The Weekly Curmudgeon

A couple of things happened to me this week.  A plumbing breakdown and two very important (!) deadlines at work.  I did not have the skills to help myself with the first, but I was able to collaborate with others to help accomplish the other.  Looking back, if I were to be able to pick which of the skill sets I would prefer to have cultivated during my life, I would probably choose the plumbing. And I’m not being allegorical here.  Especially if I were looking for say, a feeling of satisfaction that comes with knowing you have fixed or built something.  Or the knowledge that I had helped a panicky 50 year old woman whose basement is in danger of flooding.

My desk

My work mostly takes place at my desk.  Sometimes my work takes place at a bigger desk in meetings with other people who work at desks.  Sometimes I journey to a client’s office where we meet across his or her desk.  I think you’re getting my drift.

In an incredibly good New York Times article from May 2009, The Case for Working With Your Hands,  author Matthew Crawford writes,

“One television show “Dirty Jobs,” shows all kinds of grueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys for a living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive”.

Matthew Crawford who himself operates a small business fixing motorcycles (and is also the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft, Making Things Work) goes on to describe what I agree is a fundamental problem in America.

“High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses”.

Before anyone came up with the idea of an “information economy” there were guilds.  A guild was made up of experienced and confirmed experts in their field of handicraft. They were called master craftsmen. Before a new employee could rise to the level of mastery, he had to go through a schooling period during which he was first called an apprentice. After this period he could rise to the level of journeyman, than master and finally grandmaster.  This process, while it had some downsides (such as the basically indentured existence of an apprentice) makes so much sense yet we have let it slip away.

Man, prior to information economy emasculation

In case you’re still not tracking with me, a list of jobs that we really still need people to learn how to do so they can help We Of The Desk includes:  plumber, car mechanic, carpenter, cement mason, electrician, heavy equipment operator, machinist, plasterer, and stonemason just to name a few.

Not a small part of our problem is that We Of The Desk or just your run-of-the-mill college-educated parents have a bias against people who are tradesmen.  Instead of viewing these individuals as skilled we assume that they lack the smarts do the work done by We Of The Desk.  Until we need their services that is.

What masters-prepared, over-educated “knowledge worker” parent wouldn’t cringe at the prospect of having to answer, “Phil is going to technical school to become an electrician” to the question “What schools are Phil looking at?”

Yet in case anyone is wondering, in my town an after-hours plumbing housecall costs $250.00 for the guy or gal to show up and commiserate with you about your problem.  That’s before they lift a finger.

To other We Of Desk people, you still can find ways – through the intention with which you approach your work, the relationships that you forge with your co-workers, and the pride of having done an honest days work for your employer’s dollar – to feel that your efforts are of worth.

I will close by sharing Marge Piercy’s poem, To Be of Use which can be taken literally if you are a tradesperson or allegorically if you are a desk worker.

To Be Of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

– Marge Piercy

Do good work this week. – The Mudge

We Of The Desk