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| Harboring a Drudge |
I gave ya one,I gave ya two
The best that rotten ol' boat would do
Ya won't be happy til I've given' ya three
But I'll be damned if you'll get me!
From The Ways of Man by Gordon Bok
The Dark Side of DIY
I once took a battery of aptitude tests for a range of 'skills'. I confident and capable with all of these (pretty rudimentary). And being good at multiple-guess, I was breezing my way through.
But then I came up against this one section...
Oh, I was competent, but that was the problem. So I have to admit that I cheated.
Here's the deal. I had little control over where I would eventually be assigned; I would be stuck where a) I showed 'competence' and b) they needed me. If I scored equally well across the board, it stood to reason, that I could end up in any field in which they had a short-fall.
Here's what the aptitude test looked like:
OOCOOCOOOCOOOOOCOOOCOOOOCOCOOOOOOOCOOOCOOOOOCOCOOOOCOOOOCOO
A whole page of this! In each line, they wanted to know how many C's - a) 12, b)13, c)14 or d)15? Please mark clearly with a number 2 pencil.
My sight purpled with a vision of spending years of my life in a windowless cubicle, doing whatever task for which that aptitude would recommend me.
The thing is, I'm good at this sort of masochistic detail, but I loathe it!
So I fudged every third-ish answer by one, one way or the other, praying that I was being random enough to evade detection. The final scores showed a satisfying dip at that aptitude... clearly, detail was by far my worst feature.
Now what, you might ask, has this got to do with boat-building?
Well... we're going to be building remote. We'll have a shot at one - maybe two - deliveries in the course of the project. Every sheet, piece of wood, stick, foamboard, nail, glop of glue, smear of paint - not to mention tools, gloves, brushes, trowels, spreaders - not to mention shed materials, generator, fuel - not to mention our daily bread (by which we do not live alone) - all this and more, more, more needs to be counted, recounted, shopped for (on-line), ordered and transportation arranged.
Design is fun. Building is fun. Sailing is outrageously fun.
But did I mention that I loathe counting it all up???







