“I need you to pull all this ducting out of here. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of days.”
Russ must have seen my dismay.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“A crawl space?”
“You could hardly call it a crawl space,” he laughed. “You can sit up in it.”
I’ve been working as a sort of handyman-contractor lately. Lacking any specialty skills, I do a lot of demolition and cleaning.
This job didn’t look fun. A dirt floor. Joists balanced on cinder blocks. Long-forgotten debris.
The ground under the summer house sloped down toward the lake. As Russ had promised, I could sit up on the lake-facing side, but the metal ducts ran to the other end. I’d have to lie on my back while I unscrewed and pried and hammered them apart. Moldering plastic sheeting held fiberglass insulation under the house’s floorboards. Where it had let go, the yellow fluff hung loose. When I bumped it, caches of acorns spilled out.
Still, I did it. And while I peered through my steamed trifocals, I got to thinking about why this work felt more satisfying than managing software engineers.
I came up with two words: arduous and consequential.
When an onerous job gets done, I feel a sense of accomplishment. If it’s really unpleasant, or if I do it without complaining, I feel even better.
What’s the parallel in the corporate world? I did lots of unappealing tasks: budget reviews, goal-settings, process audits, risk analyses, endless trainings on corporate values and procedures….
But I felt no satisfaction when they were complete. At best I felt relief: No diversity training for another six months. The exercises were not only tedious, but trite and ineffectual.
That gets to my second word: consequential. It’s not quite the right word, but I’m trying to say both that a job is useful, and also that there’s some peril attached to doing it wrong.
Russ doesn’t hire me to perform any life-saving rescues, but it is always possible to injure myself. I could have brought down a tree, for example, onto a customer’s house, or even onto Russ. Not inadvertently killing him feels good.
Ironically, my corporate work felt less consequential as my career progressed.
At 25, I had worked for Danny, a Chicago “neighborhood guy” in the coin-operated arcade business who sometimes landed deals making video games for big companies. Danny liked me: probably he sensed my loyalty and found it useful to have a college-educated factotum at his elbow when he talked to the suits.
After hiring a commercial artist to do concept drawings, I asked Danny how to pay him.
“Just tell Doris to cut him a check,” he said.
I asked “What’s my limit? This work is going to come in at three or four thousand.”
“Limit?” Danny said impatiently. “I don’t know. Thirty thousand maybe? You’ve got to spend money to make money. You’re supposed to be smart. Can’t you handle that?”
Later that year he sent me to pitch a proposal to the board of directors at Mattel toys. I botched it, and there were consequences.
Back then I didn’t manage anyone. A human resources department would have called me “a direct contributor in a hands-on role.”
Two decades later I managed five teams of engineers simultaneously. But as my job title and salary grew, I’m convinced my responsibility shrank.
At my last job I never even learned where the boardroom was. I used my own cash to buy a book for a new hire because it would have taken weeks to collect the approvals on a $20 purchase order.
I can remember when big business was associated with “paper pushing” and “rubber stamping.” Computers wiped out the paper and stamps, but they also made it easy to multiply checkpoints and approvals. As a director of software engineering, it was pretty much impossible for me to botch anything.
Now, as a contractor, I suppose I’m in “a hands-on role” again. Why does it feel so good?
I recall an article about manhood by Florence King.
First Miss King quoted Maxwell Perkins’ observation:
A man who wends his life with his knees crooked under a desk is not more than half a man, and we all know it. And Dr. Johnson said, when they were running down the military, "If a general walked into this room now we'd all be ashamed." And if a good workman, a mechanic, walked into a boardroom at a directors’ meeting, the directors would all feel ashamed.
Then she concluded:
Nothing in female psychology can compare to this. The career woman and the Mommy Tracker are well aware of their differences but the reaction they rouse in each other is mutual contempt, not shame. You will never find a woman executive watching busy diner waitresses with envious admiration the way male executives watch construction workers.
Maybe Miss King has got at the root of it. Arduous and consequential work is just manly.
I am a man. It feels good to do something manly for once.
That’s a word no HR department would ever use.
I love this. I'm not sure what it says about my femininity, but I certainly have been enjoying rototilling, planting, and weeding more than I've enjoyed doctoring lately. It's much more consequential!
Very interesting read as I think about my own desk job and it's ups and downs. Thanks for the insight.
--Abraham