When Jahkira Michelle, a 23-year-old university administration worker, pranked her father to tell him she had landed a six-week underwater welding apprenticeship, she just wanted to hear his genuine reaction. She knew what to expect and he said, “Money can’t bring your life back!”
“It would be one thing if I said regular welder,” Michelle said Fortune, “but something as dangerous as going underwater deep from the shore, and I don’t really know how to swim, I expected him not to be on board at all.”
The prank, trending on TikTok, involves dozens of women calling their fathers, brothers and partners to get a six-figure job offer at an offshore oil rig. The women explain that the job involves spending six weeks as a welder or apprentice diver and revealing their loved ones’ reactions. Aside from a poignant and confused silence that usually follows the women’s announcement, the reactions fall somewhere between protective, supportive and realistic, very much in line with the enormous risks of injury and death faced by oil rig workers face in exchange for a relatively high salary.
Michelle’s father worked as a welder most of his life, she said. He has worked on Maryland construction sites for decades and is more than aware of the pain and physical stress that comes with the job. “He doesn’t like the profession,” she said, adding that her father describes the job as something that added “10 years” to her life.
“Your body breaks down from all the heavy work, using hot metal,” Michelle said. “He wouldn’t want me to have to do that.”
As for his joke, he thinks he lost it at the word “rig.” She was curious to know how he, a factory worker, would react to her daughter, a self-styled “girly girl” who “couldn’t even last a day of training” on a platform. In her short two-minute response, Tik Tok users noted how much concern and support she showed her. “I didn’t think people could really see how good our relationship was just from that little snippet of our conversation,” she said. “You made me smile.”
Another Tik Tok user, Olivia Prewitt, a 25-year-old Kentucky native who now lives in Florida and works as a real estate agent, said Fortune who discovered the trend shortly after “mentioning moving to California with wild hair” to her dad. He told her that she would need a job that could support the high cost of living out there.
“Once I saw the trend take off,” Prewitt said, she realized, “I could really fall for it.”
His post-graduation life hasn’t been as traditional as that of other young adults in his Southern hometown, where, Prewitt said, “there’s a sense of what a traditional post-graduation life looks like.” That life includes “starting a job or family immediately.”
Her trajectory was a little different: She moved to Florida and started working as a real estate agent in a job that also allows her to travel. She is a former Miss Kentucky Teen USA and now visits her friends who are over across the country in cities like Los Angeles, Boston and Miami.
His father’s reaction was very paternal. A long pause and then: “It’s not something you want to do.” She pushed him, saying the pay was $185,000 for six weeks, to which he replied, “Oh shit, you’re not going to do any welding.”
He initially planned to share the video only with friends, but decided to post it publicly. It has amassed 4.5 million views and inspired a wave of new pranksters who want to gauge how their family and friends will react. For Prewitt, who also describes herself as a “girly girl,” the pranks are fun because “dads, boyfriends and brothers go into protective mode.” However, she said, she knows that if she were serious, her father would be helpful to her.
Work on oil rigs has attracted interest for months: Google searches for related jobs are at a five-year high, with particular interest from the southern states of Mississippi, Alabama, Texas and Arkansas, which are near the Gulf of Mexico and its 6,000 as well as structures or drilling rigs for oil and gas. Welding jobs on oil rigs offer a salary of more than $55,000 for just six months of work, a particularly attractive prospect for college-aged men who may be tempted by the high pay minus the higher education component.
But, as the women rightly guessed, the pay is high for a reason. Oil rig crews face some of the highest injury and death rates in the country, according to Arnold & Itkin, a law firm that represents oil industry workers. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 470 oilfield workers died between 2014 and 2019; more than 400 of them were at work and 69 of them died from heart complications. The death rate is also increasing: in 2019, the death rate of oil workers was about 12%, compared to about 6% in 2017.
The most common causes of injuries include fires, falls, fatigue, machinery malfunctions and lack of safety culture on rigs. In a Reddit thread, nearly 100 users shared their most terrifying experiences on oil rigs, describing brutal burns, equipment that maimed people and witnessing the rapid degradation of entire coastlines.
Both Michelle and Prewitt were quick to say so Fortune that the job is something they could never do, but they were equally quick to say that they know other women could do it — and that they’re curious if the trend will also reveal some incredibly supportive conversations from families.
Prewitt said she has “no doubt that there are extraordinary, strong women who are fully capable” of working on oil rigs. But, she added, “I’m not one of those women.”
The demand for labor on oil rigs is based largely on the “boom-bust” nature of the industry. According to the Colorado School of Mines, during booms, or periods of high demand for oil, investors pour money into the industry and trigger overproduction. Periods of crisis follow, seeing lower oil prices and insufficient investment by the sector, triggering greater demand for cheap oil and moving the price higher again to continue the cycle.
In addition to the risks of injury, suffocation and chemical exposure to people, it is a job that also causes damage to the environment. The oil industry is responsible for 38% of all methane gas emissions in the country and 3.8% of all greenhouse gases.
According to WildEarth Guardians, a nonprofit organization that protects the wildlife and landscapes of the American West, oil drilling also produces pollution booms in states like Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Texas and others.
In Texas, the nonprofit wrote, “drilling near schools and homes is releasing toxic fumes,” and in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, drilling threatens to undermine “years of hard-earned progress in reducing air pollution ”.
According to a report by IMPLAN, an economic impact data provider, Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado collectively contribute more than 65% of total U.S. oil and gas production. This year, crude oil production is expected to decline by 1 million barrels per day to 170,000 barrels, resulting in thousands fewer jobs available this year.
Oil rig content, however, has also appeared on social media platforms like TikTok in other forms, and many come from women creators. One woman documented her gym routine on an oil rig, while another posted old photos of herself dressed in neon protective gear.
Other workers documented their living quarters, with wooden floors, televisions and sea views, where many people live for weeks or months at a time.
In his video, Prewitt saw questions flood the comments section, asking if the salary was real and if it was a job they could apply for. “If it is,” she said, “there’s probably a reason and I’m not sure it’s worth it.”