The first coincidence of that job was all their property was in Oklahoma. (The first thing I did was to fly back down to OK City (I liked that much better than the trip in March!) to meet the people down on that end of the operation, and to drive up north to check out the property we had leased there. (The oil business is fascinating. (I have been around the fields a lot, since I was a kid.) (I know part of it is that it appeals to my sexual aspect. (e.g., on the first trip to Oklahoma in ‘81 I went up to the fields with my uncle, to watch a new well being drilled. Twas a full moon, a warm nite, and there is something really magical and sexual about a drilling rig at nite.))))
The second coincidence requires wandering off to another story for a bit. (In '78 I was living in Kansas, and I went to OK City for a seminar, and arranged to go to dinner with my uncle one nite. One of his areas of study was NLP (I now see.), and he played a lot of games with my unconscious mind that nite. (e.g., it triggered my move to Montana eight months later.) (Anyway, when I went to OK City in July '81, the company put me up in the same hotel as the '78 trip. (Eight months later I left my ex; so maybe staying in that hotel was part of the trigger that got me out?)))
The third coincidence of that job requires another story too. (In '77 I went to Vail for a seminar and took my ex and the kids along. We rented a condo that had two bedrooms, one of which was rented out separately as a hotel room that we didn't rent that summer.) (In '81 the oil company sent me to Vail for a seminar, and I ended up in the hotel room of the same condo we had rented in '77.)
In Aug. '81, the company hired Vicki. (She was my age and also at the point where she knew she was going to divorce, but wanted to wait for the finances to clear up. We had coffee together each day and bitched about our respective spouses. Her hubby was on the road most of the time with his job, and she was being pretty much single and hitting the bars almost nitely; so she would also tell me all the stories and jokes she collected at the bars. (Most of her stories and jokes were sexual. (When we had our affair, I discovered the talk was just talk, and she was a lousy lay. (Very uptight and very much in a hurry to get it over with. (Some fantasies should stay fantasies, because the reality just doesn't compare.)))))
Things with my ex kept getting worse. (We were smoking pot regularly and drinking some. From Aug '81 to April '82, she opened up enough socially so that we went to a few parties at the Cunningham's and to a couple concerts; but the alcohol and social settings just aggravated the jealousy and the rages kept getting worse.)
In April '82, my sister called to say she was moving to Montana to get away from some alcoholic crazy boyfriend she was having trouble getting rid of there. (I thought some time away might do us good, so we set it up for my ex to fly to Kansas and help my sister move up to Montana. (It didn't help any though. (My sister was into speed so she scored a bunch of black beauties for the trip, and the two of them went on a JD and speed binge that magnified the rages even further.)))
Finally, one day my ex called me at work and went into another rage, and something snapped inside of me. (She had hung up on me dozens of times over the years, but that was the first time I had done it to her.) (Vicki had been inviting me to stop by her place after work for a couple beers, for months; but I had kept passing as I only had 30 minutes to get home, or face a crazy woman. She asked again that afternoon, and I took her up on it. A couple beers turned into three or four six packs, and somewhere around 11, she came back from the bathroom in a nitegown and sat on my lap, and ….)