Yesterday I had a big project to get done before this weekend, so I hired two teenage boys to help.
The contrast between the two is striking. While one is a go getter with a strong work ethic, the other is not so much. The one not so much is a friend’s son, the go getter is his friend he recommended. Both have worked for me before, but this was their first time working together.
I had a meeting to go to, so I made up a to do list, gave them some marching orders, and went. Having been a teen myself, I worried about leaving them unsupervised but hoped the go getter would lead the way.
When I returned three hours later, my heart sank. The biggest project I had asked them to start with, clearing a main corner of tall grass and weeds, looked no different. When I left they had been heading toward it with weed whackers going. Not good.
I found the two boys taking a break. “Lets see what you guys got done,” I said. “Walk me through it.”
After them showing me two smaller projects that I estimate would have taken them an hour, hour and a half tops, I looked them both in the eye and asked, “Ok guys, did you work as hard and diligently as you could while I was away?”
My friends son replied without hesitation, “Absolutely!” The other boy looked uncomfortable, then looked away.
“Ok,” I said. “Because remember that list? Whatever you two don’t get done today, I will somehow have to do it.” And I started giving direction, putting one on one task, the other on another.
The go getter busted it out, making up for lost time. The other, not so much.
My friend was here, and I could tell she didn’t want me to correct her son. She did not correct him either. Instead she started doing what I had asked him to do, completing the work for him. Then I saw perhaps how he’d developed his nonchalant view of responsibility. It’s too bad.
I can predict already which one will never want for a job, and which one will have trouble keeping one. I also know which one I will be asking to come back, and which one I won’t.
I shared the tale with my older daughter, not one for physical labor herself. She surprised me by finding things to do, and jumping on them! Yay!
Don’t coddle your kids. It ends up working against them.
Let those who have ears hear.
Notes From a Red Pill Girl 
The go getter was taught to work by his father, the other boy was not. There is a discipline the one has that the other lacks.
Yesterday I told my boy that he couldn’t play with his tablet until he spent 5-10 minutes cleaning his room. He didn’t want to do it. I told him, it would only take a few minutes. Put away your toys in the appropriate box. Put away your books.
I noticed last night that he had done what I asked, and praised him for it. It looked pretty good and didn’t take him very long. I think that he liked the recognition for the work that was done.
His mom would have cleaned it up for him. Amazing since she doesn’t tend to clean up after herself.
Normally Cappy can be a bit of a dick but he hits this one out of the park.
Earn 100k in trades? Show up oin time, do the work as promised, have some craftsmanship.
WARNING LOTS OF SWEARING
But it soooooo reinforces the message. One of my 10 favorite videos.
RPG points out the difference. Boys that grow up without a strong father in their lives as a role model are handicapped. In time, they overcome it, but it takes a while.
RPG, I guess I have to ask. Does the less motivated boy actually have his father in his life at all? I know that you said that he lacks discipline from a father figure, but it isn’t clear on whether or not the father is in his life or is just a poor role model.
Perhaps pay by the task you should
Many building trades paid this way they are
To do so, a good estimator of effort required (and consequently pay) you would need to be
Anecdotally, I once had a teen boy beg me for work. I said he could earn some money by cleaning all the gutters around my house, said I would give him 50$. He said sure, he only cleaned half because he decided he could live with 25$.
Needless to say, he is kind of shiftless to this day, he is over 30, still lives at home with mom and dad, who also house their youngest son and his wife. Sometimes they put up their older daughter with her newest baby, from her newest baby daddy.
I think it’s the mother who is the cause of this. The dad keeps demanding responsibility from the children, but mommy keeps intervening. I feel for that guy, he’s is broken and beat down with nagging from his wife, from his kids.
She won’t let him smoke in the house, or smoke in HER car. She is always on him about this thing and that. She even admits it herself, that she needs to be better. The man looks like he’s been through hell. And people still keep piling on the shit with the “daddy do’s and daddy don’t’s”
Once I told him, “Dude it’s your house. It’s your car. You’re in charge do what you want.” He begged me to please stop, his wife was near and I think I was starting a shit storm of trouble.
It seems nowadays he is just marking time until he dies.
It all quite sad, I’ve noticed this kind of stuff going on a lot around my parish. The women never shut up with the complaints or requests, and the men dutifully submit. Some men will even declare that they married up and that they are so much better off with their nagging wives. I’ve beginning to disengage from that parish after 17 years. I may go back once and a bit, it has the Latin mass, but I have to steel myself every time I’m about to set sail.
I just can’t take listening to the bullshit complaints anymore, and the constant pedestalizing of the tender women folk.
In my country we have a saying that describes this situation. The English translation for the saying would be something like this “A hardworking mother raises lazy children”
@ Rosalie
Does you country have any sayings about what a neglectful mother raises?
I’m thinking it may be somewhere along the lines of bitter and resentful children. Not trying to be a smart aleck I am genuinely curious.
My mother was a very hard worker and ended up raising hard working / self-sufficient boys.
A Dad:
Of course being hardworking is good 🙂 but our saying basically means if a parent intervenes and does all the work the child is supposed to do for them (for example clean the room) then the child never learns to do it himself/herself.
Roman: Must say I don’t remember if we have a saying for that
Ok seriously.
http://alphagameplan.blogspot.ca/2017/07/a-hultgreen-curie-near-miss.html
Tldr
Airbus commercial airline, two pilots both female
Flew for an hour and a half with the gear down after takeoff. Couldnt get to cruise altitude because of the drag and had to divert for low fuel.
Three in the green is the mantra of any pilot meaning the indicators for the gear down.
Plus the gear handle is the only large lever on the panel, you cant miss it.
Forget they were women. Work ethic! Judgement skills!
You forget a major transition, you overlooked the climbout checklist and you cant figure out why it wont go?
Its like never shifting out of first gear on the interstate.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=a320+panel&client=tablet-android-alco&prmd=inv&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi8sKiNj63VAhUMzIMKHYTEDXkQ_AUICSgB#imgrc=XcoXOc5K9opzMM:
See the big knob on the centre console. And the row of three green lights above it.
Kinda hard to miss.
Horseman,
Thank God that no one was killed. This is what happens with hiring quotas.You think the noise would have clued them in.
i showed this to my daughters 🙂
i asked my oldest if she thought i’d be like the mom who stepped in to ‘help’ the kid, and she said, “When I read that I thought, ‘My Mom would kick my butt if that were me and demand I get back and finish the work properly!'”
i asked her how she thought i would handle it with her sister, and she said, “Mom, those two boys were not sped kids. They were normal teenagers. Everything’s different with a sped kid. If she could handle it at that moment, you’d make her do it. If she couldn’t, you’d help her.”
when i asked my Aspie-Girl, she said that if she had committed to a project, she would complete it. she knows, though, that sometimes she can handle things and sometimes she can’t, so she’d be cautious as to what she’d commit to in the first place. also, she’s less self-directed and needs more encouragement (coaching) along the way. the more involved a ‘coach’ type person, the more successful she is.
anyway, this was an excellent piece for me to share with my girls. i love things that make them think and evaluate themselves and their behavior.
You think the noise would have clued them in.
Maybe they were too busy gossiping
Farm Boy,
I think that we, as consumers, should find out if the airlines that we are giving our business to are hiring according to quota. It’s too bad Liz is not available to comment. I am sure that Mike would have a choice word or two.
Not sure if this really has to be a Moms vs Dads thing. Maybe more like the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations,’ or something of the sort. A lot of the moms I grew up around were pretty darn good at cracking the whip and demanding near perfection as a result.
It is true, however, at least in my case, that mom would say something like, “don’t let your Dad see that.” He wasn’t a harsh disciplinarian at all but she did her best to be sure that people didn’t disappoint him. He was a standard that we all tried to live up to. He set the example, she enforced it.
These days, though, I think RPG’s story is too often correct. I volunteer with an educational group and occasionally teach in your less impressive colleges. Parents cover for their kids like crazy and they are just a text message away.
The airline error is not about females or diversity etc.
Its about paying attention to your job. Over automation is the plague of the airlines. Pilots get very little actual hands on stick time. Autopilots and autothrottles fly from climbout to last 50 feet of landing. The pilots job is to monitor to not “get behind the aircraft”.
In any job just because you did something 100 times before doesnt mean you won’t get hurt on turn 101. Imagine if those pilots or RPGs hired hands were chainsawing.
Alan.
Agreed. Its a craftsmanship issue. A pride thing.
Along RPGs lines.
https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/how-privileged-are-you-take-this-test-to-find-out/article35826989/
Wente assumes privilege creates usefulness.
I prefer a Mysterious Island test
(in the book five men are castaway with nothing but their clothes, not a knife or a tool.) Would I keep you on the island or abandon you to fend for yourself?
Can you do 6 hours of physical work in a day (not papershuffling)
Can you build or craft or make or cook anything
Stripped of your job title, do you know anything; medicine, chemistry, engineering
Can you think practically to solve immediate problems
Do you have any situational awareness, can you see dangers or useful things
In an emergency will you be the person who gets smacked to stop crying or are you the one doing the smacking.
Regardless of any training, will you fight, will you do what is necessary.
Or a second test.
If you worked for Sears (or a dozen other companies going bankrupt) and were suddenly laid off from your job thru no fault of your own without a pension or severance, would you be ok without your business card or fancy diploma.
And my favorite
“Dont you know who I am?”
Which in the zombie apocalypse is answered with
” Yeah, the useless zombie fodder I am stealing everything useful from”
If you rely on privilege you have nothing of usefulness.
I’d be very interested in seeing a transcript of the cockpit recorder. The flight crew would surely have had to report their change in cruising altitude…24000 ft versus 35000…to air traffic control, since it would be a change to a flight plan. One would think this would have focused their attention on the abnormality.
There is indeed a problem with insufficient practice in manual flying skills…apparently more serious with some Asian airlines, which actually go further in *requiring* autopilot usage…but that doesn’t seem like the problem in this case. I suspect Confirmation Bias…ie, they did notice that the airplane’s performance was way substandard, but developed an alternate theory…engine problems, maybe….and settled on that rather than investigating further.
In any case, use of the checklist should have resolved the situation, and, failing resolution, the performance deficiency was serious enough that they should have landed at the nearest suitable airport, whatever they thought the cause of the problem might be.
David
Agreed. It was Confirmation Bias which is why Scan scan scan is beaten into pilots.
We are trained to scan outside and then every instrument on the panel at least every two minutes.
My first instructor loved to do stuff that wouldnt affect flight performance to see if I picked it up in my scan: move the mixture, reset the trim slightly, turn on the landing light. If I didnt pick it up after two scan cycles he would yell at me.
Forget diagnosing the performance problem. If this was unretracted gear with a bad indication yes.
But how do you miss three blazing green lights and a two inch long gear handle in the wrong position for an hour.
Then again how often do I drive behind idiots with their turn signal on for miles.
Blink blink blink blink blink.
Five minutes out on climbout it should have been
Oops. Gear deployed. Moving gear up. Three up and stowed.
Carry on.
I do remember when Pan Am could claim to be the world’s most experienced airline.
A new post at Spawny’s there is
https://spawnyspace.wordpress.com/2017/07/30/alpha-widowhood-how-much-impact/
Things have gotten quiet. Is everyone out hunting wabbits?
Well, it IS summer. If I didn’t have to get ahead work-wise I’d be at the beach or carving canyons! Have a Scotch or an ice tea and imagine it’s on me … er, not literally!
Love that Clipper, BTW!
Iced tea sounds good. I had better lay off the hard stuff. Who knows what mischief those humans are up to?
Bloom
Going to your original blog concept.
This is, as Richard calls it, Cold Hard Truthbombs!
Mandatory watching for all women, regardless of traditional, feminist or anything i. Between. If you want an even partial red pill guy, do this.
See if you can handle the truth.
Horseman,
I think that only a few women are aware there is a problem in the sexual marketplace. I think most of them are seeing and hearing from other women saying their inbox on online dating sites is always full. They have bought into the false premise that they dominate the marketplace. What has to occur is that the market seizes. Only them will women in general realize there is a problem. However, there is no timeline for this to happen. As someone once said about the stock market, markets can stay irrational longer than you have money or patience.
There is a new post at Spawny’s
https://spawnyspace.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/in-a-bind/
I don’t think men can tell women anything anymore, but it is getting out of hand.
Competition between women to be dressed the more seductively has gone too far and, yet, men are not allowed to criticize.
lol Horseman the “6’s” thing!!! I’ve never in my life heard that and I’m glad!
My husband was barely making anything when we first got married, now we’re comfortable and he’s continuing to go up in his career goals and financially – but it’s taken 10 years to get there. Why women don’t understand that you can marry someone and grow with them through life is beyond me… except that maybe it’s entitlement.
Entitlement that they think they deserve all those “6’s” right away and upfront. :O
We have a new 6.
Engaged in 6 days. First date Friday, engaged on Thursday. 29 years ago.
Seriously, she has 6 diamond flakes in her engagement ring, one for each day we dated
While I don’t expect anyone to comment on the Faith Goldy video, I do have to wonder why women who do that attend church? Their motivations must be social.
Bridezilla and a half. It is brief.
http://bobagard.blogspot.com/2017/08/marriage-may-not-be-for-everyone.html
I don’t know what to think.
There is a new post at Spawny’s
https://spawnyspace.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/now-they-are-starting-to-worry/
@ Fuzzie, wow! Hopefully that groom got the marriage annulled or got a divorce! Yikes!