Ever since he graduated, John Norback has been working weekends, holidays and long hours. Now a mechanic at the Dynamic Mechanic in Stephenville, he finally has time to relax and enjoy time with his family.
Norback graduated from Dublin High School in 2011 and found a job at Prime Metal Buildings in Dublin, where he worked a variety of jobs. “I started off in the component shop,” he said. “Then they got a little slow and they needed help at the structure shop so I went up there to be a painter. Then they asked me if I wanted to learn how to weld and I said yes and I got pretty decent at it.”
After a little over a year at Prime, one of Norback’s family members asked if he’d be interested in a job in the oilfield. The money was good, so he went out to West Texas as a cement truck driver for drilling rigs.
The job required long hours. “I worked pretty much every day,” Norback said. “And I was on call 24/7.”
Still, he enjoyed working with the equipment and spending time with his coworkers. “They were all down to earth,” he said.
When oil prices crashed in 2015, Norback was out of a job, so he returned to Dublin and worked at the funeral home for a while as a gravedigger. He stayed there for two years, then left for another opportunity in the oil field at a company called Frac Fuel Solutions.
“It was a new company,” he said. “I started as a site operator, doing all the fueling of equipment out there.”
Soon he worked his way up to team lead, and then to regional manager. In his manager position, Norback got to travel to different drilling sites in Colorado, West Texas and North Dakota. “Traveling was definitely fun,” he said.
Norback’s daughter was born in 2019, and he decided to find a job that would let him be home more, so he returned to the Dublin area and found a job as an auto mechanic at the Dynamic Mechanic in Stephenville. “I’ve been here two years and I’m loving it,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever leave.”
Norback enjoys having more regular hours and time off, and likes the day-to-day work. “I get to learn something new every day,” he said. “It’s pretty satisfying when the customer comes in with something to work on and you’re able to fix it.”
He plans to stay at the Dynamic Mechanic for the foreseeable future. “They take really good care of me,” he said. “If I ever need to take days off for family stuff I can take it off, no questions asked.”
When he’s not working, Norback is usually spending time with his wife Morgan and their four-year-old daughter Adalyn. “They’re pretty much everything to me,” Norback said.
He and Morgan had known each other for years before they started dating. Their romantic relationship started off strong: Norback was planning to go visit family in Washington state with a friend, but when his friend couldn’t go, he invited Morgan instead. “That was our first date — flying across the country together,” he said.
The Norbacks married in 2019. His wife and daughter, Norback says, are his greatest source of inspiration. “For years I didn’t know what [my inspiration] was,” he said. “I would just go with the flow. But now that I have my wife and kid, they are my inspiration. I want to be good to [my daughter] and give her what I couldn’t have as a kid. I was never able to have toys and now my daughter has more toys than I know what to do with. I just want to make them happy.”
Norback’s advice to Dublin graduates is to take life as it comes. “Don’t think about the future too much,” he said. “Slow down and just pay attention to what’s around you at the time.”
Editor’s Note: This column chronicles what Dublin graduates have done since high school. If you have any suggestions for other grads, email publisher@dublincitizen.com.