Trades

Trades work is the real economy. Trades work is John Raulston Saul’s wet dream. Trades work is local, and real, and based primarily on word. 

People of all sorts in labouring work complain viciously about ‘what it does to your body’ without ever stopping to consider trying pigeon pose - once in their life - for 7 seconds. Maybe if you wore the earplugs your employer provided you for free your hearing would be better. What if, instead of flirting with a DUI on Saturday, you went for a run? If you tell me about your knee pain but can barely do a chin-up it becomes rather hard to take your moaning seriously. Since you are being paid, primarily, to direct your physical body through a series of tasks, would it not be the best idea you’ve ever heard to eat a vegetable once a fortnight? 

While I’m on the point of personal improvement: my lunch break, Steven the pipefitter, is not the fucking time to tell me about how all women are the devil because your admittedly dense ex-wife misfiled your earnings to the CRA, causing you years and years of tax issues. I cannot be fucked to help you solve your own problem. I wouldn’t even be so bold as to point you to the nearest accountant. Primarily due to my appreciation for accountants. There’s an old Carlin bit that goes something like this: If you walk out to chat to the mailman in the morning and he’s a bit of an ass, then the mailman is a bit of an ass. If from the time you leave the house to the moment you get home your mailman is an ass, and your boss is an ass, and the deli guy is an ass, then the odds are pretty good that you are the culprit. If your dumb bitch ex wife doesn’t speak to you, and your useless lib son and useless lib daughter are also (mysteriously) estranged, we can start to make an educated guess as to what the problem is. It’s you, Steven, after making out with a few too many Old Milwaukees. Oh - so you’re going to disown your son if he ever gets married because your own marriage failed? That has got to be the best fix I’ve ever heard. Go pay for a fucking handjob and stop taking your psychological issues out on your unfortunately sweaty son. 

There is a difference between labourers and tradesmen that becomes wildly frustrating when labourers confuse themselves for the other one. Good tradesman make fine money. The rest of you monkeys complain about immigrants and fight each other for bottom - barrel cash work. Get bent. 

Tradesman, despite their penchant for bad political takes, are really a big crop of commies. By far and in large they love being responsible for the fruits of their labour. They are constantly engaged in a staring match with the unskilled ownership class regarding the product of said labour. They largely bemoan, and would in many cases willingly behead bad actors who inhabit the class above them. I’ve heard things get said about landlords on a rental site that would make Karl audibly gasp. 

Trades is the wild west of personalities and outcomes. It becomes more difficult over time to establish any visual representation of worth. Sometimes the cheap guy in the rusty van is the best darn money you spent all year. Other times he will inappropriately touch your wife, take your deposit, and leave a water line running in your storage room. Some of the worst painters I know religiously wear painter whites. As a homeowner, your odds of getting a good product go up the more money you spend, but that ‘good project’ is an asymptote towards which all trades companies ceaselessly strive and will, in a cruel twist of fate (for homeowners), never touch. Your odds of finding a ‘good contractor’ are, generously, 1 in 2. Your odds of him producing good work are further cut in half, because for half the year even the good guys are getting railed. By the time you factor in material issues and him saying things he didn’t mean, you are looking at a 10% chance of making the right choice about contractors at any given time. Yes, you can hire the company with a secretary and wrapped vehicles that will ask you for literally triple (what the fuck? Triple?? What the fuck) what the last guy quoted, and they’ll probably do an okay job all things considered. Here’s the trick: those companies with all the bells and whistled are ran entirely on the backs of 2 or 3 or maybe 1 overworked and deeply underpaid actual tradesmen, and the rest of the people they have around have to leave a sticky note on their mirror every morning to remind themselves how to breathe. Their best employees are perpetually on the verge of quitting in an dramatic grown - man - throwing - tools hissy fit. What I mean to say is good luck picking the right outfit. 

As a related point, most of you clients get what you goddam deserve. If you thought my tone was tight before this will blow your hair back. If your gardener dug a hole in your lawn to defecate in it and then burned his mower to death in your rosebush, you would deserve that. If your carpenter filled softly boiled eggs with tremclad and then threw them at your house in the middle of the night, it would be fitting. I cannot possibly be more clear:

my therapist stands by all of this as ‘somewhat healthy’ by the way, keep it to yourself

I cannot possibly be more clear: should you have any wonder as to why most contractors are tired old eraser shavings with more disdain for any random citizen than you would think possible, please for the love of god try TRY running a trades show. You will be in a 7-11 paying for chicken wings and cussing out clients faster than you would ever believe. The things that come out of people’s mouths will shock you. You own a 3 MILLION DOLLAR HOUSE but cannot understand that once you seal a railing with oil, it will no longer stain evenly. You want the coating to be a solid colour but also show the wood colour underneath? Can you hear yourself? You want to move into a painted house next week and also want to triple the scope of the project? Those two things are pulling at each other i.e some sort of esoteric physics problem. This house is a black hole, come to think of it. You are sucking the light from my soul like a dementor. I’m not even done priming your kitchen and I can already tell we will be making intense eye contact in a small claims courtroom come August. We’ll wander into some strip mall like bitter, broken ex-partners, ready to hash out who gets the fucking 56$ footstool. Afterwards, we will blush and reminisce about how things used to be, when I was just a fresh-faced, well-dressed young man trying to make an honest buck and you were a 38 year old nurse who just wanted her cabinets done in white. 

Middle aged white men can’t make a single decision to save their lives and their wives think that the final bill is debatable pending how they personally felt about the job, regardless of what  the contract you both signed in blood says. I am working in Alberta and am politically motivated, so that is where the racial stereotyping will end. My blood pressure is 145 / 95 right now. I have a novel of client stories that would ruin my heart to write. Can you imagine wanting to push a crippled widow down a set of stairs? I don’t have to imagine, because she is the devil and just threatened my 10k cheque due to a problem I didn’t cause. There is no doubt in my mind that she is the most litigious old bird Edmonton has ever seen, or else I would be (hashtag) saying her name up and down this page. 

Clients need to be broken in.

One time, I got my client’s name mixed up with my close and personal friend of the same name. I was threatening (as a joke) to break into a mutual and awful business associate’s house to molest her dog. He was much less than amused, but my friend thought it was extremely funny. All things considered I would do it again. 

Somehow, the worst tradesmen were all involved in some horrific accident after which 1/3 of their bodies are held together with metal. If you’re wondering where those healthcare dollars go. Sometimes these accidents have something to do with why they have to bus to work every day. And no, of course they haven’t paid their taxes since 2012. Trades work is where dreams of grandeur go to die and lunch break cigarettes take on some sort of poetry. This is why cowboys are so prevalent in the American psyche. A bunch of vagrants putting up chicken wire had too much time on their hands and a six string somewhere up the ass of Oklahoma. and all of a sudden we think cowpokes settled all 51. Tradesmen lean towards a dead-eyed bunch and have little else to turn to other than mythologizing.

So enjoy the smokes. Use your 7-11 Big Buck on the new flavour of gas station wiener. Tell your lover you had a big, long day and you need an underpants beer even if you sat in the cab of your truck for 7 of those 10 hours. Fire the shithead who just hit you in the teeth with a ratchet strap, take up a hobby, and enjoy the pasture. You’ve got it all in the bag.