“So why don’t you?” I hear you cry. Folks, this is not my usual commute. My usual commute is bereft of urgency and requires little more than rising from my softly-furnished bower to flop down in front of a nearby laptop. Sure, I’ll occasionally close said laptop and convey it to a local beverage merchant to drink caffeine-laced liquids while my fingers transpose the inane drivel oozing in fits and snorts from my brain into barely legible prose, but this is a biochemically jolting experience I practice rarely.

As I revisit my traffic hatred and muse, I’m reminded of America’s distain for perambulation. (This does not include New Yorkers and those Olympic walkers with the high elbows and pained expressions that tell me this was their last choice in sports.) The average American walks less than 75 miles a year; that’s 350 yards a day, according to researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. I suspect this is even less among Texans, whose affair with the combustion engine has become submissive to the point of abuse.

I’ll gape wordlessly from the passenger seat while a girlfriend spends 15 minutes circumnavigating a strip mall parking lot looking for a space 10 yards closer to her destination. I’ll marvel at people who drive miles to the gym to spend 30 minutes on a treadmill. I’ve shrieked and sprinted across busy sidewalkless, shoulderless highway bridges, tons of hurtling metal roaring past by a wake-buffeting whisker, in order to grab a coffee from a vendor far closer on foot than by the avenues allowed by town planners. Complete strangers have charitably slowed to a crawl to offer me rides as if pedestrianism is a pitiful form of vagrancy. I’ve contemplated what came first, motorized grocery-store buggies or the obese shoppers salivating thereon, amassing sugar and fat for their next gorge.

It seems to me there’s a conspiracy afoot (sorry, couldn’t help myself). Car manufacturers have evidently got together and hoodwinked the American populace into believing walking is an affliction to be abhorred and dispatched.

My friends are often stunned with astonishment when I tell them I’ve walked somewhere. They leap grandly to their feet and shout “Good God, man! You did WHAT?!” with an incredulity usually reserved for stories of complex carnal misadventure or paradigm-shifting medical breakthroughs.
(Holy crap, Mopac just moved forward a foot! Hallelujah!)

I have a solution, but no one wants to hear it. I know this because we actually complain about the price of gasoline, even though, at it’s current high point, it’s still less than half the price of fuel in most other developed countries. My solution is double the price. This extra tax profit can be used to fund public transport and will make such novel ideas as car-pooling necessary. Then we’d all get everywhere a lot quicker. Plus, the cars will inevitably be made smaller and more energy efficient. I understand American masculinity is indelibly tied to large vehicles with large engines, but it really is kind of preposterous, don’t you think? Allowing a utilitarian method of transport to define our self-worth? Wouldn’t it be better to tie one’s sense of self to something useful rather than extravagant?

And besides, if we like the big gas-guzzling engines because the cost of running them inflates our egos, wouldn’t double the cost be double the status symbol?

A psychologist, historian, and keen amateur anthropologist, Stefan Abrutat’s humble beginnings working construction in frigid Canadian winters and sweltering Texas summers rewarded him with an insight often lacking in academia: hands-on experience.

The boiler went down at the plant. It was winter, so heating was essential: without it the general manager would have to send all his employees home, halting production for the day and losing tens of thousands of dollars. So he called in a heating engineer. The old guy turned up in an ancient van and the GM met him at reception to walk him through to the boiler room.
The wizened engineer carefully inspected everything in the boiler room, before pulling a hammer out of his tool bag. He struck the side of the boiler once. Amazingly it whirred and gurgled back to life.
“That’s all it needed?” chuckled the GM, shaking his head. The engineer nodded and smiled.
“I’ll send you an invoice in the mail.”
“Sounds good, thanks for coming out so quickly!”

A couple of days later, he opened the engineer’s letter, and balked at the $500 bill he found therein. He immediately got on the phone. The engineer picked up, “Come on, man. $500? I’m going to need an itemized breakdown of your costs. Because this figure, if you’ll forgive me, seems a little high. You were only here twenty minutes!”
“Sure,” replied the engineer, “I can do that for you right now over the phone: it’s a $50 call out charge, and $50 to cover my time, gas, wear and tear…”
“Right, so that would be $100, I can go with that!”
But the old boy wasn’t finished: “…and $400 for knowing where to hit.”

A psychologist, historian, and keen amateur anthropologist, Stefan Abrutat’s humble beginnings working construction in frigid Canadian winters and sweltering Texas summers rewarded him with an insight often lacking in academia: hands-on experience.

Emma Lazarus, 1883.

But hold if you toil in fields that we bore,
And contrive in this blessed land of unfree;
The misremembering withhold the key,
And the door is bound, and sigiled with scorn,
To dismay the meek, the sick and lowborn.
Our ancestors turn; we taint their esprit,
Bastard their motives and strike their marquee,
“Enough of your help, please leave,” we implore,
“Your home is ours now, unwelcome senor.”

Stefan Abrutat, 2012.

Crude, I know, but it gets my point across, I think. And for those Arizonans wishing to implement even more of Hitler’s controversial ideas about population management, shame on you. Before you start prattling on about patriotism or some other such nonsense, you may want to consider in the last couple of years there’s been more emigrants from the US to Mexico than vice versa, illegal or otherwise. Isn’t that an interesting turn?

“Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.” George Bernard Shaw never said a truer word.

This immigration about-turn is far more likely to do with economic juxtaposition rather than any human rights-violating legislation in the Grand Canyon State. I wonder what’ll happen if Mexico’s economy starts to boom, and Arizona’s continues to fizzle? We may just see the biggest crow-eating festival in the history of ignorance as the more hillbilly Arizonans try to find work across the border, no matter how the Supreme Court rules on these laws next month. I love this idea. Please don’t start until I’ve stocked up on popcorn.

A psychologist, historian, and keen amateur anthropologist, Stefan Abrutat’s humble beginnings working construction in frigid Canadian winters and sweltering Texas summers rewarded him with an insight often lacking in academia: hands-on experience.

The reality is there’s more than one sail, each with far too many names (apparently to compound confusion among the crew. Instantly obeyed orders in life-threatening situations obviously aren’t quite dangerous enough for those that think up these things) and a dizzying profusion of ropes. But then these aren’t ropes; there are no ropes on a sailboat, silly. I learned this nugget the first time I tentatively stepped aboard, despite the wide array of potential author-entangling/drowning evidence to the contrary. There are lines, halyards, braces, outhauls, and sheets, for example, but no ropes. As each name assigns a rope a particular task, the word ’rope’ seems to have been tossed overboard with other expressions such as ‘unsafe’, ‘lunatic’ and ‘waiver’.

During my last sojourn seaward, it was blowing a Beaufort Scale Force 7, which is far too conservatively described as a ‘moderate gale’. Martin, our skipper, scoffed at the blood red danger flag snapping and straining enthusiastically above the harbor. Commercial boats were restricted to port. “Oh, that doesn’t apply to us,” he said cheerily, and radioed in the crew count to the harbormaster (he needs to be informed of how many ‘lost at sea’ forms to prepare).

The Beaufort Scale provides descriptions of conditions at Force 7, such as wind speed (eyebrow ripping), wave height (alpine) and sea conditions (boiling liquid innards of hell). “The 707s won’t be out today, this sea would eat them alive,” offered Martin conversationally, as we surmounted a mountainous swell, teetered precariously at its zenith, pivoted sharply downwards and plunged vertically into the next, “can someone light me another cigarette? This one keeps going out.” (Intermittently submerging during a raging tempest could be the culprit, I silently observed with surprising sarcasm.)The 707 class of craft are smaller than Martin’s yacht, but not by much. The crews of these had wisely retired to the harbor pub to watch the race from the balcony, drink beer and not die.

As for the vernacular, I’d never been told to ‘hoist’ something in my life before, nor ‘belay’ some action. ‘Trim’ means to adjust the tightness of the sheet (rope) for optimum sail efficiency, ‘ease’ means to slacken, which coincidently happened repeatedly to my bowels whenever the boat tipped sideways at the alarmingly precipitous angles the more experienced aboard seem to consider perfectly acceptable. “Don’t worry!” someone yelled above the black roar of wind and sea, “this boat can go beyond ninety degrees and not capsize!” (Now, I don’t particularly want to pull out the ol’ math books here, but as far as I’m concerned, anything beyond ninety degrees IS capsized. Common sense would dictate neglecting to roll beyond ninety degrees would be an essential requirement of NOT capsizing.) However, there’s far more at work here than my less-than-rudimentary grasp of seaworthy geometry, so I trusted these people to get me home safely.

Obviously they succeeded. Since then, in an attempt to pick up the terminology in a state more conducive to learning than a sobbing fetal ball of abject terror, I’ve taken to reading a lot. And the more I read, the more complicated this sailing malarkey seems to get. The simple concept of a bed sheet, broom handle and bathtub has succumbed to notions of juggling chainsaws atop a soccer ball. There are so many variables involved, it’s becoming apparent, no one is ever going to become a perfect sailor. It seems to be more about risk elimination and the hedging of bets than ever being absolutely comfortable 100% of the time.

This experience admirably demonstrates the first thing one discovers when entering a new job or industry: the amount of jargon. The pervasion can often be quite daunting and it’s a steep, analogous climb up the learning curve. But death is rarely a consequence, so take solace in that and hit the books.

Oh, I didn’t mention if I actually enjoy sailing?

The answer is yes, despite my affectations. I love every second of it.

A psychologist, historian, and keen amateur anthropologist, Stefan Abrutat’s humble beginnings working construction in frigid Canadian winters and sweltering Texas summers rewarded him with an insight often lacking in academia: hands-on experience.

My interviewer was extremely tentative about the timing: they obviously wanted me for the position, so they asked if it would be okay for me to go down the street to the medical center and take it right there and then, or would I need a few days…? They let the question hang. That’s when I cottoned they were giving me a window of opportunity to cleanse my system should I be a drug user, or to simply bug out. I couldn’t help but chuckle. I took the test immediately and everything was obviously fine, but I did find myself thinking, as I urinated into a plastic cup in front of a bored man in a white coat, has it really come to this? People are being chemically analyzed for a job? Have we finally become cattle?

And how is it their business as long as the work is getting done effectively? I tried to take the dehumanizing invasion of privacy with a pinch of salt, but there was a niggling concern I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

That concern came to fruition several months later when another employee injured himself, not seriously, on a piece of equipment (he banged his head and opened up a small cut requiring a couple of stitches). Now, I was used to working in construction with men that duct taped gauze over anything that didn’t require at least a blood transfusion and got back to grafting with nary a word of complaint. In an office environment, the flap that erupted over my colleague’s minor wound would have one thinking the zombie apocalypse had found its first host. People ran. Voices raised. Cell phones trilled to life. This wasn’t concern for his well-being (or the prospect of having their brains eaten), you understand, they were worried about getting sued.

He went to A&E and they patched him up. Then our manager said it was company policy he take a drug test immediately. He refused and quit, as he’d smoked marijuana the previous night, and didn’t want a failed drug test on his record.

I felt like I was spiraling the wrong way down the rabbit hole. As the more educated of you know, I’m sure, marijuana is a fairly innocuous drug. It’s certainly less dangerous than alcohol, and has been successfully politically marginalized over the years by the propagandist lobbying of booze peddlers. (And don’t believe, for a second, this whole ‘gateway’ idea (no, it’s not a theory. A theory requires substantial evidential support, not division, with the majority of evidence slanting towards the null hypothesis. It holds up to scientific scrutiny about as well as a chocolate teapot).)

Debatable legality notwithstanding, the fact that this company was within its rights to take action against an employee for behavior outside work hours irked me tremendously, primarily because marijuana leaves no residual hangover. If the employee had had an alcohol hangover, which could quite easily have led to the inattention the accident required, he would more than likely have been in no danger of losing his job or having his reputation besmirched.

Seems ludicrous to me. But then I’m one of those fair-minded folks that believes in justice and equality rather than greasing the rails towards a corporate-driven Orwellian dystopia. Call me old-fashioned.

What do you think about corporate drug testing? Is it an invasion of privacy or shrewd employee surveillance?

A psychologist, historian, and keen amateur anthropologist, Stefan Abrutat’s humble beginnings working construction in frigid Canadian winters and sweltering Texas summers rewarded him with an insight often lacking in academia: hands-on experience.

Now, I understand this isn’t the most popular opinion with modern employers, but bear with me…

We all understand America was founded on puritanical beliefs, which is probably why we still have so many wacky Christian fundamentalists knocking around who, to this day, seem to take a dim view of any recreation involving a significant amount of biochemical behavior modification. (And by the way, please don’t be fooled by what we were taught in school about the Pilgrims leaving England to escape religious persecution: they emigrated in order to practice persecution themselves. What did they do that was so bad, you ask? Well, for a start, they banned Christmas for the better part of two centuries and forcibly punished non-puritans for celebrating the holiday, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. England, quite rightly, would not tolerate such staunchly miserable (and let’s be frank here, ironically and retroactively un-American) ways so the Pilgrims had to travel somewhere their oppressive religious bents could go unchallenged; somewhere the people couldn’t effectively fight back because they didn’t have guns. I don’t know about you, but I’m finding it somewhat sobering to realize America’s forefathers were bigoted bullies.)

Now we’ve got our history straight: it strikes me that the days of purityranny seem to be returning with this phenomenon called the lunchtime workout. The endorphins, adrenaline, serotonin and dopamine released when we exercise is the heady cocktail that’s come to replace alcohol as our Mad Men Mid Day Buzz of Choice. Rather than a liquid meal of potable fun at some bawdy hostelry, people are donning spandex and iPods and mounting equipment that’d be more at home in a gerbil cage.

I can’t say I approve.

As a consequence, an energy dump often follows an exercise adrenal spike, so unless one continues to exercise throughout the afternoon, it stands to (my rapidly becoming more tenuous) reason, there could be serious repercussions with work performance. A lunchtime drinker, however, can always simply take shots of liquor to maintain that optimum level of productivity.

I am, of course, kidding.

But not much. Cheers. Now where did I put those cigarettes?

A psychologist, historian, and keen amateur anthropologist, Stefan Abrutat’s humble beginnings working construction in frigid Canadian winters and sweltering Texas summers rewarded him with an insight often lacking in academia: hands-on experience.

We finished the roof. Once it’s finished, a steep roof at that height is a perilous thing to work on, as there’s nothing to stop you falling off without bringing in expensive and laborious safety equipment. My boss met with the homeowner and architect to review the roof from the road. After some minutes of contemplation, the architect offered, “I think it needs more mortared tiles on the left side. Right now it looks uneven.” The young homeowner wholeheartedly agreed, suggesting three or four more would make all the difference.

“I’ll get right on that,” said my boss. I overheard. When they’d left, I asked him if they seriously expected us to risk life and limb, or great expense, just to sling some mud under a few tiles (there were several reasons why this case was particularly dangerous, but I won’t bore you with them today), “Hell no,” he chuckled, “just watch. We ain’t gonna do a thing. I’ll just tell them we did.”

A week later, as he’d predicted, they declared the untouched, ‘improved’ roof a triumph. This demonstrates an important issue: to assume the client is always right is somewhat naive. Flippant decisions by a customer can often be a product of a manipulative ego rather than a wish to achieve a more satisfactory result, and they typically either have no idea, or simply don’t care, how much extra work (and in the above case, physical danger) they’re causing. For some people, bossing folks around just plain feels good. One sees it all the time, especially in the restaurant industry, where customers unused (or maybe overused) to being waited on can take the situation to an exploitative level. I’m not saying every seemingly flippant decision is ill-conceived or lacking potency, but I’d suggest they may well be in the majority.

For example, I have a friend who always orders a plate of lemon slices wherever she eats, in order to ‘test’ the ability of the establishment to go above and beyond the menu to satisfy a customer. Needless to say I never share her (likely enhanced) dessert.

Marco Pierre White, l’enfant terrible of the restaurant world and one of the most highly regarded chefs on the planet, once said, “The customer is not always right. He’s sometimes bloody stupid.”

I’m inclined to agree.

A psychologist, historian, and keen amateur anthropologist, Stefan Abrutat’s humble beginnings working construction in frigid Canadian winters and sweltering Texas summers rewarded him with an insight often lacking in academia: hands-on experience.

And I’ve been guilty of it myself, though for no other reason than my seven-year-old PDA was perfectly adequate for my mobile technology needs. So I wasn’t really a technophobe, more a stubborn retrofan, and only in response to those who chose to ridicule my comparatively clunky piece of handheld devilry. (I doggedly refuse to replace anything unbroken until I’ve squeezed every ounce of usefulness out of it. I consider this shrewd; many others consider it scrooge-like.)

Of course, I have a smartphone now, but I wistfully treasure those days when I made people who were usually much cleverer than me look stupid. I didn’t particularly mind the verbal aspersions, as they presented a cracking opportunity for banter. If the sneers came from a Blackberry owner, for example, I would laugh at their pathetic hobbit thumb keyboard and whip out my PDA’s near full-size folding one from a cargo pocket with a wink and a flourish that’d shame a Transformers movie. After a protracted series of unfolding clicks, slides and shunts, I’d attach my PDA and fire it up; “Fancy a typing race?”

I understand the reverse gloat is indulgent, and quite possibly alienating, but I can’t help myself: it’s so much glorious fun.

The same prejudice used to exist with gaming. Electronic gaming was seen as an evil until it became mainstream on mobile phones. Now pretty much everyone is gaming (one third of the US population at the latest count), and their virulent objections seem to have conveniently dissipated. The only people who seem to disapprove of such recreation anymore are the really dumb and technologically backward.

Of course, this is great news for the job market. Not only are game manufacturers booming, games are also including advertising, sometimes in very inventive ways. This synergy in itself creates jobs; one only needs to look at product placement in movies to see how lucrative an opportunity this is, and a game can reach far, far more people than a movie. I think we’re witnessing the birth of a new industry, don’t you?

A psychologist, historian, and keen amateur anthropologist, Stefan Abrutat’s humble beginnings working construction in frigid Canadian winters and sweltering Texas summers rewarded him with an insight often lacking in academia: hands-on experience.

Interviewers will try to put you at your ease so you let this front down (though perhaps not to the depth I suggest), which is why there’s often two present; one to interact, and one to observe and note your reactions. They may switch these duties back and forth to disguise their motives. Sneaky, eh?

This is especially true during interviews for start-ups. The initial start-up staff are tremendously important in dictating the future fortunes of the company. They are the seedlings from which the business will grow, so they have to be made of the right stuff. Thus the selection procedure can be stringent, and they’ll pull out all sorts of tricks to get a peek behind your professional facade. Conducting the interview over lunch, for example, or in a coffee shop induces a convivial atmosphere quite removed from the interview room.

The thing is, it’s best to let them. Better to find out now if you’re of the mettle to cope with the rigors of start-up business than to find out later when you’re swamped with customers and your suppliers are on strike. Your interviewers may ask all sorts of questions that don’t seem to pertain to the position; they’re looking for conducive personality traits, experience, evidence of an appropriate skill set, and a sturdy core. If you’ve got these (and you should know by now if you do), then let them see.

The problem is, over recent years I’ve noticed more and more that many people have an inflated sense of their own self-worth: we think we’re better at things than we actually are, so we consistently bite off more than we can chew. I don’t know where we get this from, but I strongly suspect it’s got something to do with our kid gloves culture. Our aggregate has become a caricature of the gumption that sculpted it: unrealistic expectations are now the norm. Iron forges iron goes the saying, but this iterance also applies to soft fluffy bunnies.

Sure, we’ve always been dreamers in America, but our dreams were more usually couched in the realms of the reachable. Hard truths of inadequacy have somehow become too difficult for us to bear, so we’re dismissing them and raising our kids to think they can do no wrong. We’re denying and deifying our own mediocrities.

Advising honesty is all well and good, but knowing who you are first is by far the most important step, don’t you think? It’s hard to be honest about yourself when you don’t know your limits, and the only way to find your limits is to test them, preferably long before you enter the interview room.

A psychologist, historian, and keen amateur anthropologist, Stefan Abrutat’s humble beginnings working construction in frigid Canadian winters and sweltering Texas summers rewarded him with an insight often lacking in academia: hands-on experience.

I can see potential employers’ point, though. They’re worried we’re going to be bored by the lack of challenge and will move on to more suitable pastures once the opportunity presents itself.

While this may be the case often enough to support such bias, employers predictably fail to understand some of us are quite prepared to stick with a job that may be beneath our talents if the challenges we’re currently facing are putting food on the family’s table and a roof over their heads. First things first. Sustenance, shelter and keeping the electricity on take far more precedence than watery notions of “job satisfaction” and “employee happiness”. Or at least they should, if responsibility is in one’s rubric.

Whenever I’ve been desperate for a job and suspected this maxim may drift across the interview table, I’ve edited my resume to exclude my more lofty accomplishments. Is this lying? Perhaps by omission, but I really don’t like my loyalty being questioned before my foot’s even in the door.

And boy, am I loyal. I worked for almost four years for a company because they were good enough to give me a job when I needed one. They often told me I was the best employee they ever had, which I immodestly agreed with: I could’ve done the job in my sleep.

However, this certainly doesn’t mean one should retire to the chaise longue for a bag of bon-bons, oh no. I contributed far more to the company than my initial job description: I reorganized many of the systems to heighten efficiency and was quite happy to work eighty hour weeks when increased workload demanded it. When I finally did leave I stuck around to train up the new guy. They were sad to see me move on, but did they regret the four years they got out of me? Not by a long shot. Their business was more streamlined and processes were far easier for other employees to understand. My legacy was everyone worked less and produced more.

Thus I think the “overqualified” argument should be immediately dismissed when applicants learn the specifics of the job and are still keen to apply. Otherwise HR departments shouldn’t been surprised when resumes pack a little lighter.

A psychologist, historian, and keen amateur anthropologist, Stefan Abrutat’s humble beginnings working construction in frigid Canadian winters and sweltering Texas summers rewarded him with an insight often lacking in academia: hands-on experience.