Ditch Digger

Episode #648

July 3, 2021

When i was a little boy my mother encouraged me to study hard in school.
“You don’t want to become a ditch digger when you grow up,” she said.

So i studied hard.

i excelled in high school. My grades were good enough to be accepted at a prestigious university. i started my university courses in the sciences and segued to English and the Arts. As VP of my residence hall i had access to the underground steam tunnels. Was this a preview of things to come?

Mine was a full and rounded education.

With a degree in hand i drove a bus, sold insurance and worked with my father-in-law at his cabinet shop. When i took over the cabinet shop from Fred i learned how to run a business.

After the cabinet shop i expanded my wood crafting skills at an architectural mill, becoming a stair builder. These skills gave me the resume to work at Disneyland on the Fantasy Land rebuild project. There i combined jig making and “Innovention” to create unique barley twists for the Dumbo Circus Calliope.

After Disneyland myself and some fellow cabinetmakers found jobs in the trade show industry. The skills we learned included modular cabinet building, jig making, electrical wiring, plumbing, advanced elliptical layouts, crate building, graphics, warehousing and fulfillment. We learned to bend tools to our will.

When i bought my first Macintosh i leveraged the project planning software into a front office job as the estimator. This job made me the liaison between Design, Sales, Graphics, Purchasing, Production, Union and Accounting. Ultimately my title was company Ombudsman.

My experience as the de facto IT guy for the trade show company network and its Apple computers prepared me to become an Apple consultant.
i am the iMentor to this day.

In my life at home in the country, now-a-days i have become a ditch digger.
i dig holes for plants, trenches for shed foundations and ditches for irrigation and water control.

i am very good at it.

i understand the need for the right tool for the job. Living on a granite mountain actually prompted me to buy a jackhammer… for planting trees.

My experience and knowledge of construction, tools, design, planning, physics and math have well prepared me to dig a stable and functional ditch.

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

—T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets