“You heard of ExxonMobil?” Hannah Pawelski asked her dad during a phone call posted on TikTok. “It’s like an oil company,” she added. When her father replied yes, Pawelski, holding back laughter, told him she “saw like a job posting, and I applied and it’s like an apprenticeship … in an offshore oil rig,” and that it “pays so much money.”
Pawelski, like many other girls participating in this latest TikTok prank, isn’t serious about working on an offshore rig, but her dad doesn’t know that. Her father understandably responded to his twentysomething daughter’s call by trying to make her understand that offshore oil rigging is not for her. “You’re in the middle of the ocean, the wind is blowing. It’s probably one of the most dangerous jobs in the world,” he told her.
“But they offered me it, and they said you’d get trained … and you get paid like $150,000,” Pawelski jokingly countered. “Yeah, because you may die,” her dad responded.
Countless other young women in their twenties have hopped on the trend over the past couple of weeks to prank their fathers and brothers into believing they are seriously considering becoming offshore oil rig workers.
“Those are the most rugged motherf-ckers you’ve ever seen in your life,” one father told his daughter over the phone, stating plainly that she “couldn’t make it” and “couldn’t do the work.”
“A lot of those guys die,” a brother informed his sister after she told him she accepted a job
