If You're A Certain Kind Of Stupid, This Post Is For You



If you see this face in the mirror every morning, pay attention.

Apparently, the genetic coding for intelligence, reading comprehension, and humility are all on the same gene, and separate from the one that grants facility with tools.

I say this must be so, because of the two screeds deposited in response to yesterday's autobiographical essay, which posters evidently think they have one thing down, but they've apparently come up short on some other chromosomes.

For the twenty soopergeniuses out there who thought what two posters took the time to write, the following:

Nota bene:

I don't live in Hooterville, nor have a shop (nor room for one). Not even a garage.
I nonetheless have quite an assortment of hand and power tools, great facility with both, and zero days lost due to accident at my own hand. Ever. (The fact that so few of those who do such work for a living can say the same is what earns me mine. Think about that.)

If the point of yesterday's description got by you, a few more salient points for the reading impaired:

My troubles yesterday (other than too much stuff for the space I possess) were wholly and solely the result of Fortune 500 companies (who should damned well know better) either substituting cheap-ass parts for spec quality hardware, or not bothering to include it at all.
And with 50 year old wiring doing what 50 year old wiring does, unassisted.

Unassisted, BTW, being the exact same way I diagnosed and repaired my electrical problem, despite not working in that field, nor having consulted anything written on the subject for some couple of decades.

In my time, I have dug holes; filled holes; filled sandbags; dug foundations; dug wells; trenched irrigation; milked cows; slopped hogs; wrangled steers; worked on horseback and helped smiths shoe the critters; slaughtered rabbits; fed chickens; picked fruit; plowed fields; planted crops and gardens; post-holed; shifted rocks by hand; poured concrete; strung some miles of fencing: wood, chain link, and barbed wire; repaired same; demo'ed houses; built houses; de-roofed and roofed them; painted them inside and out; remodeled; built additions; built furniture; felled trees; chopped them into firewood by hand; landscaped; brush-whacked acreage; welded; shade-tree mechanic'ed; built, torn apart, and rebuilt bicycles; performed emergency repairs on cars and powerboats; restored actual tanks and half tracks; maintained trucks, howitzers, and actual haze gray men-o'-war; and even constructed and torn down entire villages, to beyond code, even though they were coming down in a couple of months. Some of this was for pay, some of it wasn't. I don't feel any inadequacy when it comes to hard work, hot days, blisters, sore muscles, or using any tool known to man. If I won the lottery, I'd be buying machine tools large enough to need bolting down, and heavy equipment big enough to pick them up, not Ferraris and such. My next appliance, likely as not, will be a blacksmith forge. My man-card is well-punched, and like Quigley and Army .44s, just because I don't like doing something every day doesn't mean I don't know how to do it.

Confuse that reality at your peril.

There are plenty of wrench-benders who could get Ph.Ds. And plenty of Ph.Ds. who can drop a transmission and rebuild it, should they choose to do so. Like Mike Rowe, I have nothing but respect for people, paid or not, who can and do perform dirty, hard, and/or dangerous work, and do so with professionalism and skill. College degrees mean little if you don't have the brains and ability to put them to use.

I've had my share of greasy fingernails, and I chose to work in a licensed profession where there's more poop, puke, and blood than grease and dirt, because it's indoors, it pays much better, and it's air-conditioned. Which helps the layer of sweat I work in pretty much non-stop 12 hours a day.

But if you missed the above parts of the previous essay, and all you bring to the discussion is a knee-jerk excuse to trot out your low-IQ Working Class Hero autobiographical moment, to be the hero of your own story, or try playing city mouse/country mouse bullshit games, rather than reading and grasping what I wrote, save yourself the electrons, and leave off beating the molecules of that particular deceased equine critter.
The horse never did you any harm.

You, like the other two knuckleheads, will only embarrass yourselves.

And I've really got better things to do than hang signs on jackasses.
That's what their braying is for.

So please: don't be one. Life's too short for that sh*t.