Why I’m careful with my tools

I used to work for a man who…
Okay, let’s start over. This time with a little bit of honesty…
I used to work for my father-in-law who used to get pissed off whenever we (the techs) would lose a single roll of electrical tape or when he’d walk through the parking lot and find a handful of connectors that cost four cents each. Four cents!

He kept a big jar on his desk where he would deposit his parking lot finds and wouldn’t let anyone touch it. Even when we ran low on these connectors (especially when we ran low). At the end of the year he’d count them out and tell us he was taking $215 out of this week’s paycheck. That was more than half of what I made back then! Of course he never took the money but it was the point. We were throwing these things all over the place. If he found $215 worth in the parking lot in one year, I know I must have thrown away thousands of dollars of these things over the years I worked there.

And then there was the $100 roll of tape. A single roll of electrical tape. If we went to the job site and didn’t have the right tools or materials, it cost us a dollar at Home Depot to get a new roll of tape. But it cost the company $100 in use of the truck, gas, loss of productivity for the time we were off site… Every time I see a roll of tape my head thinks, “$100″.

It’s a good thing Jerry never worked for NASA. He’d lose his mind with this! But, it gives amateur astronomers and hobbyists something cool to tell their grand kids. $100,000 tool bag floating across the sky.

Years later, I’m in a job where I don’t really use tools anymore. A tape measure, an architect’s scale, a Sharpie… But you can bet that all of my tools are present and accounted for. When I show up on a job site and I work with another tech and he has to rummage around and find his tools… Can’t find his Sharpie and spends an hour looking in the airport shops to buy one and eventually has to borrow one from the TSO, you can bet that my brain is thinking, “the hundred dollar Sharpie.”

I hated working for that man. But years later I find myself realizing why. You never understand your parents until you have kids and you never understand your boss until you have people working for you. I was young, thought I knew it all and didn’t like this old guy yelling at me all the time. But as I approach adulthood (I’ll never get there, you can’t make me!!!) and I see how the world works, I find that I am sounding more like him.

Luckily for the people that work with me I have diluted that personality with several other people’s influence. Just like when you say something to your kid that your parent’s said to you. You swore you’d never sound like them. But in many ways they were right, you just didn’t know it at the time. Sometimes at work I hang my head and say, “I sound just like Jerry.”