Gonna Miss Those Flush Toilets

Phil over at BustedKnuckles had a piece on us old farts leaving the workforce and, by and large, not being replaced.

He’s 100% right as usual.

You can not tell me that they weren’t pencil whipping all of the calibrations and required maintenance schedules at that point because we could barely keep up with all of it with 16 people. That plant was running 24/7 and now I believe they are down to 2 shifts Monday through Friday.

They literally had permanent job opening ads in several outlets and could not get anyone to even apply.

The outfit I work at now has the same aging maintenance team issues and they also refuse to see the writing on the wall.

I am the oldest of 3 guys. The next guy is 60 and the youngest is a guy I worked with at the other place. He is 50.

This place also runs 24/7, with just 3 guys on Dayshift to keep the joint running. They rely heavily on outside vendors and extra Millwrights when things break down.

Somehow they justify this great expense instead of hiring a full time guy to pick up the slack.

I used to hear that line all the time back in the day. In reality, people are cheap. Especially those younger guys wanting to learn a trade. Back when I installed phone systems, I was constantly doing work above my pay grade, and thought nothing of it. I relished the opportunity and experience. In Phil’s quote above, they were probably trying to hire an experienced person, when it would’ve been far easier to get a noob, and have him (or her) mentored by a greybeard. For the price of a guy they couldn’t get they probably could’ve gotten two trainees. Managers absolutely cannot think abstractly. The cost of not doing something is often more than doing it. Like creating a labor life cycle.

“You know, guys like Jeff don’t walk in your door every day. Usually you have to steal them from somewhere. So when they do, you hire them right away before someone else does” A boss of mine (nearly 30 years ago) telling me about the new tech he hired, who turned out to be a fantastic dude.

Hence the problem in Phil’s companies. It was hard enough then. Now that there’s fewer, it’s nearly impossible to score a seasoned worker.

Since about two years into my telecom career, I’ve been the alpha-dog tech wherever I’ve been. I’ve mentored dozens of guys. So I’ve seen it over and over. Get someone starting out and grow them. Can’t do it now, it seems. Or won’t.

The here and now reality is, all us old farts who have that experience are either retiring from the work force or are falling over dead and there isn’t anyone coming up behind us in large numbers.

The Airline industry and the Automotive industry are already suffering this shortage of experienced people and this DEI bullshit is already getting people killed.

Frankly, I don’t see any good solutions on the horizon.

This is why many things in our world no longer work. From a fast food order to a jet aircraft. Those Boeing jets that you see aren’t having failures from design. A 737 (Pre supermax) and 757 are wonderful, mature, designs. It’s shoddy maintenance and lack of focus that caused those failures. A friend of mine returned home on a 737. He showed me a pic of the shitty, peeling, cracked paint on the interior ceiling. Really? You can’t rattle-can the SOB when the plane is idle for a few hours? Did anyone notice? Was there someone that could do it?

There are two solutions, by the way. First is to go back to what works. We’ve already seen waves of millennials and gen-z opting for trades. That’s a good thing, although it’s a smaller generation than Boomers and GenX. That will take time. Hopefully, they can get actual mentoring, as well as training. Like how Phil started the piece, you may know how to do things, especially by the book, but those greybeards know how to do it well, efficiently, and safely. I’m sure as the economy contracts, you’ll see guys heading to trade work more and more. There are a lot of things AI isn’t going to cure.

The other solution will probably happen when the economy contracts, like it will. It always does. And when it does, the food chain collapses. Workers that otherwise wouldn’t look at doing manual work will probably start looking for it, and smart companies will keep core talent and loose the dead wood. That happened over and over throughout my career. The dumb ones will simply vaporize.

Back to what Phil was talking about. His industry isn’t the only one letting tribal knowledge die on the vine. The space industry went through that. I remember stories of all the paper drawings, calculations, and notes that were tossed as NASA upgraded to DEI causes. You can’t get that back. I saw a motorcycle show with Jesse James where he was building a bike that had the tank made from copper and riveted. He discovered the ancient art and wanted to get good at it. I remember him holding up a seat from a B-17 and saying “Some old-timer shaped all that metal and put in all those rivets”. He had to research and practice to learn how to do it.

Many such cases of ‘dying arts’. We used to have shop classes, where a dude could learn the basics. Now, I’m not sure if a young dude would even get the exposure needed to be a decent helper. Hell, I watched a cashier at Tom Thumb training a kid who couldn’t tell celery from squash. Think he’ll learn to maintain industrial machines?

“Oh yeah? Who’s going to train the monkeys?” – My sister to a law partner that said finding assistants should be easy, since a monkey could do the job.

It’s not just trades, by the way. Look around.