Norm could quickly read off a laundry list, some of the items being:
Wear nitrile gloves when using yukkie stuff. Drain your compressor. Safety glasses often aren't enough. Wear Goggles. Do NOT use a hair-dryer in the bath tub.
Or he could suggest a section to view on his website that contains safety suggestions and run of the mill stuff that users should view on occasion. Stuff that would eat up valuable TV time if he went through it every time on his show.
Talk of PC tools reminds me of what I often saw working on the PC's of friends and relatives AFTER they had tried to repair, replace or upgrade something on their own. I've seen keyed connectors of every sort jammed in backwards in ways I thought impossible. I've seen PCI-E boards installed in machines too old to have proper slots for them (for non-techies think of European wall plug jammed into US outlet). It made me realize that people have very different conceptual views of how easy or hard some things are. DIY PC upgrades were presented as easy, and many were - until you hit the first even mildly unusual situation. Norm makes it look so easy - and can always do another take if it's not!
Another example would be all these "flip your house" programs that I think powered a great deal of the last housing boom by making it look *so* easy to flip a house. I know a lot of people who bought structurally unsound homes or ones that had defects so serious they might never sell again in the frenzy. For a little while, there was always someone just as stupid, willing to buy, without "due diligence," a termite or mold infested home as the prices kept soaring. The media hardly ever said "can it last forever"?" They were too busy selling the boom with ads, articles and TV shows alongside real estate agents, mortgage brokers, local government taxmen and anyone else who could make a nickel selling a house to a turnip. Who knew that protecting even dumb consumers from themselves would, in the long run, have protected the entire economy?
I think one of the problems is that Norm and lots of others make craftsmanship look easy by bringing an ocean of knowledge to a problem that most people can't appreciate. It's like that old engineering joke about the PE that sends a detailed bill for his job:
Bolt -$1 Knowing where to put the bolt - $5,000
The fun on real jobs comes from aggressive flippers gutting load bearing members or something just as serious. (I confess, I recall TOH getting snagged on one very long beam acting as a lever that affected the roof suspension.) It's knowing what to do when something very unusual happens. It's knowing where to look for signs of repeated basement flooding BEFORE closing! (-: It's making sure your 200A panel isn't actually being fed by old 60A feeders. It's like the old first year intern's joke about procedures involving insertion of some sort of test equipment: "Call the surgeons, it's stuck and I can't get it out!!!"
The plus side is that eventually, a real dumb DIY that has bitten off more than they can chew will, at some point, hire a pro. It's after the experience gained by the material ruined, people can actually appreciate that they are paying for more than they can see. They can stand by in awe and say "Gee, he knows how to drill into the bedroom wall without shorting out the lights. I'd say one giveaway consistent with amateur home repair is the obvious lack of squareness. Tyros eyeball but pros either use a level or have one "built into their brains" that's just as good.
Which is probably the subject for another thread: What are the hallmarks of a good contractor, in any field?
-- Bobby G.
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