www.thefabricator.com: There are days in the metal fabricating industry when everything feels normal. You walk in, flip on the lights, hear the hum of machines and the clank of steel, smell of smoke, and you don’t even think twice about it. It’s just what you do. It’s what you’ve always done. Honestly, you get kind of complacent.
I’ve caught myself in that mindset more than once. Everything seems to be on autopilot and nothing seems to be as fresh as it used to be.
3 comments:
It is really interesting to hear this from an opposite point of view as mine–to me, highly specific fabrication (that is, metalworking and some forms of carpentry) usually does nothing but stress me out. I have some trouble deciding when it’s okay to be a perfectionist and when something is “good enough,” (and as a theatre worker, usually “good enough” is fine.) Finding excitement in this kind of thing (and especially after so long working in it) is cool to hear about. First, because this can apply to almost any line of work. Sometimes people tend to see a lot of jobs different to the one they have as “cool,” but we tend to forget that it can become monotonous over time. I even sometimes think about jobs I would never even consider right now as being cool (for example, I’ve firmly said that I’m not doing anything STEM related, but sometimes I’ll see something and think, huh, wow, that is cool. I think the same goes for fabrication, but maybe I’m more susceptible to that becoming monotonous for me.)
I feel like because a lot of the hyper-specific fabrication machines that we have are still very new to me, I still retain a lot of this excitement when I see them. Getting a tour of all the machines in carpentry stagecraft was often eye-opening as I got to be like oh, thats the machine that makes that thing that I never imagined how it was made. However, as soon as I have to start using one of those machines on crew, I lose the excitement. After you cut and assemble 10 stair units, it starts to get a little old and you forget that you’re literally making structures that can support entire people out of planks of wood. I like this perspective - its important to realize that you are creating something out of basically nothing, which is really cool and not something anyone can do right away. Not only that, we’re also solving problems and creating art, which is not something that everyone gets to do everyday.
I like this article a lot. It outlines exactly what I love about shops: making stuff is, in fact, really cool. As someone who’d feel at home working in a shop in the near future, the rhythm of machines and background sounds of a workplace like that make me very happy. I think in all areas of work, be it education like high school or college, or somewhere in a person’s career path, burnout can hit like a truck. Doing the work you love can turn into a repetitive chore that must be accomplished in order to get through the day. But where I think I’d go crazy in a cubicle or office space, workplaces where “making stuff” occurs offer the constant benefit of seeing really “cool stuff”. Whenever I feel weighed down by work I don’t have any particular interest in doing, I can always persevere by promising myself a project where I get to make something at the end. I think a lot of us in this industry have this innate urge to make and fiddle with things. As long as we hold on to that feeling of building a tree house as kids, we can never truly lose the magic.
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