Her colleagues call her “sweetie”, “young lady”, “baby” or “sweetheart”. Katie is 21 when she gets hired in the oil sands, the fracking camps in Alberta, Canada, where huge mines are used to extract oil from the sands. The job pays well and Katie has to pay off the loan she took out for her history and anthropology majors. But it’s a tough job in an inhospitable area, the workers live isolated in camps, places with their own rules. A man’s world – on Katie’s first day, colleagues line up around the tool slug she works in, pretending to need wrenches or other odds and ends, actually to check out the new girl. Comments on her body included.
“Ducks” by Kate Beaton: Alone among men – culture
