Handy? 

I want to be skilled at using my hands, a person able to fix things. 

I learned early in life that I wasn’t “handy”. My repair attempts more often than not ended poorly. Failure did not mix well with my introverted, shy nature. I would quietly watch my father do home repairs but seldom tried. I didn’t “do”.  I was afraid of another failure.

There are “doers” and “thinkers” in our world and I was a thinker. 

In my teens and early 20s, during summer and winter breaks from college, I worked for Commonwealth Natural Gas (CNG) and Bottled Gas of Virginia (later Commonwealth Propane). The first summer, I dug ditches, installing gas service lines to new homes in Old Coach Village off Huguenot Road. Later years, I was a gofer for propane installations including a pig brooder in Varina and a pig scalder at the Powhatan Locker Plant. We put in gas stoves, lamps, water heaters, dryers, furnaces, fireplaces, grills, and even a few propane refrigerators (yes they exist, mostly used in RVs now).

I fetched equipment, cleaned up, threaded hard pipe, leveled concrete blocks, put mastic on underground tanks, listened to Johnny Cash and praised Richard Petty, but never planned and executed installations myself. I just followed instructions. I wasn’t handy and after five years there was little I could do undirected. 

I did develop a strong appreciation for manual laborers. Our blue-collar doers are not appreciated enough for the comforts they provide us. They work hard and get things done. One of the handiest people I met at Bottled Gas, Jimmy Flowers, grew up on a tobacco farm and quit school after the sixth-grade. It seemed he could fix anything, whether he had seen it before or not. I was his pig scalder gofer and witnessed him working on many other, major projects, including a ruptured gas main and a leaking pumping station.

Apparently, schools don’t teach students how to solve real-world problems, analyze mechanical devices, deal with failure, and fix things. Jimmy had bulldog determination and wasn’t satisfied until the job was fixed right. It had to work AND look good. 

I have met many other handy people without advanced degrees. Bobby Smith, Jeff Claypoole, and Duff Poage don’t have college degrees but are plenty smart solving problems. They and Jimmy fix things without having been taught in a classroom. They figure it out and get it done.

Eleven years working at a University didn’t change my opinion. Practical skills were not UMW’s strong suit and many, if not most college graduates are clueless around the house. Educational degrees don’t mean that you are smart. 

My favorite job with Bottled Gas was a summer spent painting 30,000-gallon propane storage tanks along the James River. I loaded up a truck, went to the site, and rolled white paint over vast expanses of metal all day under blazing 95-degree sun. Remember the thin, flimsy, one-use, slip-on sunshades that eye doctors gave you after an eye dilation? I put a pair of them over sunglasses, double darkness just to counter the white paint in bright sunlight. I listened to a fantastic new invention that summer, the Japanese transistor radio. Through one earplug, I rolled paint and listened to Monty Python routines playing on WXGI in Richmond. 

I loved that job. Working alone with instant feedback, I could immediately see my progress. Kind of handy. 

I admit that one sunny day with temperatures hovering in the upper 90s, while wrestling a 300 lb. propane tank on a dolly over rough, uneven ground, sweat pouring into my eyes, I thought “I want an indoor job!”

So I did.

But in family practice, you aren’t handy. The body is a self-healing organism that, like an ocean liner, you can nudge in one direction or another using medications but overall the course is directed by the body not the doctor. People came in sick, they left sick, I didn’t “fix” them. After forty years of practice, I couldn’t “fix” a common cold any better than when I began, just overprescribe antibiotics or get into arguments about them. Very unsatisfying. Very unhandy.

With few exceptions … removing foreign bodies, sewing up wounds, taking off skin lesions, and removing ear wax … I wasn’t handy. Hecky dang doodle, when someone came in with an ear canal blocked with wax and I removed it, I was handy! They left better than when they came in. They were “fixed”. It just wasn’t very often. Surgeons “fix” things. My brother, Jim the orthodontist, “fixed” things.

Primary Care didn’t satisfy my introverted desire to work alone and fix things whether in the real world or on computers. Too many patients with things I couldn’t fix. Perhaps I should have followed my West Virginia roots and become a blue collar worker. 

In later blogs, I will discuss my quest for handiness.