jobs would last longer than they did, and that they would have the chance to pay off everything that was bought on credit: cars, motorcycles, boats, homes.  Keep in mind also that real estate prices dropped tremendously within a few years.  There were very few jobs in Dickinson then, and the jobs were low pay.  Do not fail to understand the lessons of the past, please try to remember what has happened before and plan accordingly.

If you are poor and come to Dickinson, North Dakota

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If you are poor and come to Dickinson, North Dakota, there is no homeless shelter.  If you think you are clever, and you will sleep in your car in the Wal-Mart parking lot, there have been a couple hundred people before you that have already ruined that, you can’t do that now.  Likewise, if you think that you will sleep in your car at a truck stop, there have been a couple hundred people before you that have already ruined that, you can’t do that now.

If you think that you will bring your trailer with you and stay at an RV park, they will only allow trailers and motor homes that are newer than ten years old, and by the way, the lot rent is $800 per month, plus about another $250 per month for your electric bill.  If you think that you will go to a public campground, there have already been a couple hundred people before you that have ruined that, campground stay is limited to ten days, then you have to leave for thirty days.

If you think that you will ask some farmer if you can park your trailer on some corner of his land, there have already been a couple hundred people before you that have ruined that.  If you think that you will call the Catholic Church to ask for a place to stay, they will tell you,”There have been some rapes and kidnappings in North Dakota, we have some women here, we can’t have anybody stay on that land.”

All out-of-state workers are hated.  You have ruined everything!  Not only will you not be helped, they will try to fuck you in every way that they possibly can.  To get an idea of what it will be like in Dickinson, you need to watch the movies “Deliverance”, “The Grapes of Wrath”, and “Planet of the Apes”.

More Culture Shock In Dickinson, North Dakota

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In the South, where I grew up, education is valued and respected.  If a person was a teacher, a preacher, a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer, they were respected.  I believe that there were several reasons for this.  Church and the Bible were important in the lives of people in the South.  The preacher was looked upon as a person with higher learning, as wise, as having sound judgement, as someone to be respected.  The preacher, nor the citizens, would tolerate disrespect towards a preacher. Similarly, teachers were looked upon as someone with higher learning, as wise, and having sound judgement, as someone to be respected.  Doctors were very highly valued, they were treated with respect and were treated as very important people.

Anyone in the South, would hope that their child would grow up to be a teacher, a preacher, a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. It was good that a child would grow up to be knowledgeable, well read, knowing about the world, able to make informed decisions, to be able to practice their profession where they chose, to not be tied to a place, or to be limited in life by the lack of understanding or lack of knowledge.

I did very well in school, my classmates who liked me were proud of me, my classmates who didn’t like me wouldn’t deny that what I had done was good, that I would go to college, that that was good.  When I was going to college and working, my co-workers whether they liked me or not, they would not disagree that what I was doing was good.  When I graduated with a degree in engineering and went to work as an estimator, engineer, superintendent, and project manager, my employers and co-workers either acknowledged, or did not disagree that the engineering education and learning was important.

When I got to North Dakota, I found that the people here have disgust and hatred for people with an education.  In about the middle of 2013, there was a national newspaper article, that said North Dakota had the highest percentage of people in the United States with less than an 8th grade education, and, that North Dakota had the highest per capita beer consumption. That explained a lot.

As I explained in my previous post, I have been to the North Dakota pioneer museums, life was very hard in North Dakota, the early pioneers in the late 1800s and early 1900s lived in houses made of grass sod because there were no trees to make lumber.  They had to burn dried animal dung for heating and cooking.  Whole families of six to ten people lived in houses that were less than 300 square feet.  Life was very hard in North Dakota, even into the 1950s and 1960s.  What good would it have done for a man or woman to gain higher learning if they were going to have to fight the land and the cold to survive.  There would not have been a way to spare children from daily labor necessary for survival, for them to have the time to do a great deal of studying.  There would have not been any money to send children away to college.

If a man or woman did start to learn about the world, about what life was like in London, Paris, New York City, or Miami, and were interested in that sort of life, would they remain in North Dakota, and once they were away, and knew what it was like to have a toilet, would they ever want to return to Dickinson?  I imagine that the people who had the aptitude for college and were able to leave Dickinson, might not have wanted to return because there were not any job opportunities for them, suitable marriage opportunities, cultural or social opportunities, just a very hard bleak life of farming with seven months of winter.

So the reason why most of long time residents in Dickinson hate people with an education, is because they do not have an education.  They never saw the need for it, it had nothing to do with their way of life, or they wanted more education, but did not get it, and now they are bitter about it.  The people who got an education probably do not come back,  I know how they feel, it is very frustrating trying to live and work with the highest beer consuming/lowest education level people in the United States who hate people with a college education.