Nonsense Fatigue

"Take this job and shove it." -Johnny Paycheck

This post is the second in a series that we are launching at the Savage Collective about self-employment in the trades. Last week, Grant described trends and characteristics in self-employment in the trades. You can read that here. Today, Brandon is leveraging his own experience of running a small diesel repair business with his father to comment on how Machine nonsense forces tradespeople to leave jobs in the Machine to strike out on their own.

“If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.” - Marcus Aurelius

What are the prerequisites for being self-employed in the trades? I suppose that you need some starter capital and essential equipment. You obviously need some skill in the trade and a willingness to accept risk. However, a common trait among self-employed tradespeople is the refusal to tolerate bureaucratic nonsense, which tends to increase with company size and CEO pay. Many skilled workers focused on producing quality work can't stand it.

This nonsense typically comes in three main forms: safteyism, searching solutionism, and corruption

Safetyism

Corporate trades jobs can overwhelm skilled workers with safety requirements. While I've learned some helpful safety techniques and ergonomics in these jobs, the safety regime is often run by company men who don't understand the actual work. For example, I've sat through lectures about not lifting more than 50 lbs. overhead without assistance, only to be sent out to install a 60 lb 42MT starter on a diesel engine. In reality, you often have to hold the starter with one hand while starting the bolts with the other, in a space so tight there's no room for another person or a jack. If you've ever dropped a 42MT starter on your forehead during a road call in a Walmart parking lot on a cold January day, you might be a diesel mechanic. Diesel mechanics have a lot of Mondays.

Many bureaucrats fail to understand these sorts of imperfect and improvised techniques required to get a job done. They also misunderstand how the equipment and conditions themselves dictate best practices. Corporate mechanics are often told that, while running a road call, they must turn off their van and put the keys in their pocket once they reach the disabled truck. I’m sure this sounds great in theory to the head of HR, but she has never tried to work on a stranded truck in the middle of the PA Turnpike. Turning off the van would be a terrible idea. Not only are you often powering equipment from the service van’s electrical system, but you are also running emergency lighting and have the heat on full blast since it is inevitably winter. Furthermore, the last thing you want to do is have your keys in your pocket as you’re crawling underneath a trailer to change a brake can. Who responds to the road call for the guy who is on the road call when he needs spare keys or a jump when his battery dies? I’ve never seen an HR flow chart provide that answer.

Most of the safetyism that comes from top-down management is built on a risk mitigation framework that relies on processes, procedures, and policies. If just the right steps are only followed and implemented in just the right order, we can reduce risk to a negligible level.

I was a diesel mechanic for Pepsico. Not long before I left, the company circulated an email. One of the company men drew up a fancy, visual PDF showing the proper approach to pull-starting a small engine. Helpful tips like making sure your hands are dry and to pull the string with the right ergonomics and angle. I suspect that someone, somewhere had hurt their shoulder while attempting to start a pressure washer. Now, as if his injury wasn’t enough, we were all having to suffer through more training. Processes, procedures, and policies are a weak substitute for virtue, especially the virtue of prudence.

Many tradespeople are fatigued by the safetyism. They know what they are doing. They are good at what they do. They want to act prudently, and they trust that they can. Most tradespeople I know have a better understanding of risk than any tie at a desk. So, they flee from large corporations toward the margins: the small shops or self-employment to escape this insanity. They lace up their steel-toed boots every day, grateful for all their digits. They know that the work they do can be dangerous. They assume this risk, recognizing that it is required to do the work of creating or reconciling some material object to the world. In a real sense, when the job does finally get done, the victory over danger adds to the accomplishment. There’s only so many times a company man can take away razor blades because they are “too sharp” before a good tradesperson will walk off the job. As Matthew Crawford has said, “There’s no HR department in a welding shop.”

The dreaded safety meeting.

Searching Solutionism

One great promise made by company men is that they will solve problems. They have solutions. The issue is that the solutions are often in search of problems. This is what we call “searching solutionism.” There is never any shortage of clever promises from company men that they will solve problems that you did not know existed. Unfortunately, the Machine has created managerial positions that must ultimately be justified. The best kind of company man is one that can simultaneously discover phantom problems for which they have shovel-ready solutions.

Many of these solutions seem useful from the top of the system. However, ask any mechanic, and they will tell you that there’s always a difference between horsepower at the flywheel and horsepower at the wheels. Horsepower in the flywheel passes through myriad mechanisms to convert crankshaft energy into movement. The same is true in the trades. Often the theoretical solutions for non-existent problems cause new problems that also never existed. What looks good on paper often plays out very differently in real life. As Yogi Berra used to say, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice--in practice there is.”

Again, back to my Pepsi days. We were running 15–20-year-old equipment. A lot of changes were in the pipeline. We were one year away overhauling the entire distribution system with brand new trucks and trailers. In the midst of this overhaul, a company man decided that it would be a great idea to switch all of Pepsi’s fleets to full synthetic oil. There was no discrimination between fleets that had been upgraded and fleets which hadn’t. This meant that we were forced to switch our old equipment to full synthetic oil instead of waiting one year for new equipment and implementing all those changes at once.

While the oil salesman guaranteed that our equipment would work fine on the new synthetic oil, the gap between theory and reality reared its ugly head. A huge portion of our fleet began to have starting issues. On the old trucks that used high pressure oil to fire the injectors, the new oil was bypassing the old O-rings. Trucks that started fine yesterday now needed a shot of starting fluid. Some wouldn’t start at all, especially after they got warm. We had to replace O-rings on the injectors for practically the entire fleet. Of course, the salesman’s excuse was that the O-rings must have been going bad already. “I’m sure they were,” I replied, “But they still worked before with conventional oil. Now practically every single truck needs to be worked on for what was a non-problem.”

Less than a year later, after I had left, all the brand-new trucks and trailers were delivered. Most of the old equipment wouldn’t have even needed touched in that time frame if they had rolled in synthetic oil only as the new equipment had emerged. Countless man-hours were spent on unnecessary repairs because someone thought it would be easier to solve a problem that did not actually exist.

Situations like these often break the brain of a tradesman. A wise tradesman knows when a problem is a problem largely because they can see the process through from top to bottom. They see how things could have been done better, cheaper and with fewer overall resources but must follow respond to mandates, those “searching solutions” that they know deliver an inferior service or product. For those in pursuit of excellence, this is a hard burden to bear.

A winter day at an old Pepsi fleet, circa 2017. Wearing High-Vis in the yard, obviously.

Corruption

The final nail in the coffin for many tradesmen is having to work inside companies crawling with corruption. Talk to almost any blue-collar worker who has put time in at any large company, and they will tell you countless stories of shortcuts and dishonest reporting done in the name of marking a job “complete.”  I have seen plenty of service writers at dealerships writing up brakes and rotors as needing replaced when they were clearly fine. When I worked for a short while at a Freightliner dealership, I constantly saw customers overcharged for the poorest quality work. A friend of mine finally stopped working there when he could no longer live with the level of warranty fraud in which he was complicit. It was not unheard of to claim that completely operational engines needed entirely rebuilt to create more work for themselves, cashing in on pay from Detroit Diesel. My friend made good money at the time, but his conscience wouldn’t allow him to continue to work there.

My father has a similar story. He worked at Ryder Truck Rental for 24 years. His father retired from the same shop. In some of the last years he was there, Ryder applied pressure on the shift foremen to falsify paperwork in order to meet internal quotas. If a truck was due for a preventive maintenance (oil change, grease, tires & brakes checked) but that truck wasn’t on their lot, the company would simply falsify all the measurements so the job could be marked complete and quotas could be met. After a week or two, when the truck was finally back at the shop, they would then look over the truck and redo the paperwork with the real measurements. While this made the shop numbers look great and the managers happy, the numbers reported of on-time preventive maintenance simply didn’t mean anything anymore. They weren’t real. My father refused to falsify paperwork. They slowly forced him out

My father at Ryder on his “road-call bike", a bike he retrieved out of the dumpster and aired up the tires to ride to a far lot to check on equipment.

For many, being a tradesperson means something. It is a good and worthy life that is marked by skill and virtue. Often working for a large company within the Machine conditions of safetyism, searching solutionism, and corruption, it is impossible to act as a true tradesperson. You get fatigued by the nonsense. Ultimately, the only option may be to strike out on one’s own. It was the obvious choice for my father when he was forced out of Ryder and I left Pepsi to work for him. But the life of a self-employed tradesman has its own challenges. In subsequent essays, we’ll explore many of these challenges. Some emerge from the nature of self-employment itself while others exist because even when self-employed, the relentless Machine continues to hound us.