I want my MTV.

I’ve worked for several small companies over the years. In many cases, it’s never more than a few days before I start to wonder, “How in the world do these guys make it in the business world?” I worked for one company that the owner couldn’t spell his own name and insisted on hand writing all formal business correspondence with his customers. It wouldn’t have been as bad if his handwriting was legible.
I worked for an individual once who kept asking me to lie to the customers about the details of their purchases. I worked for a company that never had enough functioning vehicles for all the employees to perform their daily duties, and the employees worked on commission. I worked for an individual who was frustrated because I couldn’t hear him over the large piece of equipment he was operating, so he hit me with it to get my attention and then got mad when I was too injured to continue work that day. I had my ankle broken because of the inattentiveness of fellow employees at one job. I’ve contracted for companies that refused to honor contracts or pay their bills (the ones I had given them). I had one job where the people that I trained were paid more than I was and they worked for the same company.

When I was a teenager and needed money for all the essential purchases a teenager must make (fast food, music, gas, miscellaneous junk, fast food, etc.) I started to look at my options and did not like what I saw. My buddies were getting jobs at the local video store or fast food joint for $5.15/hr. They’d work nearly every evening and were rewarded every two weeks with a big fat paycheck that usually amounted to something like $85. Some nice lady in the neighborhood offered me $100 to fix the roof on her shed. My choices were to work for 3 or 4 hours a night for two weeks and make $85, or take half of a Saturday on a shed roof and make $100. Now I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but that seemed like a no brainer to me.

15 years later all my buddies have grown up and gotten real jobs, and I’m still fixing shed roofs. I’ve questioned myself a million times. I’ve even tried the 9 to 5 before, but I’m just not cut out for it. I always joke that while everyone else went and found them a good corporate job with benefits and a retirement plan, I just skipped it all and went straight to retirement. It just seemed more my style.

There are days I love what I do for a living. I make stuff, I fix stuff, I play music, and I talk to people and get paid for it. There is something about crafting something with your own hands and seeing it completed. Even on the most horrid projects, when it’s all done I can step back and look at it and I’m filled with a sense of accomplishment and completion. When I was 16 I contracted and built a garage for a family friend to pay for my first car. To this day when I drive past it with someone new I point it out and say, “I built that when I was 16.” When I see someone pull out one of my pens to write a check, I get all excited (especially if the check is for me).

Unfortunately there are also days that I hate my job. When it becomes a job, a necessity to pay my insanely high electric bill because my children turn on every light and heater in the house no matter the time of day or season, then it’s not as exciting as it used to be. When I have an order for two dozen identical pens that I’ve given a quantity discount for and I am under the gun to get them finished by the deadline, it’s not as fulfilling as the first pen I turned on the lathe. The days I really despise what I do for a living is when Hannah gets sick and needs to go to the doctor but we can’t afford it. The days when I crawl into my 200,000 mile mini-van and hear one more squeak or groan that wasn’t there the day before make me question myself. Would it be better if I had a 9-5 and 2 car payments and a mortgage like everyone else? Some days I wonder.

This week I put a window and door in a 105 year old farm house. The house was built before standardized building materials, so what should have taken 4 or 5 hours took over 20. The walls were too thick. The openings were too small, or too large. Nothing was square or level. There were several moments when I wanted to pull my hair out because I discovered one more problem I hadn’t seen before. Tonight though I stepped back to look at the completed projects and felt better about myself than I’ve felt in weeks, although admittedly not as good as I will feel tomorrow when I cash the check (but definitely better than I’ll feel when all the money has vanished to pay all my silly little bills). My customer was ecstatic. Their old house that was drafty and dark and rotten is, today, slightly less drafty and dark and rotten. His Great-Granddad built the house in 1906 and 105 years later I breathed a little more life into it.

I’ll never be a millionaire replacing doors in old farmhouses and turning pens that Hannah sells at art shows, but that doesn’t really matter. Sure I could find places to spend millions of dollars, but eventually it would run out just like the hundreds and thousands run out now. I spent three days with my oldest son. I helped him learn a little bit more about a dying craft. I added a few more years to a family homestead. I also managed to make enough money to pay our bills this month. Not a bad way to spend an unseasonably warm week in January. Now if I could just find the motivation to finish my own house….