Go over to The Gregarious Loner and check out this post. Watch the video. It's eight minutes of Mike Rowe and he's not hard to watch. He's making a pretty important point, for those who are willing to listen.
TL;DR: we're afraid (as a society) of hard work, and it's going to break us.
It's true. Think about it. You call the garage because the Open-Wallet light on your dashboard came on. When are they going to get you in? A week from Tuesday? Do you think that's because they have a card game going on that they won't put aside for you? No. They are *busy* - doing skilled labor. Think those mechanics all have college degrees? Unlikely. Most of them have been turning a wrench for years.
Call a plumber because a drain is clogged. Same thing - you're going to wait. They're not hurting for business.
Welding - which Mike touches on in the video - is a dying art. An former coworker of mine had a son who took the VoPro welding track at the local BOCES during high school. He finished the track, graduated on time, and took the state welding certification test (or something like that). He had three offers of employment when he got his high school diploma, and not one of them was under $40,000 a year.
During my time at BBHIS, I saw this disconnect first-hand. Customers would come in, ask for advice, then argue with the answer they got because "it doesn't sound right". That red vest pretty much guaranteed that I was going to be treated like furniture at least once a day. I'm not a construction expert, but I know the basics and know where to find the answers I don't know.
Related anecdote: had a customer come in because she wanted to pour a new front stoop from concrete. 4x4 and eight inches thick. Anyone who's worked concrete knows that's a fair pour. Not huge, but fair. She wanted to know how many bags she'd need. I did the quick math and told her it'd be about twenty bags of concrete and a piece of re-mesh to do it. She told me I was wrong and she only needed eight or ten bags and no mesh.
*shrug* Whatever you want to do, ma'am.
I'm not skilled labor. But I have a clue. And you know, that welding certificate is looking better every day...
1 year ago
4 comments:
I got my engineering degree, but the whole time I was in school, and indeed even now, I am still thinking about something more hands on. Do some real mechanicing.
Dead on...
One of the few good things about growing up poor in the days before the Goobement did everything for you was, that if it was broke, you learned to fix it yourself. Now I see Yuppies standing next to a $30K SUV with a Flat Tire on the cell phone calling AAA....
Oddly enough, at one time I was a certified welder. I loved the work, but decided there must be a better way to make a living after a spark went inside my helmet, bounced off the inside of my safety glasses, and stuck into my contact lens.
If I could just stick to TIG welding, I'd be a happy camper.
I've got to say, the certification test (for steel, 1/8 to 3/8 thick, flat, horizontal, and vertical, was pretty difficult. It took about two hours of solid welding, and my right glove was smoking when I finished. Three of us (out of a class of about 30) tried to certify that day - one on TIG (me), one on FCAW, and one SMAW. I was the only one who passed.
Rolls
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