If I Were a Carpenter

Make $75,000 a year! Challenging and satisfying work. Be your own boss. Choose whom you want to do business with. Pick your own hours. Let your creative side show through.

If there was such a job listing, you’d think Americans would be trampling over each other for the chance.

But actually, it’s the other way around. Work like this goes begging for the lack of good people to do it.

Craftsmen who hang a door, install a stove, rewire a circuit box, build a counter top, Sheetrock a bathroom and thatch a Tiki hut are in high demand.

How can this be?

Well, I’ve been asking that very question as I try to transform the well-worn 47-year-old house we just purchased into a home.

I think blame rests with America’s misguided tunnel vision about career values. A generation ago, vocational education earned a bad rap in public schools. Based not on aptitude but on ethnicity or socioeconomic upbringing, students were directed either into college-prep programs or vocational ed. Surely, this did many children wrong. But instead of fixing the system, educators began pushing everyone into college prep programs. By social consensus we agreed that college was the path to satisfaction, money and, most important, status.

In a recent essay in this paper, Drew Limsky of City University of New York summed up this view. College, he suggested, is “the difference between a white collar and a job at Burger King.”

That is silly. I personally know at least 10 PhD marine biologists, not one of whom makes $30,000 a year. The Washington Monthly recently ran a long, first-person account titled, “Why a PhD is a fast ticket to the unemployment line.” The parents of these dead-end intellectuals are no doubt proud and still have their “my child is an honors student” bumper stickers.

But more than a few PhDs are wondering about their career choices. Not to mention the many college grads in the same straits, backstabbing each other for footholds in the dreary world of mid-management.

Meanwhile, the social status we confer on craftsmen has not risen to match the importance of their work.

Stories in newspapers describe programs that train juvenile delinquents and ex-cons how to build and fix things around the home. The successful among these students soon will realize that the joke is on society.

When you call for help, they’ll respond at their leisure. If they approve of you, they may squeeze in time for your job. They may or may not feel obliged to meet the schedule they promised. They may disappear for days at a time. But if they do a sound job, in the end you’ll call them back and recommend them to your neighbors. And if they do a really creative job, you’ll do anything to keep them happy and working.

After finally locating a craftsman/contractor worthy of the title, I found myself driving three hours to watch him race his sprint car. I never felt the need to prove my loyalty to my dentist or doctor. But a top-flight craftsman cannot be shown too much respect. And I confess, when he smashed his race car into the wall and flipped, my concern for his welfare was mixed with worry about my half-completed kitchen.

A dear friend of mine has a 20-year relationship with his contractor/handyman and calls him a more important person to the family than even the woman who provides at-home child care. That’s because my friend knows that he can replace a child care worker.

A colleague recalled one day when he sneaked away midweek and went surfing at the beach. The lineup was full of adults. “They said they were contractors, plumbers and tile layers,” this colleague recalled. “No work was getting done that day, not when the swell was up.”

“Personally, I’d never go back,” a former corporate vice president told me. After 40 years climbing the career ladder, he was laid off. Now he’s a handyman. “I’m not responsible for anyone but myself. This work provides instant gratification. You please a customer and they tell you so. You rarely hear that in the corporate world. Plus, I can pick the people I work for. For most of my life I couldn’t do that.”

Vocational education may be the wrong thing to call it. Handyman may not be enough of a title. But in this era of fleeting careers, there is something venerable and solid about putting a chisel to wood and getting the cabinet door to close as sweet as a vault. Especially if it gets you to the beach on those good days.