twenty years of schooling and they put you on the dayshift...

Tom Watson · 2009-05-24T11:29:31+00:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------May 24, 2009The Case for Working With Your Hands By MATTHEW B. CRAWFORDThe television show ?Deadliest Catch? depicts commercial crabfishermen in the Bering Sea. Another, ?Dirty Jobs,? shows all kinds ofgrueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys fora living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in thefact that such confrontations with material reality have becomeexotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal thanreal. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see anytangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplishedat the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect isopaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agencycan be elusive. ?Dilbert,? ?The Office? and similar portrayals ofcubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americanshave come to view their white-collar jobs.Is there a more ?real? alternative (short of inseminating turkeys)?High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s aseducators prepared students to become ?knowledge workers.? Theimperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and sendit to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the futurein which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about ina pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with,such work often feels more enervating than gliding. Morefundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fixour cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses. When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful,the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options.We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrificefor others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur ?the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come tomind. But...

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Charlie Self 17 years ago

Unfortunately, as basic farm style skills have atrophied in the general population, fewer and fewer people are even interested in learning how to do trades jobs. Schools started two-tracking about the time I got to HS, academic and shop. Shop was for the dummies. My mother had big dreams for me, based on engineering of some type (both my paernts came directly from farm familes) I think being the primary goal. Yeah, well...my math skills meant I'd never be an engineer. My interests leaned more to following the old man's "profession," auto mechanic, aka grease monkey back then.

Instead, I joined the Marines and ended up playing with expensive aircraft with the props on top.

From there it was a straight jump to...yeah, right. After drifitng for a couple years, I went to college, and ended up doing most of my writing work on motorcycles, cars and woodworking, with stops at home building and remodeling, while living in the country.

I don't have a clue as to an answer, but I do know we need top tradespeople in almost all fields. The pay in many is now almost as bad as that for schoolteachers, though, so improvement in skills is less likely.

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jo4hn 17 years ago

The one encounter with an inspector was when we were selling our flatland house. The buyer wanted an inspection, the results of which made me laugh initially and ultimately led me to put the house back on the market. The inspector was a class A fenderhead. The finding that set me off was a back bedroom which had two problems:

A dead electrical outlet.
An electric switch that did not operate anything.

Yup. The switch controlled the outlet. The buyer came back and bought the place "as is". grumble, jo4hn

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Lew Hodgett 17 years ago

================================= I don't have a clue as to an answer, but I do know we need top tradespeople in almost all fields. The pay in many is now almost as bad as that for schoolteachers, though, so improvement in skills is less likely. ================================

SFWIW, because of his interest in all things cars, and lack of available trained personnel, Jay Leno has established some scholarships for mechanics to work on his car collection.

Evidently it is possible to earn $100+K as a properly trained mechanic these days.

Lew

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Lee Michaels 17 years ago

And it doesn't matter what the Wall Strteet boys do either. You still need your car fixed.

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RicodJour 17 years ago

Well school teachers around here do pretty damn well for themselves. Average Teacher Salary: $82,520 That's the _average_.

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Swingman 17 years ago

Seen this a number of times with inspectors and 3 way switches that operate lights on two levels, like balconies and porches ...

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Tim Douglass 17 years ago

Where are you? Around here the average is more like half that and the very top is less than that.

Tim Douglass

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: Spelling errors in this message are the product of a poor school system. Pay teachures more than athletes.

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Ed Pawlowski 17 years ago

You can hit that in CT. One school district also has 20 sick days, 5 personal days, plus the usual holidays. Many families live on far less than teacher salaries these days.

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RicodJour 17 years ago

Long Island, NY There are a number of school districts around here that are up in that range.

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jo4hn 17 years ago

system. Pay teachures more than athletes. Ummm. Tim, you have a misspelled word in your sig: it should be

*athaletes*. :-) jo4hn

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RicodJour 17 years ago

ol system. Pay teachures more than athletes.

U mus b unedumucated! At leats meens at a minimunum.

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Larry W 17 years ago

Good article, perhaps in the future it would be more appropriate to just post a link to th original copyrighted material.

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Tom Watson 17 years ago

Go buy the book it was excerpted from.

Regards,

Tom Watson

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Glenn Lyford 17 years ago

Or the color of the walls or carpets.

Just as scary to me are the realtors who insist on staging a house to the nth degree, like people can't figure out that a room can be used as a bedroom, because there currently isn't a bed in it, or that one end of the kitchen can be used for dining because it doesn't have a table? Or even more sadly, that experience has proved them right...

--Glenn Lyford

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krw 17 years ago

Yep.

I agree with them to a point. At least I've found it easier to look at homes that are furnished than ones that aren't. Even though I brought a laser tape measure with me when we were house hunting, it was easier to judge the size of furnished rooms than unfurnished.

The big thing they drive home is neutral colors and to "de-junkify". In those I agree 100%. I'd add *NO F-ING WALLPAPER*. After my last house, I *hate* wallpaper.

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