those lucky auto mechanics
Update: I’ve discovered that the links to the NYT from this blog don’t seem to send you right to the article, but instead to a login page. I didn’t mean to do this, sorry. For some reason, I was able to click right to the article when I Googled it. The first one is called “My Personal Credit Crisis”, and the second is called “The Case for Working With Your Hands”.
I read a couple of very interesting articles in the New York Times Online yesterday. One of them was this one, the tale of an economic correspondent for the New York Times who found himself in a subprime mortgage and $50,000 of credit card debt. Believe me, it’s a story worth reading. I wanted to roll back time, jump into his life, and criticize him and his wife for their thoughtless spending habits, but that would not only be impossible but very wrong of me. I couldn’t help feeling a little of that Alexandra Penney feeling towards him, though – the monthly take-home pay that he characterized as impossible to make ends meet on is slightly more than my own.
The other interesting article was this one. Slate wrote a gushing, glowing review of the book that this article is excerpted from – a book that echoes Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance but is, I think, more a practical discussion of why the working world is going in the wrong direction these days. I firmly believe one of the key tenets of the article: that there is value in the skilled trade professions that is absolute and incorruptible, and that the practice of looking down on these professions because they don’t require higher education is absurd and must end.
(I have something of a personal investment in this notion, because my mother is a professor who very clearly looks down on skilled trades, while my father is a born and bred mechanic/carpenter/tradesman who was unwillingly sewn into an office job in his final years in the Navy.)
I was inspired to think quite hard about my own job and my own direction when I was reading this article.
A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this. Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate.
Crawford writes of the lack of visible progress inherent in most office jobs. The work is unending, non-episodic, often tedious, and generally does not have any measurable output. In my own job, I see letters that are signed and mailed out, and a few weeks later I see medical records placed on my desk by the mailman. I see letters come in requesting material and I see that material go out. There is measurable work being done. When a case settles, I share in a tiny percentage of the relief of our clients, because I did work – wrote letters, organized papers, shared insights – that had a part in achieving this result.
But I hadn’t thought about the kind of results he’s talking about: a motorcycle comes into his shop broken, and the owner drives it out of his shop fixed. I am not often given the chance to directly help a client achieve a good result. My mind returned to a thought I’d picked up and turned over a long time ago – how unfair it is that paralegals are not allowed to offer legal services directly to the public, because doing so would be the unauthorized practice of law. I firmly believe this rule should be modified such that paralegals can directly complete very simple tasks, all designated specifically in the law so as to avoid that slippery slope problem, so that people with simple legal problems and no money can be helped. That is something I’d like to do for a living; that, even though it’s office work, I’d consider real, rewarding work.
But only attorneys can do the kind of work I’m talking about, and there are precious few attorneys who are interested in that kind of direct help, rather than renting their laurels to the highest bidder. Honestly, yesterday morning was the first time I’ve seriously considered law school in years, for this crazy altruistic reason.
Teaching yoga might be helpful, and might help make the world a better place karmically, but it’s not necessarily going to provide any visible positive result to me. Change of the yogic sort takes a long time, and is the work of the student far more so than the teacher. Life coaching is sort of the same way. I still believe that these vocations are in my future, but after reading this article I have a yen for using my brain to work with my hands – constructively, not literally, as being a plumber is not for me.
There’s a little storefront down the street from my office where an attorney sells help with pro se legal issues (pro se means you represent yourself, and it’s for things like landlord/tenant, DUIs, little stuff like that). He will give you legal advice, but you don’t really engage him per hour ad infinitem like most attorneys. He does the work that I’d love to do. I’ll bet he doesn’t make much in his little shop – probably not enough to employ a paralegal – but he may know someone else who does the same kind of work who’s looking for help. I think I’ll stroll down there next week and ask him.
May 30, 2009 at 9:40 am
I have written about the skilled trades often on my teacher blog. I don’t CARE if my mechanic can discuss the implications of Lady MacBeth’s motivations, I care that he keeps my car safe and functioning.
I 100% agree with you; we really need to shift the way we think about the work that people do, and an important part of that shift is that we stop thinking that EVERYONE needs to be spit out of school knowing the same stuff…
Moreover, that EVERYONE needs to be spit out of a school in the first place, instead of a trade school or an apprenticeship. Also, I’ve read on your blog that you have the world’s best mechanic – I’m surprised he doesn’t know about Macbeth.
May 30, 2009 at 3:50 pm
It’s very, very hard for people to practice the kind of law you describe. After college and three years of law school, its pretty easy to rack up a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt. The debt pressure tends to force lots of talented people into higher paying jobs that are soul crushing and incredibly boring.
Also, as removed as it seems, the law that your firm practices is actually a bit closer to clients who will be satisfied that all sorts of other practices. The lawyers on the other side of your cases are typically representing insurance companies. The people who benefit from what they do are largely an abstraction — maybe its the shareholders of the company? maybe its the rate payers?
The most satisfying legal work I’ve ever done was representing inmates on death row.
May 30, 2009 at 5:43 pm
I am a product fo skilled trades that now works in a professional capacity along side of others with college degrees. My anxiety about my lack of education in my profession is one of the things that I used to think about all of the time.
It wasn’t until I realized that my skill set is completely different from those around me that things started getting better for me.
I started, after the Army, as a construction laborer…the bottom rung.
June 1, 2009 at 11:23 am
I thought I’d posted it once but if so I can’t find it. Hell, maybe you and I had this conversation via email some months ago. If so, I apologize.
Generally, I sometimes find myself ashamed to be doing the work I’m doing. I feel like there’s something false about work that, as described above, has no real physical or measurable or sometimes even noticeable outcome. I feel like, on the other hand, the time I spent busting my ass to rebuild my deck, or the hours I spent tinkering on my motorcycle, or the years I spent hauling lumber on a truck, are in many ways more worthy of respect than the job I get paid a fairly nice sum to do now. And in many ways no less mentally challenging.
I think a psychologist could chalk up some of my feelings to childhood years in which people around me attempted to beat me down by devaluing my intelligence…but I don’t think that’s the sum of it. Deep down I just…feel better when I work with my hands. And as Pirsig says, isn’t it the feeling of “good” that matters?
Well, the fact that there’s a visible feedback loop with building the deck or fiddling with the motorcycle or, in my case, making jewelry, cross-stitched items, and scarves, is the biggest part of it for me. But the “just feeling better” is what I think Crawford has spent a few thousand words trying to pin down.
June 1, 2009 at 11:24 am
I should also say that I earnestly wanted to take a year of auto mechanics in high school…but that was a two-hour class and my college-prep course load didn’t allow for two hours’ worth of electives. What a crock of crap that academic conceit really is.
Laaaame. I took shop for a half a semester when I was in middle school, and I freakin’ loved it.
June 1, 2009 at 1:31 pm
I did “Home Ec/Industrial Arts” in 8th grade. A semester of each. I made a Baked Alaska and a trophy shelf, a skateboard pillow and a set of cast aluminum comedy/tragedy masks. Auto mech would have been much more fun.
June 3, 2009 at 1:31 am
I really enjoyed that article.
But on the other hand, I seem to recall (my thoughts were scrambled by a 50degree celsius summer) that after several weeks chipping cotton after I finished school I rang my mother and wailed, “I want to be an academic!”.
June 3, 2009 at 3:07 pm
I said the same thing after that first summer working in the tobacco fields. “Damn this, I’m definitely going to college!!”
June 4, 2009 at 8:21 pm
I remember one winter break I was working for Dad in his machine shop. I worked in the office with my brother, and it was snowing outside like crazy. It snowed so much that winter that the plows had to scoop the snow into dump trucks and leave it in a field (in Enfield, mind you!) to melt.
My brother said to me, “That must be such an irritating job. You work so hard to move all that snow, just so you won’t have anything to show for it once it melts in the spring. At least with my job I can make something out of metal.”
I don’t know…if those snowplow guys knew how thoroughly heroic I considered them when I lived up there, they might find it worthwhile.
June 24, 2009 at 11:13 am
[...] a similar sort of feeling that I expressed several weeks ago in a comment over on Crisitunity’s page. In some nebulous way it feels more like “real work” than what I do. I feel like, [...]