Posted on 05/12/2016 9:02:45 AM PDT by fella
Every once in a while, we come across someone – either in the media, on TV or YouTube, or right next door – who captivates our attention because of their passion and love for what they’re doing.
. . .
Mike Rowe is one of these individuals. Ever since I discovered his show Dirty Jobs, I was hooked on his messages, vibrant energy, and his overall approach to living and working better.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
My brother is like that. He’s a commercial glazier. My other brother and I are more white collar, although my current job requires steel toed boots and helmets, it’s in a sales capacity.
We were helping some relatives pour concrete at their cabin and my brother was too self important to realize that all of the people he was constantly berating as “college boy” were all college graduates and he made himself look like an absolute idiot.
I’m a big fan of labor jobs, especially when you’re young. My college student son is working a construction job this summer and loves it. He’s learning critical life skills.
Sweet!!
A boy my daughter dated in high school went the Caterpillar route and now he is making real money and has rapidly worked his way up employed by them. He went through about 10 years ago though so no idea what it is like now.
Every hot 20 something white women on TV / in movies is either a partner in a Law firm, CSI lead investigator, owner of a top end art dealership, editor of a fashion magazine or high powered advertizing executive.
Every judge is a black woman.
You mean the real world doesn’t work like that???
I think the slogan on my BIL’s trucks was “Nothing beats a straight flush.”
Have to tell you a story about my plumber, Manny. God bless him.
Several years ago there was heavy rain and flooding in St. Louis. My basement flooded —water shooting up from the storm drain. I had 3 FEET of water in my basement. Called a plumber, he looked down my basement steps at the water and said, “no can do”. I called Manny’s firm and he came out. For him, “no problem” —he’s a shorty and he jumped in the water —which was up to his chest, and proceeded to unblock the drain and let the water out. It was filthy, dirty sewer water. ugh.
After he finished and was drying out on my porch, he mentioned he had to get home because he was going to bake the wedding cake for his daughter. All I could think about was his whole body being immersed in that nasty sewer water and wondering how clean he could get his hands, and how thankful I wasn’t attending the wedding :-) God love him, he was the best plumber I ever had :-)
Thanks. I have respect for a Vice President in a large corporation who provides leadership, the right pathway, and protects the interests of the people under him.
I also respect the guy who cuts my grass, because he pays attention to his work, does a great job on the edges, avoids my wife’s garden items, is reliable, dependable, flexible, and is a customer oriented type of guy who runs a family business.
I respect the person who writes software, and the person who cleans the bathroom.
I don’t respect the garbage collectors in my town, because they throw people’s trash cans on their lawn or in their driveway, instead of either standing them up or gently placing them on the ground so they don’t blow away.
The respect is about how much someone cares about what they do. If they do a good job and treat their customers well (VP treats employees under him as customers, municipal trash collectors treat the elderly guy in the run down house as THEIR customer) then they have my respect. Work is work.
It always reminds me, when I do hear people speak disparagingly about someone who they see as doing a job that would be beneath them, the old joke about all the organs in the body that had an argument about who should be the boss.
The Brain said “I’m the obvious choice, I have the ability to orchestrate everything.”
The Heart said “How about me? How can people make moral decisions without me, and besides, I keep you all supplied with blood!”
The Stomach said “No, I should be the boss. Without me, you guys would wander around all the time undernourished thinking of your next meal.”
The Rectum spoke up and said “Why can’t I be...” and he was immediately shouted down, ridiculed and laughed at by all the other organs. So the rectum said, “Fine. You are all jerks. I am clamming up, and I am not going back to work until everyone apologizes to me.”
After three days without a rectum on the job, everyone voted to make the Asshole the Boss.
Dad became a veterinarian on the GI Bill after World War II. But he grew up as a farm boy and appreciated the importance of basic carpentry and metal working skills, which he passed on to his five sons.
My BIL is a millionaire at least twice or thrice over. Yet every spring he calls me and asks if it’s time to charge up my A/C with refrigerant again. If It needs it he comes over himself and does it.
I do his electrical work and he does anything plumbing for me. If you looked at him on the street, you’d think he was just a dumbass country boy like me.
I spent four years in the Navy as a jet mechanic, working the flight deck in all weather, etc. Cleaned a lot of toilets and urinals, scubbed a lot of floors, carried a lot of trash, got my hands and body so filthy, cold, hot, cut, scratched, and irritated, that it gave me a very, very healthy respect for anyone who worked with their hands.
Those four years were the most influential years of my entire life. I learned who I was and what I wanted to do with my life, and it also made me understand what I didn’t want to do.
I loved being a mechanic, I had good aptitude for it, developed my troubleshooting skills, I was eventually a QC inspector (verifying and signing off on the work of others)
But the thing was...I hated being dirty and having mangled hands all the time. Stick your hand somewhere to check, and a poorly executed safety wire job pokes you up under your fingernail. You get a finger sliced from some unexpected sharp edge. You rip the skin clean from your knuckle, but because you are up sailing around the Arctic Circle where it is around zero degrees with a 45 knot wind and replacing a Constant Speed Drive on a plane tied down on the flight deck, your hands are so cold that you look at your knuckle, and it isn’t bleeding at all. It is just a white area the size of a dime. It won’t start bleeding until your hands warm up. And so on.
No matter how hard I tried to be careful and wash thoroughly, my hands always had ingrained dirt, and putting my hands in my pockets to grab anything was extremely uncomfortable.
So I decided to make my living with my brain instead of my body.
As a result, I have always had an abiding respect for those who do work, outdoors in all weather.
I can’t pass by a guy roofing a house, or a guy on a utility pole without thinking to myself “God. That is some hard work, there...”
Hmm. I had no problems viewing it. Of course, I am using an older version of Opera (v. 12.16) but with “Ghostery” and “Adblocker Plus” and I could read the article.
Agree that the layout is poor, though...
Cheers!
But he merely work with nuclear materials, whereas your granddaughter risks getting raped/stabbed/murdered by her clients! Best wishes for both, though.
That is a great trade. The thing about a trade like that is that the folks who are in need of getting their heavy gear back into service are losing thousands and thousands of dollars while it sits idle, broken. If they have to pay him a grand for a day of wrenching, it’s a bargain. Good move.
One plumbing company puts this slogan on their trucks, “A flush beats a full house.”
After getting my B.A. In English and Psych and teaching in public schools, grad work at 2 prominent universities, then 4 years in ministry to college students, I went back to my summer job through college - as an apprentice electrician. Went through full apprenticeship, went from Journeyman to Master to Unlimited Electrical Contractor’s license, then general contractor /corporate CEO doing complex, high-tech, negotiated 7-figure contracts for Fortune 500 firms for 10 years.
The apprenticeship learning process is invaluable and by far the best method of training in any field: old Chinese proverb - “I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do, I understand.” That’s why it’s used in all the trades. There are those who have successfully used it to train doctors and lawyers as well. It builds character and a work ethic - and teaches one humility.
Mike Rowe gets it - and is incredible at communicating important and lost principles of life. Love the guy!
BTW, I also am a very experienced public speaker and writer......skills I also learned through........apprenticeship........the method Jesus used to train the 12.......also called discipleship.........
:0)
There is dignity in all honest labor.
L
Cutting and pasteing around all those ads after wading through them to read the story (I like Rowe that much) was taking to much time because I had work to do in the yard.
I was an Engineman for 4 years and went through some of the same things.
It was enough for me. I thought about staying in but it was 93 and those cutbacks hit and there were some Catch 22’s in my case so I got out.
I went to school after and wound up in Television. Fun but with fewer prospects to advance so I transitioned into technology and after a little grief and growing pains make pretty well for a 6 class tech school graduate in computer repair and partially color blind with some other different eye problems.
I at least can work on own old jeeps, blazer, and to a point the cb750k I found.
Steer her away from those, most of them that I know have been married multiple times.
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