Adaptive Curmudgeon

Today I planted trees.

It wasn’t Earth Day. (See here and here.)

I plant trees, because I like trees. No ribbons were cut. No speeches made. No t-shirts sold. No petitions signed. I didn’t “raise awareness”, pose for a camera, or notify the press. I planted them by myself. I wasn’t in a park. I used a shovel.

This time it was only a couple dozen oak trees. A few might be ready for firewood sometime around my 100th birthday. Ideally a few luck ones will live until roughly the year 2414.

I hope the squirrels appreciate me and the deer don’t eat ’em before they get a chance to grow.

I talked too much about field work in my last post. What I really wanted to talk about was the best job I ever had; mowing rows.

One of the lowest of the shit jobs on a Christmas tree plantation is mowing. Most folks hated it but it needed to be done. Nor could it be done with “upscale” equipment. Particularly for larger trees, the rows were too narrow for even the smallest “ride on it” tractor. (Remember, this is a field… not a lawn. “Garden” tractors need not apply.) Thus everything was done on foot. As a newbie, I assumed I’d hate it mowing too.

Enter the machine I bonded with. A big fat honkin’ Gravely “walk behind tractor”. This was a two wheeled behemoth with a hefty engine up front, a big brush hog disk in front of that, and almost comically, handlebars at the back. I’d fire up this monster (electric start!), engage the PTO for the brush hog (with which to smite everything before me), and (after taking a deep breath) engage the wheels. The beast would lurch into action and lumber over, around, between, across, and through anything. My job was to hang on for dear life and “steer”.

When I first met the Gravely I had my doubts. Strapping handlebars from a Huffy onto a Buick’s engine block seemed like While E. Coyote logic. Never mind the fact that the front was a 4′ woodchipper of doom mutilating everything in sight, it was getting dragged into the next county that worried me.

Shockingly, the machine worked flawlessly! The monster chewed through anything in front of it without hesitation. (Including, on occasion, entire trees.) Stalling was utterly out of the question. Electrical shorts, clogged air filters, and the like were inconceivable. The gas tank was huge. The tires never went flat. It was as subtle as a hammer and built like a wheeled anvil. Once I got used to it I found it a pleasure to operate. I still miss that machine. They don’t make them anymore and I couldn’t afford one if they did.

Other guys on the crew hated the machine. They preferred little bicycle tired brush mowers that were faster, sleeker, and lighter. From my point of view they seemed to spend more time broke than running. Like the tortoise and the hare, I could always catch up and surpass them by plodding along with my unstoppable wheeled force of nature. I got the hang of sweet talking the critter up and down the rows without a hint of drama. From then on it was all production all the time. You had to talk its language. It was big enough that you could nudge it but only that. If you fought it, you’d lose.

I’d run it all day long. I always ended smiling.

It was a simple stupid job. Not only could a monkey do it, but a monkey should rightfully get bored doing it. Not me. It became a mantra. Fire up the monster, point it in the right direction and kill everything in your path, when one row was done there was always another one waiting. When the sun sets the day is done. Service it and park for the night. Show up at dawn the next day. Lather rinse repeat.

I grew to love my job.

Trudging up and down rows was immensely relaxing. The universe was a giant Japanese rock garden and I was a immense rake; bringing order to chaos. I was at peace. Sometimes I sang.

Everyone else hated mowing. It was hot and dusty and boring. I never got bored. I have no idea why.

Sometimes the speedier mowers would nuke a hornet’s nest and everyone had to run for their life. The job was so repetitive that nasty stings on a sunburned arm was a “change of pace”. I, moving slower, usually saw the nest before things got crazy. Once, because I felt like it, I spied a largish hornets nest and attacked. I lumbered up and ground their volley ball sized Death Star clear to topsoil leaving a cloud of angry by very battered insects wondering what the hell had just happened. I somehow reversed the mighty beast and safely got out of there without a scratch. Even moving at it’s usual slow deliberative pace, the hornets were at a loss. Other guys in the crew could run like the wind yet they got stung all the time. Not me. I marched around like a tank and was untouched. The crew was mystified. I was not. Why should I run?

Me and the machine were one. Hornets were no match for us.

I don’t know why I didn’t get bored. I can’t sit through a half hour of TV but I could plod with heavy boots though a field hour after hour. Really? Earplugs jammed in my ears meant no music. Flying debris meant I was covered from head to toe in brush, grass, and dust. Hot sun meant sunburns. It didn’t seem to matter. I was content.

I strapped a jug of ice water to the hood and that kept me from overheating. The machine, for it’s part, was so strongly built that it never overheated. Plenty of water and a couple sandwiches for lunch and I became a happy human conveyor belt. That’s all I wanted. I’d run all day without complaining. Never bored. Never wondering “is this pointless or what”? Nope. I was totally happy. Me and that big stupid mower. I had a foolish smile all day long. I still don’t get it.

It was the best job I’ve ever had.

A.C.

P.S. Because this is the Internet, someone is going to point out that appropriate equipment does exist to process Christmas trees in effortless, highly mechanized, debt laden splendor. While technically true, the best “equipment” at the time for any Christmas tree operation smaller than “huge” was a handful of flannel clad workers with strong backs. I wouldn’t be surprised if that remains true today. Though I don’t know how hard it is in our modern world to find folks who’ll do the job anymore. Lack of guys who’ll go into a trance given the right mower might have driven newer (and lamer!) technology.

Yesterday I took a trip down memory lane related to one my favorite topics; “shit jobs”. I don’t mean that as an insult, only to realistically portray the bottom of the totem pole. Frankly some of my best workplace experiences came from “shit jobs”. Why? Because “shit jobs” have a significant overlap with “jobs that need to be done”. (Not all of them, just some of them.)

In contrast, non-shit jobs, regardless of the cachet, have a tendency toward irrelevancy. There is nobility in doing that which needs to be done that many high end jobs lack. At any rate I tossed out this little bit of truth, which bears repeating:

“There’s no such thing as overqualified, only ‘I can find a job I prefer more’.”

I stand by that.

Compare my attitude to a snippet from USA Today:

“Dear Class of 2014: We regret to inform you that the nation’s job market continues to force college graduates to take jobs they’re overqualified for, jobs outside their major, and generally delay their career to the detriment of at least a decade’s worth of unearned wages.”

Hell No! This is steaming bullshit served on a platter of indignant stupidity. The sort of thing you can only say if you’ve been mainlining the Kool aid.

First of all the word “overqualified” should be stricken from the dictionary. Overqualified implies a person with one set of skills is inherently too awesome to do a job which relies on a different (subjectively lesser) set of skills. If you’ve got your head in the clouds it makes sense. If you’ve lived in the real world you know it’s utterly untrue.

“Overqualified” is an idea which should be killed with fire. It’s a failure of reasoning that crawled from the gaping maws of pinheads who should know better. Nitwits that tend to confuse “someone who can make more money doing something else” with “radioactive”. They also confuse “we treat employees like scum and they crawl on their hands and knees to escape us” with “all those employees that ran screaming from our little hellhole were overqualified”. Screw that! If there’s a brain surgeon out there who’d be happier running a forklift and can do it well shut your piehole and let the man get busy loading flatbeds. On the flipside, if Harvard McYale can’t learn how to mop, kick his ass out. That’s the true measure of an employee, how well can they do the job. “Overqualified” stinks of deliberately seeking people without options so they’ll stay put in a workplace that sucks.

Doubt me? Ever meet someone who happily stays at a job that they like, even though they could make more cash elsewhere? That’s the flip side of “overqualified”; not interested in the rat race. It’s often a sign of an excellent jobsite. If you find a bunch of people like that, pay close attention to their employer. There’s more than money you know.

Of course, money is the self limiting factor to all this. In the long run, folks who are unstoppable tend to… wait for it… persevere. Thus the highly motivated, in the very act of going after their goals with hammer and tongs, tend to wind up being excellent competitors. They’re likely to  get some or all of what they merit. At that point they might find that their particular personal apex isn’t all they imagined it to be. Alas it’s just as hard to step down as it was to climb up.

It takes balls of steel to let go of that sweet sweet salary and revert to a shit job. Many talk about it. Few do it. So goes the balance of the universe. In the end, most of us find ourselves chained to whatever maximum earnings we can make. We tend to think that’s exactly what we need. That’s human nature. Some of us fight it. Some win. Some lose. Some bust their ass and stroke out at 50. A few are exceptionally wise and lay off the throttle in mid career. A few powerhouses happily find part time low end work pleases them in their “retired” golden years. None of this fits in the obscene little fiction that is “overqualified”.

A.C.

Hat tip to Maggies Farm and Had Enough Therapy.

This is still a static site. I’ll update when I get good and ready.
Until then please go to adaptivecurmudgeon.wordpress.com.

This is a test. If it were a real post it would have content. Mind you it might be pathetic but there’d be verbiage dammit.

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