Story of the Day for Wednesday January 30, 2013
The Look on the Davis’s Faces
There is nothing better a man can do than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God.
Ecclesiastes 2:24
You have ever seen a picture of the Statue of Liberty taken from above her? Her coiffure is as beautifully sculpted as the rest of the statue.
“Yeah?” you might ask, “What’s so odd about that?”
What is “so odd about that” is that, when Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, completed the Statue of Liberty in 1886 – the only people capable of seeing that part of the statue would have been someone who attempted to soar above her in a hot air balloon. Bartholdi had no way of predicting the invention of helicopters and air planes so others could observe the quality of his work. Whether others could see his artistry made no difference to the pride he took in his workmanship.
Supposedly, there is a tag on every vehicle which also identifies the day it was built. A friend told me never to buy a car built on a Monday. “On Mondays,” he explained, “assembly line workers are hungover or tired from the weekend. They are usually crabby about returning to the drudgery of their job, and they are apathetic about the quality of their work.” I have even talked to auto workers who confessed they would never buy a car from the company they work for because they know how shoddily they are built.
I’m not mad at auto workers for doing shoddy work; I’m sad that they work at jobs with no purpose other than a paycheck. Work is a tough slog when we can’t take pride in the quality of what we do.
A while back, I had been unemployed, so I was delighted to find minimum-wage work doing landscaping. The work was hard – mostly raking and hauling endless wheelbarrow loads of rock and dirt. The contractor who was building the house was passionate about quality; he wanted everything to be beautiful. He never talked about the money he was making or how long it was until quitting time. But he kept repeating, “I can’t wait to see the look on the Davis’s faces when they see. . .”
Excellent, I have always had pride at every job I had. I may not have been the fastest at times, but it usually was right. Its sad nowdays that a lot of workers have no pride in their work, whatever they do, and it really shows. If you go to a Dr’s office the first person you see is usually the receptionist and if they are not kind to you and take an interest in helping you. many people will not go back to that Dr., because of their bad experience at the front desk,
Jan, that’s so true. What amazes me is the number of businesses who don’t seem to realize this.