Wow, went from bartering to dis'ing the younger generation. I guess nobody likes a good trade better than me. I often do work for buddies without chargeing anything. They need something welded, they bring it to me. Need something fixed, they bring it to me. I like it when they owe me a favor, it does two things for me. One, If I need something, I know who to call, two, it they dont want to return the favor, they dodge me and I dont have to mess with their junk anymore. For the most part, my friends return the favor. Buddy with the long arm mower hits the side of my driveway cutting back the weeds when it gets overgrown. Other buddy will plow my garden or bring me a load of firewood. I dont have to ask anything from either of them, they just do it when they have their equipment in the area. Bartering is a good way to help someone while helping yourself at the same time.
As for the younger generation, I have had the opportunity to work with a large groups of people over a period of 40 years. Men come and men go, but the crew was always in the 50 people or so range. I did notice the change in attitudes over the years. When I first started working, everybody had the same goal, to work their way up to be the boss, and then the bosses boss and on up the ladder. As the years passed, it seemed the younger generations would have similar goals, work toward the top, but they where also very eager, taking promotions when they knew they werent qualified and lacked the experience they really needed. Now days the new hires want to hire in as the boss with no qualifications and zero experience. It seems to me, they dont care if someone has been doing a job for 30 years or more, they think they can do the job better and the old guy should just move out of the way and give them their jobs. I have even heard some of them make statements along those lines. I have also seen them deliberately do things to put some of the older folks jobs at risk, just so they could take their place. I will agree its partly the fault of the parents raising their kids to respect their elders, but I also seen fault lie in the supervision of younger employees in the work force. Nobody wants to fire someone, a young guy, just starting a family, that person needs a job. The boss lets him get away with little wrongs long enough that those wrongs become common place and the norm instead of the exception. The expectations are lowered and the work place suffers. Is it the fault of the young employee who doesnt have the benefit of years of experience, or is the fault of the old boss man that should have corrected the employee when the first mistakes where made.
I worked 40 years for one company, 33 of those years I was in charge of my own crew. In all those years, I fired exactly one person. My crew led the company in safety and productivity for almost 20 years in a row. I spent my last 10years on a small 3 man crew and upper management seldom even came around, we did our work and we did it correctly. We where the crew that was called in whenever an emergency happened. One of my guys retired a couple of years before myself and my other coworker became eligible. I got a young, wet behind the ears, guy as a replacement. I spent my last two years training and working with him to prepare him to do the work without my supervision or looking over his shoulder and he was eager to learn. He knew in a couple of years I would be leaving and he wanted to be able to do the job, not just hold the position. My other coworker retired on a Wednesday and I left that Thursday. We where replaced with a couple of other young guys with no work ethic or no experience in the work that they where required to do. The company cut the job off about 3 months after I left because of lack of production. You cant hire experience straight out of college, and you cant lead a group of experienced people, if you dont know how to do the job yourself. You can read plans and rule books all day long, you can type on your computer and stay on the phone all you want, but if you cant drive up on a jobsite and recognize a problem and comeup with a solution, you cant lead a group of workers. Now put someone that doesnt know how to do the work in charge of a group of men that dont know how to do the work and its the blind leading the blind.
as he has more than paid for it with all the wood he has brought to me.
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