The well deserved geek stereotype and handiness
I was reading Scott Hanselman's blog, Computer Zen, this morning and most specifically the post How Geeks become Do-It-Yourselfers and Tile their Kitchen. It struck as very appropriate related to the week of vacation I just took from Magenic in order to catch up on a lot of the around the house things that need to be done. These are the things that have sat in need of doing since we moved into this house January of 2006 as well as things that have evolved into need of doing because of the impending New England winter. These things and many more items yet to come people are always surprised I can or am willing to do myself. It's that geek stereotype showing through.
My whiteboard 'honey-do' list was large and seemed very doable in a weeks time. I was wrong. The plasma TV that has sat on it's stand is now very close to being mounted on the wall but is not yet done. A few more hours and it should be good to go so I can almost check that off. I was able to get to the most offending of the basement window wells; the one that leaked during our flooding rains this last May and June leaving me with sucking 10 gallons at at time of water with the wet vac out of the window well and from the basement at all hours of the day and night keeping up with it. Then having the joy of traipsing through the downpour and into the yard that was now a stream to dump the water. It was a cold, cold rain. This was in addition to the triplets that had just come home and had their own all-hours-of-the-night agenda and seemed oblivious to the potential flooding of the future finished playroom. Infants-- so short sighted. But contrary to the rain they were warm and snuggly and definitely left me all warm and gushy inside.
Coming back to the geek stereotype. I think it is well deserved but still often incorrect and any stereotype can be and I must say I find proving the particular stereotype of the bumbling unhandy geek one I love to just blow out of the water. Take for instance building a stone wall as a personal project.
I've always had a love for stone. I loved stone houses as a kid, I played hours on end in boulder strewn stream beds, I rock climbed, bouldered, was a spelunker, I sold rocks on the corner and outside a little community store in my small hometown both pet rocks and more interesting varieties like large pieces of quartz. The pet rock reference gives you a clue of my generation. Why I didn't major in Geology I'll never know. This love of rocks is probably a part of what eventually brought me to New England. Stone walls everywhere. Many are old, old, old others are new but built in the old style of dry stack. Others make me sad because they are new, new, new and are built just that way. Honestly, in my second career I may well become a stone mason. I joke about it along with having an Alpaca farm on our land. My wife, Suzanne, wearily laughs it off because she knows I'm not entirely kidding. Back to the stone.
Suz and I moved from Cambridge, Ma to the south shore, Marshfield to be specific, in November of 2004. We bought a nice little (and I do mean little) house a few blocks off the beach and a fenced in yard of a 1/4 acre. That amount of acreage in a beach community is a sizeable plot. My neighbor across the street refereed to it as a 'wicked pisser of a lot'; that is about as high a praise as can come from someone that grew up in the Massachusetts area. The house was a cape surrounded by the classic white picket fence. The fence had seen it's better days and really needed to be replaced and definitely needed scraped and repainted it nothing else. And best of all it had this great little boulder that stuck up out of the ground right up front in one of the flower beds. It was the perfect boulder that when I was a kid would have quickly been co-opted as the perfect landscape for playing 'king of the hill'. Even as an adult I kept trying to get people to play but the neighborhood kids were no challenge and the adult visitors just didn't want to play. When we priced out a replacement for the fence for our little lot the price tag was not small at all. I was duly informed I would do the fence myself. The idea of scraping and painting a fence that would have looked much better but whose days were numbered did little to motivate me. Having figured that Tom Sawyer was required reading for most all kids I didn't figure I could trick some hapless neighborhood child to beg to take all the fun I was having and enjoy the activity for himself. So I began to think of alternatives. I could pay a kid. But kids don't seem to do those things anymore. They are too busy with summer activities and camp and all sorts of over scheduled lives. I worked with my uncle roofing one summer as kid, always mowed lawns, sold rocks (of course), painted housed, fixed gutters etc (oh and walked to school in the snow, uphill both ways in Alabama). Contrary to my cliche joke I found it all then and now very rewarding. Now all I can find are men to do these things that want what seems to me to be more per hour than I bill out for clients. A move to rock masonry is looking better everyday. So I looked again for more alternatives.
A stone wall. Not just any stone wall but a classic New England dry stack stone wall built by me from New England field stone. It would be a classic. The warnings that building a stone wall entirely with New England Field Stone was like stacking oranges did not deter me in the least. Nor the statements that you should really just use concrete in the center to hold it all together and it will look natural dry stack but will hold up better. HOGWASH. The old Daniel Webster house down the street with it's wonderful dry stack stone wall had been there for hundred of years. Concrete was for those not willing to take the time to be a craftsman and build it with the proper means to be solid. I'd do it natural or not at all.
We had two 6 ft cedar fences at the end of the yard that abutted neighbors and the fences were quite fine and thus could stay. After my calculations, I determined that a 2-1/2 ft dry stack stone wall would take about 35-40 tons of stone based on my linear feet calculations. Cheaper for the raw material than a replacement cedar picket fence fully installed. This was about a long desire of mine to build a stone wall and my love to just handle the rock. This was not about the price, especially; since I needed to leave out the opportunity cost of my time in building the wall or else I would have been compelled to have just bought a synthetic fence that needed no upkeep, fully installed and the old fence taken away at a lower realized total cost.
Everyone laughed at me. The family joked about it... 'we'll do this or that or the other when you get that stone wall built.' On and on. One day I began. As any good software developer knows I planned for a proof of concept. I ordered up and had delivered 2 tons New England field stone straight out of a bin from the stone place. No control over shapes, sizes etc. Just enough to build a 1-1/2 to 2 ft wall around where the trash cans were kept with enough variance to have proper stone selections. About that time we found out Suz was pregnant with triplets and the stone sat in the gravel drive for many weeks. Waiting. We'd have to move. The house was not near large enough for a family of 6 (dog included) and the quotes for expansion were most costly than if we applied that money to the sale of our little beach community house and bought a large house a bit further from the ocean but in the same town. So in the end I needed to perform my POC with the wall in order to get the 2 tons of rock out of one of the parking areas in order to show the house. AlsoI could now plan to not replace the fence with my grand vision.
I spent one day building a dry stacked wall with my two tons of field stone and enjoyed every minute of it. It's a thinking mans activity. You get to lift and push and pull and struggle all while trying to solve a puzzle of how a bunch or random rocks can be assembled to make something not only aesthetic but sound. Level along the top, solid so that freezing rain in the winter would not dislodge stones on the exteriors, ensuring there were no long vertical running faults or cracks in the wall, positioning, moving, repositioning, building a part, tearing it down and rebuilding it. Two tons of rock meant in reality lifting and moving four tons at least because many stones needed to be handle multiple times to get it right. In the end I was a happy camper, and had a great wall. I could stand atop it and nothing budged. The mockery of family and friends dwindled to something short of admiration but a far cry from the mockery of before.
That Suz and I also tore out an entry way closet, built a custom bench and tiled the room with slate to make a very nice mud room only added to the destruction of the stereotype. This was furthered by adding a chandelier in the dining room including doing some rewiring, and also ripping out drywall and adding new floor sections to expose the brick in the chimney that ran through the master bedroom. Now when I say I am going to build a workout room and an office area in the basement, or build a rack as an integral part of the basement for the sea kayaks and the Thule box to be stored I get the same "I'll believe it when I see it' looks I received before but only because of the triplets-being-all-encompassing stereotype not because the of that geek stereotype.
Guess what. This last week while on vacation I began to accumulate the knowledge I needed, a plan and have begun my POC for that workout room. The POC being the kayak storage rack since it has to be mounted into the poured concrete basement wall which has a metal flashing that surrounds it exterior (I didn't know about the flashing until I tried to mount a TV bracket in the workout area for the treadmill and found my masonry drill bit hit metal if it drilled though the concrete (obviously I drilled too far). This also taught me that drilling pilot holes and then drilling in masonry screws was not the most efficient mechanism. Add in the fact that in order to frame out the room I'll also need to go through 2x4's that are mounted onto the concrete walls and floor. This is no normal concrete. It's not concrete blocks it's the really hard stuff - poured concrete. They built this house strong. Bravo for them. It gave me the perfect excuse to buy a new tool. I'm now a proud owner a low end powder actuated nail driver designed specifically to fire an appropriate nail through the 2x4 and 1" into the concrete. It's both a scary tool and one that just flat out rocks (very punny). If I were a native of the area I'd say it's 'pisser' or rather 'pissah'. Nothing like the smell of powder from the .22 cartridge when you eject the casing after every nail drive.
So the moral of the story is that we geeks deserve the stereotype that we have for clumsiness and general lack of ability to do more manual things and would prefer to just hire it out. But don't forget what we geeks are really, really good at is picking up a book, doing some research on the internet and jumping in on a project of any type and making it happen. If we're so inclined to study just a bit on any task and have an interest it will not only be done but be done reasonably well the first time and probably exceeding well anytime thereafter.
Beware that geeks hidden inner brawn.
By the way... I drove by the old house after winter was over. The true test of such a wall was to see if any of the exterior stones had been dislodged by the expansion and contraction of freezing rain, snow and who knows what else. Winter is very tough on a wall like that. Not a single stone was out of place. Rahhhh!
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