Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/486601
APRIL 2015 14 THE JOURNAL BY GEORGE PORTER SERVICE & SET-UP Interested? Do you have a hobby? Some people garden; some people woodwork; and some people read. Basically it is something that lets us relax while we do something we enjoy. We don't have to do it but we like the way it makes us feel so we get in- volved. Many of my friends like or maybe even love, golf. It doesn't work for me but they are ad- dicted. They play all the time and complain about how hot it gets and they can't hit it straight and so on. But, they keep coming back for more. It is a hobby and somehow they enjoy the self-im- posed abuse because it is interesting. My hobby is making bullets. (You didn't ex- pect something normal did you?) It is very tech- nical and precise and you can never really reach the point where some improvement can't be made. It is sort of a competition between you and perfection. You will never win but you can come pretty close if you really work at it. You can make a bullet that just goes bang and disappears and you can craft one that will do exactly what the next five will do and go through the same hole at 100 yards. Doesn't happen much with me but it gets pretty close so I keep fiddling with stuff and maybe someday it will work every time. In our hobbies we read about them and we par- ticipate in discussions about them with other peo- ple who do the same things. Hobbies sort of energize us and sharpen our minds and science has proven that these things are healthy for us. How many of us would like to turn our hobby into a full time job? Believe it or not, when that happens it doesn't work out too often. If I had to get up every morning and pull the handle on a loading press for eight hours every day I would go crazy after about a week. I truly believe that I would be bored to death with the simple repetition of it. When I got bored I would make mistakes. Now if you make a mistake in golf your score goes up. If you make a mistake in gardening then you don't get many tomatoes or something. You don't want to make any mistakes when you are making bullets…trust me on this! You are deal- ing with fairly large volumes of gunpowder and ex- plosive primers that you push very firmly into a tight little hole in the end of the case. There is a "recipe" for every caliber, bullet weight, and type of powder. There are thousands of combinations. Confusion can be very costly and/or painful. You can literally blow up the rifle. Keep your mind on what you are doing and it all works fine and in fact is fun. You may be wondering what in the world does this have to do with servicing or installing a home. Well, it is simple really. You need to be inter- ested in what you are doing in order to do it well. There are also some great benefits that come along with that interest. Like the quality of the work and perhaps your own safety. In my forty plus years in this business I have identified the three most dangerous and damaging words that people in installation use. They are not what you might think they are. Some may think that they are, "Make it happen" and that would be near the top. I believe they are, "It doesn't matter." Here is why. Most of the time we don't have enough interest in what we are doing to see the difference. We develop bad habits and sort of let things slip by. We judge our work by whether or not it can get us by instead of whether it is really well done. The difference is in the mind of the worker. If that worker has a hobby he will probably excel in it because it is interesting. Sweating in the hot sun is not all that interesting but you must find a way to make it at least a little bit less mind numb- ing. You should do this for your own piece of mind and your own safety as well. Guess what would happen to me if I decided to make 1000 bullets of various kinds a day for 5 years straight. I would make many mistakes because I would get so tired of pulling the stupid handle that I would lose my concentration and mess up. De- pending on what I did, the effects could either be inconvenient or devastating. Don't put the pow- der in a cartridge and press a bullet in the end and the primer may pop the bullet a few inches down the barrel… next shot the gun explodes. But hey, that was only one out of many thousands. Does it really matter? Well…. It does to whoever is pulling the trigger! It would be sort of ridiculous to try make our- selves believe that setting homes is a hobby. But, we need to work on our heads a little bit. To be successful in this business you must absolutely be- come interested in what you are doing. In fact as many parts of it as you can. Retailers sometimes have no interest beyond cost in installation and some installers have no interest beyond getting paid. They must have miserable working lives be- cause they surely must see a lot of troubles. One of my favorite stories about an installer comes from South Carolina about 15 years ago. He came to class and heard all about what should be done and why. I met him about a year later and he came up to me and said that he decided to follow all the rules and advice he heard and within six months he had lost about 70% of his business! He had to charge more because he did more. At this point I am thinking this is not going to end well and I am about to get my but butt kicked by this rather large fellow. Then he said that in the next six months he got all new retailers because he seldom had call -backs and in fact has had to turn business away lately because he couldn't keep up. "Life was good", he said. I believe that was his way of saying that his work was now a bit more interesting. George Porter is a consultant to the manufactured hous- ing industry. His Company is Manufactured Housing Re- sources, P.O. Box 9, Nassau, DE 19969, (302) 645 5552, Fax: (302) 645 1152, Web: www.george- porter.com Some of his services are both in person and On-line training for certification in many states plus ex- pert witness and investigation for the industry. T J