As you may have heard, Michael Bloomberg once stated he “could teach anybody in this room to be a farmer.” “It’s a process,” he said. “You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.” On the other hand, he said he could not teach anybody to be a TECHNOLOGY worker because the “skill sets that you have to learn are to think and analyze, you have to have a lot more gray matter.”
Honestly, I am embarrassed to admit that Mr Bloomberg’s comments took your humble correspondent by surprise. For decades, I was actually under the delusion that being a successful farmer was one of the HARDEST things anybody could do, and would be a challenge for even the SMARTEST people I had ever met, like my wife’s late grandfather. Farmers’ skills seem to cover a wide range of so-called “gray matter” professions, including veterinarian, horticulturist, climatologist, animal behaviorist, geneticist, and businessperson.
So, I’m sitting here wondering. If this is what Bloomberg thinks of FARMERS, what must he think of us HANDYMEN?! Geez, being a HANDYMAN is one of the many things that even FARMERS can do! It’s not like we handymen NEVER deal with gray matter, but I can tell you, you wouldn’t want the gray matter WE work with stuffed into your head, either before or after it has hardened.
Now, I don’t know if Mr Bloomberg ever reads these newsletters and, even if he did, whether he’d think there’s anything Dr Steve can TEACH him. But I’m not going to take a chance, and miss this opportunity to teach Mr Bloomberg about Fix St Louis handymen, so he won’t embarrass himself if the subject ever comes up.
So, here is my list of things Mr Bloomberg probably would NOT be able to teach Fix St Louis handymen:
Climbing Tall, Scary Ladders
While Mr Bloomberg may have plenty of experience climbing onto boxes behind podiums, it seems unlikely he has the bravado to stand at the top of a 40′ ladder, which our technicians do routinely.
Carrying Heavy Bags of Concrete
Fix St Louis technicians often carry TWO 80 lb. bags of concrete at the same time — one under each arm. If Mr Bloomberg could be cloned, I have no doubt they could also carry one Michael Bloomberg under each arm. Based upon his slight frame, I wouldn’t think he could teach anyone how to do this.
Getting Intimate with Toilets
We at Fix St Louis are poking our heads into toilets every single day to get them working for you. But for all we know, Mr Bloomberg has people whose full-time job is to push his flush levers, and he would have trouble differentiating one end of a plunger from the other. Seems like Fix St Louis wouldn’t get much out of his toilet teaching seminars.
Making Drywall Seams Disappear
The magicians at Fix St Louis can make the seams between two drywall sheets disappear, using that gray matter I’ve been talking about (sometimes referred to as “joint compound”). Trust me, this is very hard to do and requires lots and lots of experience to get it right. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but Mr Bloomberg has willfully chosen not to invest his time on his drywall performance, but instead spends it on his Wall Street performance and, believe me, those are two different types of wall altogether.
So, what have we learned from Mr Bloomberg today? We’ve learned that while we handymen may never be invited to a Mensa party or that annual elite get-together in Davos, an awful lot of folks there and everywhere else CAN’T or WON’T do what we at Fix St Louis do everyday — even the most ardent do-it-yourselfers. You might say we just had a teachable moment.
Dr Steve
Fix St Louis
314-434-4100