01 – intro and stuff

I have been asked to do something about writing down some “words of wisdom“, or “pithy quotes“, or “cliche’s” or “old man’s observations” depending on your perspective.

This seems like a decent enough idea, so it will go here in this section, and be added to over time.

Comment was also made about making things a downloadable pdf or whatever, well there is a handy free online tool at http://www.blogbooker.com/wordpress.php that does just this, you can grab a version of this entire blog to date –> wimminz-book-one. <–here as an 11 meg pdf

I’ll add to this section as time passes and shit occurs to me, and when it is done this section will be available as a pdf. I make no charge for this, I don’t want your fucking money, do something useful with it like put it towards your own NAS box.

So, just what sort of shit are we talking about here?

Well they are all real life examples from my own life, and to start you off here is one I have mentioned before… actually it will likely be more than one… lol

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Now, I was real lucky, I did not just get to know my dad as a boy growing up in a family with a mum and dad, later on in life I took the same trade as him, Engineer, back when that meant something, and worked alongside him, which introduced me to an entirely different aspect of the same man that I would otherwise never have seen or been aware of, dad at work.

Dad at work is a whole different ball game from dad at home, particularly so if dad at work is a physical job like engineering where both lives and profits and reputations depend on the quality of the work done…. if you thought there was no fucking around at home when you decided to play with matches one day, you are in a whole ‘nother world at work.

One AfORism my dad never said to me regarding work, because he never fucking had to, I was after all an adult, albeit a young and stupid one, was “Do not embarrass us, Son”, but then again he was fond of saying something essentially similar.

“You are only as good as your last job”

This one is easy, and not, let’s say you a a NASA rocket engineer, and your entire life at work has been you doing one engineering marvel after another, people talking about your fabrication and welding skills as an art form, people talk about you being able to sense the innards of a machine from 10 yards away, you get the drift….

…. then one day doing a mundane routine job like inspection, you don’t pay attention, you miss a failing seal, and next thing you know Challenger blows into 10,000 pieces.

Nobody will talk about all the previous good jobs you did, all they will talk about is the LAST fucking job you did, the one you fucked up on.

A related one was;

“Do it properly, you may be the next fucker who has to work on it”

Which I have seen come true many times in my life, it’s awkward and annoying and a pain in the ass and everything else, but that union is still dripping and the only answer is to do the job properly and rip it out and replace it, new unions and olives, and yeah, you have to rip out six other systems first to get at it, but there is;

“The right way to do the job, and every other way”

And in the real world you’ll find a lot of cunts will just bung a blob of plastic metal on that leaking union, and now you have to remove nine other systems because it is not just the union and compression fittings that need to be changed, but the pipework either side, because when the first blob of plastic metal started leaking they just added more… at least if some other cunt was the one that did it you can curse them and charge the customer.

If YOU were the cunt that did it you curse yourself and bill yourself.

I actually got into smoking because of my dad, not because he smoked, but because of why, sitting down with a smoke and just looking at a job before you started in and committed yourself to something, can’t tell you the number of times you do that and spot something you’d missed before, and oh shit, thank fuck I saw that before I started… so one you hear from amateurs trying to emulate professionals is “measure twice, cut once”, and it’s bullshit.

“Think thrice, measure twice, sit down and just look at the job for 5 minutes, then cut once”

You see Engineering is at heart a very simple field, everything works to known and documented physical laws, and every action has a reaction or consequences, and there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch or a shortcut or a quick way to do something.

So you end up with a very practical mindset and approach, concepts like what is fair or unfair or nice or nasty of what I want and ponies and unicorns and shit don’t get a look in.

So, true story, one day as a junior engineer you sit down in the bar after work with your engineer dad and say, “Dad, me and xx are gonna get married”

Dad just looks at you, waves his empty glass at you for you to buy him a beer, you do, and he says, “boy, I am going to tell you something, and because you are young and stupid, you are going to think I am joking and laugh at me.”

So I look at him and say “no dad, I won’t laugh”

He just looks at me and asks me, “what’s the difference between a married woman and a single woman?”

I tell him, “I don’t know dad”

and he looks me right in the eye and says;

“The difference between a married woman and a single woman is the married woman has two assholes, and one of them gets up and goes to work in the morning.”

and I laughed at him, especially as I came from a home with a mum and a dad and all that.

And that, is the issue with AfORisms, if you’re young and / or inexperienced, they don’t stop you fucking up, no siree, not one bit, because if you were smart enough to really pay attention you would no longer be young and inexperienced.

Where they DO come in handy is AFTER you fucked up, they help you make sense of shit, they help you stay sane, they help you avoid a reaction that just makes matters worse, and they help you, after a suitable passage of time, to laugh at yourself, and to silently toast your dead dad, yeah old man, you were right, yet again.