Skipper's Boat-Building Blog
Comment Other Priorities It's been about eight months since the last entry in this blog and a lot has happened in that time. Some of it has been the reason the build has stopped. Mainly though, the build stopped because, for one reason or another, I lost interest or, I suppose, it's more accurate to say that my interest was diverted. I started this project when I was was working nearly fifty hours a week doing a fairly stressful job and I wanted something to do which was completely different to the day job as a kind of weekend wind-down. I have always been interested in wood-working though I have never really done anything about it and, as you may have already realised, I love using power tools. The talk of 'cheese' in previous instalments was a reference to the book 'Who moved my cheese?' which is a self-help book about coping with change in the workplace. I don't normally read books from the 'Stating the Bleedin' Obvious' section of the library but this one was recommended and I actually thought it was fairly useful. It summarised what has been happening to me since I was first made redundant three years ago. The 'cheese' is anything you need on a regular basis, usually your source of income. When it runs out or someone moves it you have to pull on your trainers and go running off to find some new cheese just like one of the little mice the author used to illustrate his point. You've never seen a mouse wearing trainers? Well, that's not surprising ... they are very small. A sudden decline in orders where I worked and the threat of redundancy for a second time gave me the incentive I needed to go looking for a new job. I had an offer from a competitor in the same town but, as the money was far less and they would probably soon be in the same boat so I accepted another offer from a company in an entirely different business sector. This was just at the time we were realising we were in a recession in this country and, redundancy eventually found me anyway after five months doing a job I loved and, previously didn't even know existed. Actually I think it was the people, not the job, that I was enjoying so much. Since then I have set up a little office in the garage and made a job of finding a job. I sit down at my laptop at 0900 every day and stay there trawling internet job sites, local papers and phone books looking for work until lunch time. For twenty nine years I worked in one office or another. I won't go into detail but I had a job which was constantly changing and I had to keep learning new ways to do the same thing. Sometimes the new way was better or faster but usually it was just different. On a few occasions I had to learn a completely new job in order to keep doing the same job. Computers came in and everything changed then, computers went 3D and everything changed then everything went global and … well, you get the idea. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to have lived in a time when you learnt a trade from your father and you taught it to your son and your son carried on the business in exactly the same way as your father had done. Well, it's not hard to guess really … I would not know what a holiday was, I would probably be dead by now from sickness or pointy things, I would never have met people from a foreign land without orders to kill them and I would certainly not have been involved in a walk-out because the office was a bit too warm to work in comfortably. Well, I was young, it was the seventies and everyone was doing it. Walk outs and strikes were a way of supplementing your holiday time in the same way as duvet days and feigned sickness are, for some, today. Index ----- Next