Joey Davenport:  

I wanted to stay in Houston with all my friends. My divorced mom begged me to help her move to San Diego, so I loaded up the truck and moved to way south of Beverly. Got a job as a janitor at Sears in El Cajon (unemployment was pretty high and it's all I could find). I met a couple of deaf men on the crew and in a few months I was pretty fluent in American Sign Language of the deaf. Later, another deaf acquaintance was in dire straights and I let him move in with me for a few weeks. He asked me to go to the local junior college to help him register. We met the Hearing Impaired Coordinator and after about 10 minutes of talking to my friend she realized I could hear and sign, so she hired me on the spot as interpreter for her other deaf students. I signed up for several of my own courses and did well at both job and studies. The latter cost money, however, and the former didn't pay terribly well, so I bid them adieu after only 1.5 semesters and rolled through several other jobs before deciding with my buddy to get on down to the booming oilfields. Starting as a Roustabout and worked my way up to Rig Manager while seeing over 30 countries. First was on a rig Brazil for 3 yrs. I already knew Spanish at an intermediate level and quickly picked up Portuguese. Then I did some training in Singapore for a few months, worked on a rig in China for 1.5 yrs, another in India for 1.5 yrs then back to the Zane Barnes (now Jack Bates) here in the Gulf of Mexico for 5 years. It was during this period that I met and married my lovely wife Jennifer. I was recruited to work in the office on a project for the better part of a year and at the end of the project I went back to the rig as senior man (Toolpusher / Offshore Installation Manager (OIM). Did that for 3 years on the G.H. Galloway and got ca...Expand for more