Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

I just wasted two hours of my morning with a young person who came to me asking for career advice, coincidentally with a post on ZH about the types of jobs that are disappearing fast, you know, chimney sweep, buggy whip maker, etc etc.

I wasted it because I took it seriously and tried to do it properly, and the fact is it soon became apparent that I was wasting my time, but I found it interesting, so I followed the rabbit down the hole.

I should start by saying that in my opinion it is a really hard question even if you know the person, but the answer both genuine and cop out will be some form of trade that you carry out with your hands that you can do alone, Kenneth Williams (ooh matron) of Carry On and other fame was a Draughtsman (pen and paper CAD) before he was drafted into the army and ended up in the entertainments corp and thus began his career, all accidental like, but, he had a trade to fall back on, which he said was something *his* father banged on about.

The thing people don’t get is I’d rather teach a trained draughtsman electronics (as an example, not that I myself know anything about electronics) than a random kid off the street, because the trained draughtsman has already demonstrated that they have the perseverance to stick with something until they master it.

People I know with young kids don’t even talk to me much any more, my last comment that I hoped their 11 year old daughter got real good real fast at blowjobs, because I couldn’t see any other way she’d earn a living, kinds set the cat amongst the pigeons.

I’ve had a couple of people with mid teen kids who see what I do for a living, and in shades of being 20 and unmarried and everyone trying to arrange dates for you, these folks are trying to arrange paid apprenticeships for their progeny, oh, so you mean little Fred who can’t keep a computer running without constantly loading it up with infections, little Fred who has never in living memory used the kettle / cooker / washing machine etc, little Fred whose last comment to me was that I drive a shit old car, *that* little Fred, the little Fred who has never expressed the *slightest* interest to me in what I do, you want me to give *him* a job, *and* pay him, *and* train him…. is that right?

Um, well, he needs something, it would be good for him, umm.

So back to this morning and the wasted youth.

I spent the first 30 minutes explaining what a trade was.. ooh I get it, you mean like a barista…. smacks head on table repeatedly… kid, how did you get so dumb.. not a barista, or a hairdresser, or a celebutard shopper, or a kardashian.

A trade is something that someone comes along and either makes from scratch or design, something that did not exist before, like a welder / fabricator or a turner, or someone who comes along and transforms something from one state into another one, but does so elegantly and with little waste, eg a butcher or a farmer.

oooh, you mean like Pete the mechanic, dad’s mate who fixes all his cars? No, I don’t mean like Pete, I’ve seen the state of your mum and dad’s cars when they leave Pete’s workshop, and frankly when they leave they are worse than they should be when going into a proper workshop run by a proper motor engineer, Pete is fucking useless…  cue teen angst and outrage.

So we go through all the basics, and yeah, I know all that shit about rose tinted glasses and all that, and I know all that shit about most of what we learn at school is shit and who needs to know the great fire of london was 1666 and william the conqueror was 1066, but the fact is, my little shit, you’d been IN the fucking scholastic system from the age of 5, plus you’ve been surrounded by the fucking internet most of your life, so you have a good nine years of learning behind you.

So then I discover, and I fucking shit you not, that questions like “what is 100 times 1?” make you pause, ( hell I started of at 400 times 25 pence, and that wasn’t a question, it was just an aside to an example I was giving about piece work rates and making a profit, and then I saw the vacant look on your face and got side tracked…) and I can see from your face you guess the answer, and all your answers have question marks behind them, you do not KNOW anything…. and school is obviously a place where you can keep guessing until you get the right answer, no penalties.

So my career advice is either practice saying “Do you want fries with that?” or go and join the army and become cannon fodder somewhere… god forbid you are probably not even too stupid to get into the police force.

Because you’re fucked, at 14 your life is already over, and don’t give me that new age shit about little Fred may wake up one day when he is 16 and find something he really likes and start making a go of things and by the time he is 25 he will be a millionaire… that DOES NOT HAPPEN to people who are *totally* uneducated across the board, *despite* being surrounded by the internet, there is a whole world of fucking knowledge and interesting things out there and he doesn’t give a fuck about anything except the latest and greatest phone, and PlayStation 4…..  and maybe Ferrari’s…

And that’s another fucking thing, he is a mad keen Ferrari fan who knows everything about them, show him this pic and meh, some old prat in some old car, is it a mini> Well no kid it’s a cooper, and the old prat is one Enzo Ferrari..  what, so he has the same name as the cars??  Smacks head on table repeatedly again.

But, all this aside, it is true that lots of jobs are going to go the way of the buggy whip maker, I completely fail to see how high street shops that basically sell nothing but greetings cards and wrapping paper and ribbons have any future at all, ditto the £3 for some dreck in a cardboard cup coffee chain shops, in fact unless you are totally blind and deaf the entire retail chain from the factory to your door is undergoing massive change, and you can’t even look at any one sector (for example parcel courier) and not see still more massive change going on, retail is being attacked from all sides and it’s impossible to know where it will go, but it is easy to see that massive changes are looming.

I actually think a young person taking an apprentice ship today with one of the very few remaining true motor engineers / independent garages might not be such a bad thing once all the free credit / personal leasing / inventory stuffing has gone away, it’s certainly a better move than a main brand dealership doing sales or finance or servicing while on the lease…

I think electronics would be a good one too, because you *can* still do most things, after a fashion, with discrete electronic components, and so you’ll still learn what goes on inside an IC and understand it, electronics was the one career that always called to me, but never quite loud enough, when I left school I interviewed for a place at Harwell AERE learning electronics, the siren call of Castrol R40 and BSA pre unit engines was stronger, but I often wonder….

I think programming is a bad one, even if you specialise in a field with a future like CNC or machine vision, because it is likely to be one of those fields where you are either world class, or a worker drone soon to be replaced by a library…

Perversely, despite the total crap that is the hobby market, I think 3d printing / additive machining has a future too, but as part of the hackerspace thing where you rebuild and repurpose stuff rather than just scrapping it, I thing we are due a resurgence of things being used for purposes for which they were never intended at all, eg making a product such as a electricity generating windmill using off the shelf efficient parts from a washing machine etc, rather than trying to do a Dyson and roll your own from scratch just so it is all proprietary IP… this was big in the 70’s in manufacturing.

Beyond that I’d hate to say.

What I do know is, don’t even *think* you are ready for anything unless your basic English language and mathematics skills are up to scratch (basic trig and algebra included) and you need some sort of skill in logic and deduction and working through problems, and I’d also say that if the point of learning is the wage payoff at the end of it, you’re hosed, you need to enjoy the actual things you are learning.

It is true to say that 99.999% of kids leaving school are totally hosed for life, but if survival is the name of the game you don’t have to beat people like me, you only have to be able to beat people like them, and knowing your times tables by heart will do that, so there is some hope for you, you may get past the first tiny hurdle and have at least a shot at learning enough to pass the second one.

Back to the sound guy and camera guy in the bush when they realise they are on the menu for the lions, sound guy takes off boots and puts on running shoes, camera guys says you can’t outrun a lion, sound guy says I’m not going to, going to outrun you…

… sound guy at least gets a second opportunity at life.