There's nothing like a good education. My wife received a good education, with honors in high school and college. The college education was a 2 year degree. That enabled her to get a number of jobs with decent pay. Unfortunately, many jobs require a 4 year degree to get better pay.
I actually have 2 4 year degrees, one in Spanish and one in Accounting. I am sure this helped me to get the job I had for 25 years from which I am now retired. As I look for new employment to last for another 15 years, I find that my degrees don't mean as much as they used to mean. Most jobs available require a great deal of training or special certifications, none of which I have received.
A job offer came my way this week. Home preservation. You go into a foreclosed home, change the locks, clean up, take pictures, do some minor repairs etc. I told the man I was interested, but don't know if I can do everything. He sent a worker up this weekend with 5 jobs that I could go along and watch. We broke into 2 houses, changed and changed the locks.
The 3rd house had a keybox already on it. We hauled off some junked lawnmowers, but there was still a lot of stuff left at 2 of the houses. You have to submit a bid for certain amounts of stuff. We estimated that one house had 25 cubic yards of assorted junk to haul away. A cubic yard is roughly the size of a washer or dryer.
One of the yards had weeds 7 feet high. Another yard had weeds 4 feet high. Those get bid out to cut. If someone else wanted to bid on it I guess they could, but generally the mortgage company just comes back and says do it.
I received quite an education today. Not one I could generally use in very many other professions, but I think I could do most of what was done. Other jobs coming up might be really different. My trainer started talking about need this equipment or that, a truck, a trailer, better power tools, pressurizing lines etc. My eyes didn't glaze over, but I did get the deer in the headlight look.
This was not, in my mind a wasted day. I spent 6 hours receiving an education. I think I'm going to use it to save spending $5,000 to $10,000 in equipment and see if I can't find another job, one that I might be able to continue doing when I'm 62, 63 or older.
Call me wimpy if you want, I've been called worse.
I'll be in the hot tub,
Twist
