Jolt Country

Remember when I said that American skilled trades were suffering from brain drain?

True story

Yesterday at work one of the schlubs* comes up to me and says :

Schlub: "Hey Vark, I have a question and I hope you can tell me why it is."

Me (ignoring the bad grammar): "As long as it's not a philosophical question I can probably help."

Shlub: "What does that mean?"

Me: "Never mind. What's your problem?"

He has a machining question which I give him some feed/speed pointers. Five minutes later he comes back over...

Schlub: Does philosophical have to do with that air pressure question I asked you about yesterday?"

Me: No, that would be pneumatics."

Schlub: "Oh"

He goes away.

A minute later I see him behind his machining center, poking away on his phone ( cell phones are a no-no in the shop). He steps out and calls over to me:

"Hey! That's a school word!"

Me: Sigh.



Half an hour goes by. He comes over yet again, and says..

Schlub: "Is philosophical like Snuffleupagus? Ha-yuk yuk yuk!"

Me (produces loaded handgun and aims at own temple):

"Sigh!"


THE
ONLY BRIGHT STAR
IN THE SKY SOMETIMES
AARDVARK


* by now I feel that any explanation of the term 'schlub' would be rather moot.

"That's a school word"? Jesus.

Why are cell phones verboten in the shop?

I have noticed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to have conversations with anyone under the age of 25. Every single time you ask them a question, they use their phones to search for the answer. Even the banal stuff, like what the weather's going to be like. It's like people don't know anything anymore, they just know how to find the information.

People under twenty five have never been without a phone so it's part security blanket, part life-line, part social status. Very sad, really.
Strange how they don't all get straight As in school with so much information right at their fingertips.
That reminds me of a Rubes cartoon I saw once. ( I can't find it so I'll just describe it)

In a classroom, one of the young students is holding up a smartphone above his head. To the teacher he says:

'If I have this then I don't need you.'

Something like that, only wittier. Damn, I wish I could find it. It was hang-on-the-fridge worthy.

What kills me is when you have two or more of them all sitting around and they simultaneously whip out their phones and start a phone feature discussion while texting other people.


Cellphones (texting!) at work are a distraction and unproductive. It's too easy to have your mind on a texting conversation and make bad parts, or worse yet lose a finger or something. Plus the management is old school in a lot of ways and frowns on newfangled stuff.
Should have seen the hoops they had to go through when all of our customers went paperless. They had to upgrade the entire front office network (to XP!) AND get DSL internet just because the customers all wanted to send us blueprints ELECTRONICALLY!
And here we are with that over-sized mailbox out by the street so all the blueprints we USED to get would fit when the mailman came by.


THE
WRONG ERA
AARDVARK

Understood, losing a finger become someone was trying to put "dismembered" into 'Words With Friends' sounds like it would be terrible.

At the companies I've worked for, it's all gone like this:

- Computers are open, you can browse anywhere
- Time passes...
- Everything is locked down
- They make a big show of "monitoring your Internet usage"
- I get a job elsewhere