The job was only dangerous the way I did it. Working for my dad's siding business in the summer while in high school and college, I fell backwards off a scaffold into a bush when I lost my balance shooting out the window. The bush “caught” me. I couldn't reach the ground and I couldn't reach the scaffolding or the ladders supporting it. I was suspended in the bush, like a fly on a spider's web, and for a few seconds I couldn't get out. It went on long enough that I wondered if I should call for help before I finally managed to get out of the bush and onto the ground.
Another time, I jumped from scaffolding after scraping a power line. It tripped and knocked out the power in the house we were working on. I'm lucky the house didn't burn down, and luckier still, I didn't get electrocuted.
The closest I've ever gotten to seriously hurt myself was working in our own home. I was in the yard, alone, 15 feet on a ladder leaning against the house, ripping off the yellow siding that had ugly our house since before I was born. A nail did not move. I pulled and pulled and pushed. Nothing. I even tried to shout swear words at him, the worst I know of, in every combination I could think of. That didn't work either.
I dug the claw under the nail as deep as I could, thrust my hip into the ladder to use my body weight as leverage, and pulled the hammer with both hands as hard as I could. I growled and leaned over and thought I could finally have it...then the claw came off the nail and THWACK!! hit me right between the eyes.
Yes, I hit myself in the face with my own hammer.
Really, really, really hard.
The impact knocked me off balance – remember, I was 15 feet on a ladder – and I started falling backwards. At the last second, I grabbed the ladder with both hands to keep myself from falling.
Whenever I screw up something in my career as a solopreneur — wrong height, wrong transition, wrong interview, whatever — I always struggle to fall back. This is not as bad as this , I think to myself.
For most of my life, I thought of this siding job as just a summer job. But a surprising thing happened when I went out on my own seven years ago:I started acting like a sider again. Nearly 30 years after I last worked for my dad, I find myself repeatedly emulating what he did, applying lessons I didn't even know I had learned.
***
My dad, who is 81 and retired, is as old and blue collar as they come. He wouldn't consider himself a solopreneur (then or now) and would laugh at me for using what he would call a made-up word. If I told him he worked in the gig economy (Sidings! Windows! Trim! Gutters!), he'd ask me what I'm talking about.
I bring all of this up to say that if you told any of us back then that I would write what I learned installing siding (and windows! And trim! And gutters!) Who helps me run my writing business, we would both have laughed.
While I just saw it as a job, my dad saw it as an education. He hoped that I would learn manual labor and go to college instead. But I didn't learn it. I enjoyed the work. I liked that we made a difference in people's lives. When we started a job, a house had an aspect. When we were done, it looked completely different and still better.
But I did receive an education, but not in the way one of us expected. Take, for example, relationships with customers who don't pay on time. I was extremely lucky:I never had a client stiffen me. Sometimes I have to harass customers with multiple invoices. But that never bothered me, and I think that's at least partly because my dad got paid by customers…and because of how he paid me.
He paid me $5 an hour (a huge amount for a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s, I promise you). He was the first “customer” I ever billed. Using a pencil, I wrote my day-to-day hours on a piece of cardboard torn from the boxes where the siding arrived. Every two weeks, I gave him the piece of cardboard with the total hours at the bottom. He paid me the next time he got paid... if he remembers. When I harassed him (circling back! Checking! Followed!), he shrugged and said, "Better you owe it than you get it wrong." »
No client has tried this line on me. But I'm ready if they do.
***
There's a saying in the trades:measure twice, cut once. This is important in the siding business for many reasons, including because you get paid the same amount whether the job takes you a week or a month. The more you have to cross-check something, the more your margin decreases. So I learned to measure twice. I take a similar approach in writing:I work more effectively when I think deeply about what a story is going to say before typing a single word. Call it twice, write once.
It's not foolproof. Sometimes I measured twice and always got it wrong, and sometimes I think long and start writing and find out I was thinking wrong or not thinking at all. Still, I learned that being efficient means making more money working for my dad.
Because my father was paid by work all his life, he worked fast. He loved to jokingly harangue me for being slow or for taking forever the task he assigned me.
Him:What took you so long to remove the siding from the back of the house? Me:I screwed up with the hammer and nearly fell off the ladder and died.
As important as fast work is to him, he "wastes" HOURS talking to people, time he could have spent doing something like helping me out of the bushes I fell into. He often chatted with clients, but it's not my fondest memory of batting his lips at him instead of working. No, it was at Ingram Wholesale Siding, our supplier.
We went there before work started to buy materials, we went there in the middle of work to buy more and/or pick up anything we forgot, and we went there after work to drop off excess material.
We were there at least once a week, and whenever my dad and these guys could talk about this or that or the other. Blah blah blah blah they spoke FOREVER.
I usually didn't mind. The more time they spent talking, the less I had to fall off a ladder into a bush that I had accidentally electrified.
Over the course of his career, my dad could have saved thousands of dollars and hours by slipping into Lowe's or Home Depot. Or we could have had the material delivered instead of going to Ingram's warehouse. (And watch me say “we” 28 years after I last worked for him, when it was never really “us” in the first place.)
Of the many reasons I am grateful to have worked for my father, the most important is that it gave me a glimpse of his life outside of my father. At work, and especially at Ingram, I've seen him interact with people. I listened to how he talked to people and watched how he treated them and got to know him in a way that I otherwise would have missed.
He loved talking to those guys at Ingram, cutting with them, asking them about their lives. He would much rather have paid them a little more money than Lowe's or Home Depot – frankly, maybe even a lot more money – because of those connections, and because he saw them as the little guy ( like him, which he defined as good) and big-box hardware stores like big guys (not so good).
He knew the guys at Ingram would take care of him. If he needed something delivered, if he needed a few extra weeks to pay for them, if he needed a special order to be rushed, he knew he would get it because of the relationships he 'he had there.
And here I discovered the lesson while I was writing, not thinking beforehand:My dad was a master networker, and I just realized it.
***
When he wasn't talking endlessly, my dad taught me the value of hard work. But much more important is that he taught me by example that work is part of life, and not even the most important part. We left the house at 7:30 a.m. and were finished by 4 p.m., every day. We were home in time for dinner, every day.
I have three brothers and he gave us priority over work. My dad isn't one to say out loud, "You're more important to me than work." But the way he lived his life showed it. As boys, we were all active in sports. He missed literally zero of our games because of work. The only time he missed one of my games was because he was at one of my brothers.
My fondest childhood memories are afternoon fishing games on our sidewalk with him and my older brother. The way the shadows hit the sidewalk in my memory was before dinner, which I mention to say not only did he get home in time for dinner, he also had time to play before dinner .
I understand now in a way that I didn't realize then that this moment was a great blessing that he chose to give. He could have worked, but he was with us instead. This is the most important thing I learned working with him.
"Don't hit yourself in the face with a hammer" is a close second.
Matt Crossman
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Matt Crossman is a St. Louis-based writer. He writes about sports, travel, adventure and professional development. Email him at [email protected]
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