With Q2 reporting kicking off in earnest next week, I fear we are going to see “this” far too often. Please, someone, prove me wrong.

Houston/Denver/Midland- We (xyz company) are pleased to report our Q2 earnings. Well, they weren’t really earnings because of one time non recurring (but recurring) charges, depreciation and S,G&A so can we will pivot to EBITDA please? Great. In the quarter, we came in 1% below capital guidance because we stopped fracing for the last 18 days of June but you can’t tell from our volumes because, well, timing.

10% of our rigs are drilling lease obligation wells but we like to make you THINK it must be like 85% because we are going to keep rigs flat through the remainder of the year -in part because we signed 3 year contracts in 2017 when you wanted production growth and in part because we are praying you will stop paying attention to capital discipline.

Finally, a topic of interest has been executive compensation and we want you to know we are really, really focused on that. Because we get paid A LOT and would prefer to keep getting paid A LOT. Please stop asking us to merge with someone and lose our income. Thank you. Oh, and we are doing another layoff. Sorry about that, the investors are asking for us to be disciplined.