Chasing the Phoenix
Yesterday, I witnessed the unprecedented – the price of oil dropped to negative $40. While oil price gyrations send shock waves throughout too many industries to name, let’s talk about what it means to me.
At the end of 2011, I was laid off from a company I helped build where I covered Global Media along with a wide array of other industries. When I left, two long-term clients came with me. Within a year, both left their companies which effectively canceled my contracts with them. I could not have predicted this: one had worked for his company for 27 years, the other 23 years.
In 2014, I began covering the Oil & Gas industry for a former editor/reporter of mine who had left the company before me. Six months into this contract the price of oil dropped from $85 to $40. I was able to keep the work but my rate was cut.
In the meantime, I sought other work, new careers, trained to become a facilitator and mediator. However, for four years, the O&G work put food on our table and kept us from food stamps (although some years we were close).
Then in 2018, with oil prices around $60, the price began to drop again, and by 2019, my O&G projects dried up completely. So I focused on a new business – a nonprofit in Mississippi.
Now in 2020, a pandemic hit and my new business is temporarily shuttered, potential new work I had been courting has been shelved. Then I got a call in April to work on some quick turn reporting again in the O&G industry – yes, prices were low, but most believed the industry had hit its bottom.
They were wrong.
Oil prices sunk to negative $40 a barrel yesterday. Unprecedented. What does the drop mean to me – chasing work has required me to constantly rise from the ashes. The small amount of work I had contracted a week ago vanished overnight. A part of me believes I just cannot rise one more time, so my daily work is to remember that I always have.
