From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Bob Carlson and this is Unfictional.

Unfictional is KCRW's program of stories and original documentaries. It's a part of KCRW's independent

producer project and today on the program a woman arms herself before setting out for

a day of work at the lunch counter.

A teenager with mostly babysitting on her resume

spends three grueling months in a cannery in Alaska.

Plus, the secret life of a telephone sales man. It's an episode called

Women's Work on Unfictional. Beginning here with 21-year-old Florida native

Nethina St. Pierre.

She ended up in Watford City, North Dakota, looking for a good-paying job in the middle of the

oil drilling frenzy going on up there.

And she did find work, but she also found that unforgiving wind-swept

landscape populated almost completely by men from all over the country, working the drill rigs

and driving the tanker trucks who, like Nethina, are there for the paycheck, not the scenery.

And being a woman in this strange pop-up society of man camps and truck stops means always keeping up your guard and keeping a

loaded weapon. Well independent producer Todd Melby has spent most of the last year

up in the oil country of Western North Dakota. He met Athena St. Pierre at her job

working behind a lunch counter in Watford City.

It was flattering at first to have people hitting on me all the time.

It was almost like, you know, they really thought I was pretty and they were attracted to everything about me.

And after about three months of it, and it was everywhere I went at the grocery store.

You can go into the gas station, you can pump gas, you could be walking.

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