I've never done it.
But it sure was a staple of employment around here for a long time, including when I was young, although the handwriting was already on the wall then.
Casper got its start as a railhead. That is, it was the penetration of the railroad into central Wyoming, not the oil industry, that brought the town about. Nonetheless, even from its earliest days dreams of petroleum riches dominated the economic thought of the town, overshadowing the actual industries that were here at first.
Starting as early as the 1890s, however, local oil exploration brought refining to Casper. And World War One caused it to explode. We've written about that here:
1917 The Year that made Casper what it is. Or maybe it didn't. Or maybe it did.
As we've already addressed this topic, to a large degree, I'll forgo doing that again in depth. But I will note that for decades here, indeed most of the 20th Century, petroleum refining provided good, blue collar, industrial jobs at good wages for local people.
And that's exactly how it went. People graduated from high school, or perhaps attended junior college for a while, and then found work at one of the three refineries. They were trained there and worked their way up in classic blue collar occupations, like being a machinist, for example.
The loss of those jobs, for the most part, has made a permanent change in the economics of the town, and in its culture as well. Refining, save for the remaining Sinclair refinery, has been decoupled from production. Jobs that offered stable careers. . . they keep refining even during a recession, have gone away, with many of the remaining blue collar jobs centered in oil and gas exploration, which is very much subject to the fluctuations in the petroleum economy.
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