Audio clip of interviews with offshore workers Tom Andrews and Mike Butcher
By Richard Dade
Transcript for 'Click above to hear interviews with Tom Andrews and Mike Butcher':
"I used to say to my missus - I don't want you to call me unless there is an emergency or there is a problem, because if you are thinking of home all the time then you can't settle with the deprivation you are actually going through....
Well, you just counted the days really...You got there, and there are only thirteen days to go, and you don't count the day you got there and the day you leave, so actually it's only twelve. We all used to kid ourselves into thinking we haven't got long to go, and then in the middle of your two weeks you do a short shift and switch from doing the opposite twelve hours. Of course then you were over the hill and it was on the downward slope...
If you think about home it would depress you - well, it used to depress me, put it that way...
At one point when my eldest son was born, we came home on leave (we were working in the Far East then) came on leave with a dark haired three month old baby. I went back to work two weeks before my wife travelled over there. She came to meet me at the airport and there was this bald baby that burst out crying as soon as he saw me, as he hadn't seen me for two or three weeks... That aspect of it, especially when your children are really small, you miss a lot of their growing up...
The ones who had trouble like I said are those with kiddies birthdays and they used to bring the whole morale down, some of these guys. I have often seen full grown guys crying cause they miss being home... We used to have our Christmas either before I went or when I came back."