I am not skilled working with my hands.
I am incredibly envious of those who are. I try to pick up pieces of knowledge here and there when I see people working with tools, but it’s in one ear and out the other.
It’s taken me this long to retain basic tire-change knowledge. My dad dragged me out of the house one day for what was to be a classic father-son passing on of knowledge. But years later, when I have a flat I still whip out my phone and Google, “How to change a tire.”
It’s not for lack of trying. In high school, I gave all the options a good try – automotives, machining, construction – and my instructors were treated to the worst edge jointing they had ever seen.
But a glimmer of hope came when I enrolled in welding class. Here was a skill I understood – I somehow had the concentration necessary to run precise beads down our starter pieces of busted metal. It was beautiful.
I wouldn’t say I was a welding pro, but I was doing acceptable work – these welds were passable. And I was following basic safety procedures. This base level of normalcy and safety were ceilings I strived, and failed, to hit for the rest of my manual labour life.
Take the high school summer I was hired as a weed whacker for an auto repair shop a few kilometres out of the town I grew up in. It was a hot summer, with temperatures daily hitting highs of 35 C.
I arrived at the business with a large water bottle and wearing shorts and a light T-shirt. The owner, however, insisted that for my own safety I only operate the weed whacker while wearing a full set of coveralls.
Coveralls buttoned up, I moved to the exterior of the business where I promptly discovered a forest of weeds crawling up the side of the building, taller than me and thick as bamboo.
“No sweat,” I thought, it being my first experience weed whacking.
I started up the weed whacker, which sputtered and gasped to life, and I proceeded to cut away just the flesh of the weeds, leaving behind the thick, tough guts that remained, defiantly puffing out their chests at me. I hacked and hacked, sweating and straining with effort, and looked up to see I had finally cut through one of the weeds.
Frustrated, I put down the weed whacker and began snapping the weeds one-by-one (of course, a very inefficient method). It became clear to me that these weeds were no regular plants – these were weeds as old as time, historical weeds, and only with a great deal of effort would I be able to cut them down.
I cut at those weeds for days on end, slowly mowing through the dense jungle and meeting the insects that resided within it (mostly wasps keen to sting) and looked up, a pile of dead weeds my reward. Then I started to feel woozy inside the coveralls.
The day was getting long, so I made my way into the office, where the receptionist eyed me with something approaching terror.
“Getting hot out there,” I said, my nose gushing blood.
Self-care is the most important thing when working in the sun, and I did zero of that. This was a thing that I realized as I was at serious risk of sunstroke.
“Oh, boy. Do you want… a pop?” the receptionist asked, motioning to the soda machine next to the couch I had collapsed onto.
“Yes, please. A 7-Up,” I said.
“I don’t have any change,” she said.
My other labour jobs, though equally glamorous, taught me similar lessons: I am simply too much in my own head, personifying the weeds in front of me rather than cutting them down. Probably why, these days, I work in air-conditioned offices, far away from any sort of basic equipment.
