Found Afternoon & Book Review

A found afternoon is a rarity in these parts as, being a relatively Type A personality, I typically have things scheduled in pretty tight during the week. The fact that I was scheduled to volunteer at the zoo this afternoon was why I was on the phone at 7:30am with an east coast customer for an hour. Then it turns out the weather has been crappy all day (crappy is giving it far too much credit...summer, oh summer, where art thou?) and I was told I didn't need to come into the zoo. So all of the sudden I found myself with four hours I hadn't accounted for and.not.a.single.thing.planned. What's a girl to do?

I figured I should do what any self-respecting English Lit major would do on a rainy, overcast, generally icky day, and opened up my latest library book for a few hours of reading. While I'm not yet done with it, Shop Class as Soulcraft is worthy of a mid-way-through-it review.

In case you haven't heard of this piece of nonfiction, let me set the background for you. The author, Matthew Crawford, is a PhD in philosophy who worked for a DC think tank before realizing that what truly made him happy in life was fixing motorcycles so he chucked it all and opened up a motorcycle repair shop. You think your family complains you waste your degree? Imagine what Thanksgiving dinners around this guy's house must be like.

But the arguement he makes in this book is that here in America - and much of the Western world - there is an idealized seperation between blue collar and white collar labor. Blue collar are the types of jobs that leave you with grit under your fingernails at the end of the day and white collar are "thinking" jobs. And while this may have been true at one point, Crawford argues that many white collar jobs have become so routinized that there is very little "thinking" left in them. For example, who ever would have dreamed that accounting could be just as easily outsourced to India or China as manufacturing has been? Yet it's true and it's happening because accounting - among other professions - is no longer really about exploring and understanding but more about checking boxes and making sure that all the i's are dotted. Think about it this way, if anyone had really been paying attention would Bernie Maddoff been able to get away with what he did for such a long period of time?

There are few thoughts that Crawford has brought up already that I'd like to touch on. The first is that manual labor has become seen as being an "unthinking" job. Perhaps that's true in the cases of some assembly lines where the entire job is to fit Part A onto Part B, but like Crawford himself, to a certain group of people there is something about being able to create a tangible object with your own hands that makes your very soul sing. Or at least it does that for mine.

For those who don't know, I spent several years working as a pastry chef for a hotel chain and then several years in the marketing department of a software company. The salary in the software company was better, the hours were MUCH better, the benefits were better, and I could wear nice clothes and act like a grownup. And yet if given a choice between the two I'd head back to that pastry chef job well before I'd go back to the cubicle. Being able to, at the end of a very long day with back aching and feet throbbing, to be able to point to something tangible and say "I made that" was more fulfilling than any marketing campaign I ever developed. Part of the problem came from the fact that I wasn't given the latitude in the software job to actually "develop" anything from scratch. I was given a very definite parameter and set of rules as to how said company did their marketing campaigns and one was not to stray from that regardless of the circumstances. It was essentially a glorified Search & Replace function for key words and then out it'd go. As Crawford says on page 143, "Despite the beautiful ties I wore (in his stint in the corporate world), it turned out to be a more proletarian existence then I had known as a manual worker."

To be brutally honest, there are times when I'm embarrassed that I've taken my two bachelor degrees and my MBA and parlayed it into a career path that is premised on manual labor. Yes, I own my own company and there is much in the administrative and marketing side of things that gets my brain humming and I really enjoy, but I don't ever really see myself handing off all the manual labor to underlings. I simply enjoy that work too much (most of the time). This book is helping me remember that working with my hands shouldn't be something I'm ashamed of even while my fancy degrees sit on the wall. I am becoming an expert in an area and literally "create" something every day I'm in my workspace. This is different, yes, from a management consultant (one of the career paths that is glorified in MBA programs) but the truth is that the only thing management consultants are experts at is being generalists and while they may swoop in and suggest changes, they rarely actually enact the changes themselves. This isn't to say they don't deserve credit (my hubby being a former consultant himself) but that they have to live in an abstract world based on management principles that may or may not differ from the reality of said specific business. And while abstract ideas are good, I personally would derive no pleasure if I weren't able to produce something that I can hold in my hands at the end of the day. That doesn't make me any better, but that shouldn't make me any less either.