Work, Leisure, and Full Engagement

This chapter finally discusses what I've been waiting for: local community involvement. One reason Crawford's job is so appealing to him is the fact that he generally knows his customers. The same bikes come in time and time again because the people coming in live in the area and part of a bigger community of motorcycle riders. Relationship from community even helps improve the quality of work; what you're fixing is no longer something distant that the consumer would never take the time to figure out who actually did it. This can be applied to pretty much everything, but especially important for the current push for local foods. Knowing where your food comes from makes a big difference, and keeps the farmer accountable to actual people instead of some big corporate plant.

Crawford also makes a point about how children who were rewarded for drawing eventually lost interest because the reward turned into the reason for drawing. Reading that sounded exactly like college. There are many things that I was interested in before I had to be graded on it, but once a grade was at stake it became more about getting an A than actually enjoying the material. I am definitely looking forward to good grades no longer being the goal for the first time in almost my whole life. Weird.

There are some things computers just can't replace.

Crawford discusses the difference between "knowing that" and "knowing how" in his chapter "Thinking as Doing." I think this is an essential part of our bigger question of whether or not college has really taught us anything. In my experience, college has taught me a lot of "knowing that," which makes sense considering "knowing how" in many cases would require cutting into a person. But there is also the benefit of having labs, where I have learned a lot of "how" (for instance, by cutting up animals, as cruel as it sounds. I've even performed surgery on a rat before, and yes, it did live).

Knowing that and knowing how are also important in the career world. Multiple times I have talked to people about possible paths to take after graduation and there are always questions on whether or not I have ever tried a certain job. A good example of this is research. In science, it is important to do research while you're an undergrad if you plan on going to graduate school. In fact, a lot of times they don't even care what kind of research you do, as long as it's mostly science (and that's a really broad category). The idea is that by doing any research, you get experience for what it would be like to work for the next six or more years of your life doing research. Now, there is a difference between different labs, but the essential ideas are still the same: formulating hypotheses, testing them, retesting them, explaining it to people, figuring out what when wrong and how to fix it, etc. It requires your mind to work a certain way, and no matter how much you read about what research is like, you can never really know until you do it. Knowing that office jobs can be boring does not do justice to how boring they really can be if you've never worked in an office (I'm a little biased against them, but so is Crawford). In doing something you really get to know it, like growing a garden for the first time and figuring out different nutrient requirements of plants. It goes beyond all the theoreticals you learn by surfing the web and makes it real.

The Contradictions of the Cubicle

Crawford switches his focus from the shop to office politics to show the differences between an office team and a manual labor crew. In the end it basically comes down to the office being a place of subjective standards that are prone to frequent change, while in jobs of manual labor there are concrete standards. Oddly enough, this chapter closely paralleled my feelings toward college. I have always liked the sciences because science is ruled by concrete theories and laws. Granted, this is also why many people hate science, because it seems like a ton of memorization. It is similar to the apprentice who just imitates the teacher and after a lot of practice finally figures out why. The office is more like the Dialogue classes or any English class: it is graded by subjective standards. These subjective standards tend to stress me out, because whether it's right or not, grades have a lot to do with getting into graduate school.

In some sense, I thought that Crawford was a little hard on office workers. As much as I hate working in an office, it is important to recognize that there are many offices where people are allowed to think and contribute to the betterment of the company/consumers. These tend to be the smaller companies, because once a company gets too big the employers become more distant from upper management.

Crawford also touches on the fact that as college students or college graduates, we often feel like we are an elite class of people and therefore unwilling to do more menial work or manual labor. Unfortunately, it just sounds so much more prestigious to say you work for a company like Google than be a plumber. Until our society can consider plumbing as prestigious a job as the manager of some big company it is going to be hard to promote Crawford's idea that we don't all need to go to college to have a better life.