I have just purchased the Jan 2006 issue of Fine Homebuilding. In reading the comments on page 46, Breaktime, I just want to add my experience of a stigma being attached to a word to describe what someone does.
Once I was a upper lever manager for a large wholesale lumber business. We had added new bathrooms on to our main office building. The work was complete but had yet to be ‘cleaned’ to be used. With 22 women working in the office all we had was our old bathroom with one toilet…we needed the new bathroom. Many of my employees had made comments that they weren’t going to clean the new bathroom just so they could use it.
I learned many years ago that ‘names do not hurt if we don’t let them’. I was the top management but I still needed to use a bathroom just like the lowest person on the totem pole. I cleaned the bathroom.
Many years later, after 911, I became unemployed. Not due to 911, just due to the fact that I had an employer using cocaine and I found some residue on my desk one morning. I chose to leave and turned him into the state authorities. So to make ends meet after unemployment benefits ran out I decided to begin a House Cleaning Business. I started off with a few clients. Within one year I had 40 clients and 2 employees and making good money. I can remember the first time someone referred to me as their cleaning lady. I felt ashamed. Then, promptly informed her that I happened to be someone who cleaned her home and that I was the best damned “toilet” cleaner she had ever met! She agreed.
No job is unimportant in this life. Someone somewhere created a job to fill a niche…if you are a ‘handyman’ be the best you can at it. Also, take a moment to remember that words are defined by generations/culture. A word that once meant happy now means something all together different. Also, take a moment to be grateful that you are able to make a living at whatever you do.
I now have another big management position and making good money…but I really appreciate that I know that I am one of the best damned cleaning ladies in town.
Handymen (and anyone in the building industry including this magazine) are a desperately needed business in this time of our society. None of us can afford to move to new homes so we make do with what we have. Many of us hire someone willing to figure out how to help us. Thanks to all of you who are in the business and never feel too important to do a simple job for a client that needs help. You are serving a purpose and that is all that matters.
Replies
> No job is unimportant in this life.
I used to test rubbers for the Air Force. Does that count?
Seriously, I agree, and I appreciate especially building cleaners, garbagemen (sorry, "refuge haulers"), and restaurant employees. I especially appreciate it when someone in one of these positions takes pride in their work.
For my money (and I mean money) the pride you take in your job is in many ways more important than the specific job you do (and is especially more important than your title).
happy?
Dan
Seriously, I agree, and I appreciate especially building cleaners, garbagemen (sorry, "refuge haulers"), and restaurant employees. I especially appreciate it when someone in one of these positions takes pride in their work.
Well said! I used to tell my children that I didnt care where they worked, could be McD's or MCI, but do the job with a sense of pride. Be good at what you do and it will be appreciated.
Doug
Re: "No job is unimportant in this life."
Careful there good buddy. Your getting might close to communism there. Piffin will, any minute now, come screaming down from on high and chastize you for failure to support unrestrained free market capitalism and the right of the high born to demand higher compensation for fancier job titles.
Doctors and drug companies get the credit for the health of society but this overlooks the simple fact that by far the greatest advancement in human health has been sanitation, clean food and water, which was not advanced by medicine but by government sanctioned civil engineers, regulators and inspectors.
But don't say this too loud. The merest hint that free market capitalism is not the singular fountain of wisdom and prosperity will get you labeled a socialist and heretic.
Quickly now flee your folly and perform penance buy buying something conspicuous and extravagant and telling someone poor to 'work harder'. It is too late for me but maybe none will notice your economic apostasy. Surely it was but a momentary slip.
> .... government sanctioned civil engineers, regulators and inspectors ....
Um, what about plumbers? Somewhere there's a quote, IIRC from Dean Edell or someone like that, that plumbers have saved more lives than doctors ever will.
-- J.S.
Depends. Did plumbers build the first modern masonry sewers? Do plumbers drill wells? Depends on how charitable and general your definition is.Plumbers, if you limit the term to those handling some sort of pipes, got into it, for the most part, and IMHO, late. Once the sewer systems, masonry tunnels operated by gravity and tides mostly, were built and the wells, lacking a distribution system more complicated than a bucket, were protected from sewage plumbing to get the sewage to the main drains and fresh water to individual houses became a big thing in the western world.Early on sewage and fresh water didn't have distribution systems going to individual homes. Blocks of houses had wells or fountains and sewage was either outhouses or simply, and colorfully, tossed out the window. I suppose a fountain would be plumbed. Some localities has community toilets and, possibly, bathhouses. Even into the 20s many people in the US outside of cities were still essentially free of what most would call plumbing. A hand pumped well and outhouse was still common in many areas.Based on my limited understanding of history and realizing that the facts are too diverse and widespread in time and territory to characterize with any accuracy I think that plumbers could be said to have more preserved and modernized sanitation even if they had not created the system to begin with. A noble enough calling and history.
I was thinking more that it takes the individual plumber getting the slope of the waste lines, depth of traps, venting, etc. done right to keep the whole sanitation shebang working safely. The original idea of the thread was this hierarchy of job titles and the importance and nobility of all labor ....
One quirk of the history of all this is that some cities have separate sanitary and storm drains, as does LA, while others have a single combined sewer system. IIRC, SF has a combined system. Mostly it's older places that are single system, and the expense and disruption of upgrading to separate systems is a real big public policy issue.
-- J.S.
Re: "The original idea of the thread was this hierarchy of job titles and the importance and nobility of all labor ...."A noble sentiment. I made the noted the differential in credit commonly given between doctors and people responsible for public sanitation and food safety simply because the the people who often get the credit are not often the people who had the most to do with the progress.I chose that example partially because it is currently unpopular to think governments, or anyone outside the holy circle of free-market capitalists, can do any good. Not out of any resentment toward plumbers. Or even doctors and drug companies necessarily. Point being that those getting credit and general acclaim are not those who have done the most good.
Someone going through "Tavern withdrawal"?
J. D. Reynolds
Home Improvements
Quit standing on your head, you're getting cross-eyed from trying to hard to read something into somebody elses thinking. As my previous post pointys out, your synoopsis has nothing to do with my view of the world
Welcome to the Taunton University of Knowledge FHB Campus at Breaktime. where ... Excellence is its own reward!
Re: ..."trying to hard to read something into somebody elses thinking."The question is not what you think. The question is: do you think? Do you have any extant ability to process and question your own assumptions? To separate talking points and posturing from reasoning and use information from outside the usual talking heads and sophists for hire. To question the information spoon fed you.You have your beliefs. They seem to be articles of faith incapable of being questioned. Given any input but complete agreement and the argument is met with platitude and condescension. So be it. You can ignore what I write, answer in an intelligent manner by point or continue acting as if your words were chiseled in stone and the only way to see things. I would prefer the middle option but given the other two I have no plan to change my style for anything as trivial as being told I'm standing on my head.
No need to change your writing style. I like it. You are very talented there.The problem is your listening styule. You don't do it. If you did, you would never make the comment on my position that you did. The thing that is chisled in stone is your presumption of my thinking, not my thoughts.
Welcome to the Taunton University of Knowledge FHB Campus at Breaktime. where ... Excellence is its own reward!
AMEN!
when whatever is done well, the simplest task is batter done than a sloppy image position.
I don't think I partiocipated in that thread you reference. I remember reading dinosaurs's quoted position and how a name will stick with you when I read it in the magazine. I don't totally agree with that, because I started with full intention of being a handynan in this area.
I am now a sought after renovator and designer, all because I took each task before me and gave it my best atention and performance.
One of the most inspirational memories I have ( sorry to those of you who have read this before) is a gal who had been a waitress in a greasy spoon. Slow season and she talked herself into a job sweeping up where I was one of the subs building a jail. She answered the phone in the trailer for the super when he was not there too.
The super on this job was a loser to begin with, as incapable a person I have ever seen on a job. So she filled in the blanks for him.
All the subs soon l;earned that she was better at communicating and handling things than he was, so they went through her instead. If a wall needed an electrician before it could get covered , the sheetrockers knbew that it would take three days if they went to the super, but could get done in hours if they told the sweep-up gal. She carried the info to the right person and did it in a friendly way.
She was not manipulaticve and was not whoring her way to the top. She just did whgat she saaw needed doing and did it all well with a great attitude.
Somehow, the corporate heads out of state figured out what was goping on. The Super got canned and she was offered a position at 50K annually( In about '79) to manage their next job for them. She got hive fives from all of us. She deserved it.
All 'cause she knew how to drive a push broom.
Welcome to the
Taunton University of Knowledge FHB Campus at Breaktime.
where ...
Excellence is its own reward!
I've been called installer, mechanic, service technician, etc. People don't know what to use with political correctness and all.