Reservoir Engineering for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCXIII

Reservoir engineering workspace

Among the more... interesting... content-farm posts are those which purport to explain adulty jobs for kids on the cusp of choosing a life's work. Some descriptions are relatively easy – say cops, airplane pilots, nurses, firefighters – but others don't crop up in television shows or movies (except, perhaps, as villains), so the bright folks at WiseGEEK.com (and eHow.com) assigned their field hands to describe them. The problem, of course, is that the more technical the field, the less those J-school and English-Lit grads understand the job. Don't get it? Here's an example: D. Jeffress pretending to explain "What does a Reservoir Engineer do?" for PracticalAdultInsights.com (WiseGEEK's version of Leaf Group's CareerTrend.com).

Mud Loggers for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCLXXVIII

mud logger examining cuttings

We often use the Wayback Machine at archive.org to research the history of our DotD nominees, in particular finding out original publication dates and previous pseudonyms under which the freelancers have published. Today's research took a slightly different tack: our records show that two extremely closely related topics were published on the same day at WiseGEEK.com. We'd already lambasted Terrie Brockmann for the first, "What does a Mudlogging Geologist do?" Here with a second installment is returning DotD and oil industry incompetent (the opposite of "expert") Mary McMahon. trying to explain "What does a Mudlogger do?" also at WiseGEEK. Oddly enough, both have the same publication date...

Becoming a Geologist for Dummies

geologist in the field

The more irksome of content-farm freelancers were prone to some bad habits, among them the habit of plugging random factoids into a template instead of actually learning about the topics in which they pretended expertise. Not long ago, our staff geologist ran across a post at LoveToKnow.com that purported to describe the process of "Becoming a Geologist." He snorted in derision, since the process Sally Painter laid out didn't match his experience.

Mud Logging for Dummies

mudlogger in trailer

When it comes to careers, we've always been of the rather old-fashioned opinion that if you're curious abut what a professional does, you should probably ask someone who actually does the job or has at least seen it performed. Asking some retired upcycling freelancer questions like, "What Does a Mudlogging Geologist Do?" isn't a particularly good idea. Maybe you should ask a petroleum geologist... like ours. He found a version of the "answer" to that question Terrie Brockmann wrote for WiseGEEK.com, but it was pretty much substandard.

Directional Drilling for Dummies

Mud motor basics

The staff petroleum geologist doesn't stick his head up all that often these days, but we though we'd prevail upon him to share a little of his knowledge about the oil business (aka the "awl bidness"). After all, we see a massive amount of misinformation here from freelancers whose only exposure to the industry is the local BP station. Heck, our guy consulted to BP several times. Whatever the case, we're knocking out two birds with one stone here, not only putting rock guy back in harness, but checking up on Infobarrel.com¹ as well. That's where we found John Crew attempting to explain "Oil Field Jobs: The Directional Driller."

Oil Patch Salaries for Dummies

If that's one of the largest structures in
the world, those must be BIG pickups!

A friend, who for a while attempted to educate the clueless about how the oil industry works; bemoans the fact that whenever people think of drilling for oil, those giant offshore platforms come to mind. Oh, yeah, and too many people think those are "oil rigs," the clueless fools. People who are clueless about the oil industry happens to be the subject of today's DotD nominee, buzzword aficionado Bridgette Austin, and the rubbish she posted at BizFluent.com under the title "Oil Rig Jobs & Salaries."

Dummy Answers to Ambiguous Questions

An electrician at work

One of the reasons our staffers spend so much time in the Leaf Group niche sites¹ is that the sites' "contributors" are so often incapable of answering open-ended questions. That fault may well have lain with eHow.com – the niches are filled with old eHow content moved by the successor to Demand Media – because of the site's strict limitations on content size. Then again, the fault may be the freelancer's lack of vision, such as that displayed by Denise Brandenberg. She apparently didn't think through the definition of "best" when writing, "The Best States to Work as an Electrician" at BizFluent.com (now at CareerTrend, which makes a lot more sense).