About Me

What caused me to add an about me section was a recent contact from one of our readers making it clear that people are interested to know something of me as a person and the type of life I lead. What drives me and what have I achieved.

Is there a single event that changed the course of your life? Was the actual question from a reader. That is a very tough question for many people to answer but I have two events that stand out the most important is relayed below because it explains about me better than any other.

As a young man I was very active in sports and it would be easy to pick events from soccer matches; players I have played beside that have gone on to reach international status etc. Boxing was another favorite sport and I’m sure my small time career had many inspiring events; but not a single event that has driven me from that day forward. It would be very easy to pick an event about us from this experience but life is a greater stage than sport and if writing about me we have to be sure to get the right story.

The event that takes pride of place and it took place way back in the 1970’s when I was electrician/mechanic of a drill rig. I will not give the name of the rig or the company that owned it because I do not wish to bring back disturbing memories for anybody. The reason for this article is to tell about me rather than about others.

It was bright cool night in Abu Dhabi, one of those nights when the Milky Way is so bright and thick with stars that you believe you could walk on it. The time was 11.45pm and I was just making a final check of the rig equipment before going to bed for the night. Because we were testing a newly drilled well not much power was required and only one of the four main generators was running. This made the evening appear even more quiet and relaxing.

After checking the engines and power supply I made my way to the drill floor which is situated about 40 feet above the ground. This was just a courtesy call to say hi to the driller and ask if he had any equipment problems.

The driller, never one to miss the opportunity to speed up his work, asked me if I’d take the brake for a few minutes while he made his final checks before being relieved at midnight. That is a thing about me; I never refuse a request for help. There wasn’t much for me to do because they were testing not drilling, so I agreed. The driller left the drill floor to go off and carry out the end of tour checks. That left four people on the drill floor. Two contractors who were carrying out the tests on the well, a young engineer who was fresh from university and carrying out his first job after graduation and myself on the brake. The only sound was the hum of the single diesel generator in the background.

Within 2 minutes I thought I smelt a faint rotten gas smell. (Rotten egg gas is hydrogen sulphide h2s and one whiff can kill an adult human being) Checking the gas guage it was reading zero so I accepted that I was probably imagining things. It was common knowledge that rotten egg gas would kill a human being in less than two seconds and I was still feeling fine so it was natural to believe I had been mistaken. Nobody could have foreseen the carnage that was to take place just two minutes later.

The two test engineers were standing close to the safety rail, I was pretty well protected by a safety cage that surrounded the driller and this was made of 4 inch heavy duty pipe. The young engineer stood close to the center of the platform where the pipe disappeared into the well head below.

There was no warning, no sound, and no gauge needles jumping around. There was an almighty roar and the heavy duty pipe that was being used in the test separated, not at a join but in the center of the length of pipe. Only the day before each length of that pipe had been tested to a quarter of a million pounds per square inch pressure and passed the test. We can only guess at the strength of the pressure surge that caused the break; my guess is that it must have been at least 350,000 pounds per square inch.

As the pipe broke the pressure that had built inside of it caused a whiplash effect and the broken pipe swung on a wide arc. The first of the two test engineers was decapitated. The second was hurled bodily more than fifty feet away; most of the bones in his body smashed. I was next in line for the flying pipe and fortunately the heavy duty cage about me although badly damaged remained intact long enough to deflect the pipe over my head. This happened so quickly and the pipe travelled so fast that even a great athlete like Carl Lewis would not have been fast enough to take evasive action.

Now the gas alarm was sounding and the smell of rotten egg gas was there again. In a case like this you cannot take time out to care for others because death from this gas is almost instantaneous. Holding my breath, with my hand covering nose and mouth I rushed for the steel ladder that ran up the side of the derrick (That’s the part of a drill rig that looks like the Eiffel Tower in Paris.) and climbed as quickly as I could before the gas about me became too much for me.

This was training taking over because h2s gas is heavier than air and will only fall rather than rise. I don’t think I even took a breath until I was at least thirty feet above the drill platform then when I did breath there was nothing but the smell of fresh air about me.

It was then that I looked down for the first time and noticed the young engineer on his first trip away from home was lying dead on the drilling platform – He had been too slow and maybe too inexperienced to take evasive action to avoid the gas. I am not ashamed to admit that I cried, probably from shock but at the time I felt it was for this kid who would never live to experience the full joys of life.

I remained up the derrick clinging to the ladder with no living person about me for almost an hour until somebody wearing breathing apparatus brought me a mask and oxygen tank to put on before I would descend from my safe position.

That night I didn’t sleep, I was first of all feeling guilty to be the only one of the four men on the platform that survived. I was feeling sorry for myself and wasn’t sure how my work colleagues would accept the fact that I could do nothing in the situation.

Later in the night I started thinking how fickle life was: A few hours earlier I had eaten dinner and chatted with the man who no longer had a head. I didn’t know the young engineer’s name and yet we had shared a terrible experience. A third man’s body was so smashed that he didn’t even half fill a body bag. Two of the dead left wives and children, one may never have experienced making love to a woman. The gloom about me was deep at this time.

It was at this time that I decided to take a much closer look at life; to try to discover what was my role in life? To learn what makes people tick, what was important or unimportant and at the need to grasp life with both hands and do everything today – just in case there is no tomorrow. I wanted to know everything there was about building a business and making it succeed. About whether it was important to build my life around money and most importantly about never doing anything that may hurt fellow man. It was at this point that I decided that I wanted to leave the safety of engineering and move into the world of business.

In business I spent close to 30 years in senior management and have been a director of both private and public corporations. I have been devout in my application to learning and today I understand finance, operations, public relations, government relations, sales and marketing and most importantly the importance of people.

Today I never think of an employee as just another employee. An employee is part of a family, is a parent or a child, is responsible for paying off a mortgage loan, is responsible for helping get the next generation off to a good start, may be a member, or leader, of a community organization and most importantly expects to hear nothing but the truth from me.

To summarize the affect of this event on my life is simple. I learned that life is too unpredictable to put off to tomorrow something you can achieve today there was a new guiding light about me.

Taking the safe road of a steady job with a big corporation because of the protection it gives does not always work. I was driven to sit down for a few days and write down what was important to me. The biggest lesson I learned was that people are too talented not to strive to achieve what they can in life while they still have life.

My working life started as a mechanic/electrician and at one time I was content to retire in exactly the same role. Something happened to change that and today I can state that I have visited 113 different countries and worked in 32 of them. My friends are many and varied and I have successfully run my own private business since 1983, even though at many times since then I have accepted roles with other businesses. I have no regrets with the way my life has panned out except that it took three deaths to make me realize that maybe I was put on this earth with a greater role to play in helping other people.

Now you know all about me and the remainder of this website is all about you.

Now you know about me and what drives the webmaster of this site the best place to go is to our home page and start from the beginning.

The webmaster, David McCarthy, is beyond retirement age but refuses to give up his daily business life claiming that his mind is more vibrant today than it has ever been. It would be a waste not to share his love of life and people with the world. He uses a mixture of both eastern and western philosophy to guide his own life and is a believer that we are all sharing this planet and it is better to share it in peace. Life isn't about me it is about us if you are seeking quality of life.

A recent review of the website indicated that his most avid readers are aged between 25 and 45 and are usually people that have a desire to succeed in life. For this goal it would be hard to choose a better mentor.

The internet is full of self-proclaimed gurus, some deserve the title the majority do not. They tend to be people that continually rehash each others work and serve it as their own.

Simply because one person has made a lot of cash using a certain system does not mean that others can too. When the time is right we will each find our own niche in life. It is better to have the right mindset than the wrong textbook.

Regular readers of ayecasher will have already realized that David's methods are aimed at bringing out the genius within each of you.

You can contact him personally using the contact us form that is libnked to the left of this page. All emails are answered but sometimes it does take a day or two due to heavy work load.

If you need to know more about me please feel free to ask.