The Price of A Cheap Gallon of Gas

I have a half dozen posts that I have started and stopped over the last few days. My heart isn’t in any of them. It’s in Oklahoma City with our friends who work for Devon Energy. Devon, like a lot of oil companies including the one my husband works for, are hurting with continuous fall of the price of a barrel of oil. Devon, like most other oil companies, is laying people off in massive numbers. Devon just happens to be doing it today.

Everyone has known that it was coming. The company announced last month that no employees were safe, and that everyone should clean out his/her desk and wait for the sword to fall. They, and their families, have lived under this incredible fear of sudden unemployment since last fall but the stress of the past month has been incredible. And now they wait. They are hoping to not get the phone call or be called into the meeting that tells them they are one of the 1,000 people who have lost their jobs today. Their families are waiting at home to hear whether or not their lives have changed. All the energy sector people we know are talking about how this sudden flood of job seekers in the energy market will affect wages and their own abilities to find work.

And on social media, my non-energy sector friends are crowing about the cheap cost of gas.

When gas fell to $2.00/gal, I was whooping it up with everyone else. At $2.00, there was a noticeable bump in our tight budget. My husband and I could finally afford regular date nights, if only we could find the time. When gas fell to $1.80, there started to be hiring freezes at the oil companies. At $1.70, our daughter was laid off from the only job she’d ever had – in the accounts payable department for a small oil and gas firm. When it fell to $1.50, there were lay-offs in every department  of the oil company where my husband works, and we began to worry if his mission-critical job were really as mission-critical as he thought. Now that it’s below $1.40/gal here in Texas (below $1.30 in Oklahoma), every family we know is worried.

Oil and Gas aren’t just a sector of the economy in our part of the world, they’re a big ol’ piece of the pie. As oil goes, our economies tend to follow. Many of us remember the oil bust of the early 1980’s and wonder if that’s where we’re headed now. We sure hope not, but with a President who’s famously anti-oil in the White House, we don’t see where help would be coming from.

So that’s where we are today, praying along with our friends and holding their hands through this incredibly long day. We’re looking towards the Devon building in OKC with its windows covered with paper to hide the devastation from the press, and the flood of security guards to protect the supervisors who are walking out the newly-unemployed one by one. Wondering when and if it’s going to be us.

Please pray for the employees of Devon Energy today, those who lose their jobs and those who keep them. They have all been living under fear and stress for a long time, today is just the end of this part of it. 

By Kool Cats Photography over 2 Million Views (flickr.com) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons