I used to have a quote on my bulletin board:
“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”
Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961). John W. Gardner
I was a computer buff early on. In the 60s in grade school my 5th grade teacher gave me a science fair type kit that meant to teach digital electronics before electronic calculators were common. Of course when “home computers” became available I was entranced by them.
So in college I eventually ended up working as a “computer lab” asssistant helping other students with their homework and maintaining the IBM PC and XT type computers that were in the “lab”. One of the students that I assisted said he was a “plumber” who wanted to become a computer programmer because he was sure that was the future. The poor guy had a lot of difficulty and left me with the impression that plumbing must not be much of an intellectual challenge or difficult craft to learn.
After doing quite a bit of plumbing renovating an old house I am now pretty sure that he was a plumbers assistant or someone who unclogged drains, did minor repairs and maybe soldered tubing or cut and threaded pipes and not a full fledged plumber. The ammount of thought that goes into designing a multistory drainage and venting system that complies with code can be fairly complicated.