Monday, May 7, 2012

Tacoma's New Fireboat Saying What We All Know Too Well

As a country, our product quality sucks!  You read that correctly.   Once upon a time, we use to make some quality stuff. Stuff that you can still find kicking around, doing a job as well as the newer equipment can do.  The only difference is that the newer, faster, quicker, better, more expensive equipment is fail-tastic.  In Seattle PI's, "Tacoma welcomes new $675,000 fireboat from Canada" article, Port of Tacoma quite clearly and cleaverly points out how they came to choose a Canadian company to build the new fireboat. 

If this country wants to see the next hundred or so years, we need to refocus our industries into making high-quality, durable goods. And with that, Americans need to take pride in their work.  Every building I have worked on, no matter how big or how small the task was, I tried to take as much pride and apply as much skill as I could to it.  I know that when a certain marina in Kirkland is bulldozed sometime in the future, there is a a wall or two that will no go so quietly. Why? I built the shit out of it, stronger than the prints said to and without expending any extra money to do it.  With that said, that entire building is quality built not just from my efforts, because the entire crew's efforts were focused on quality, durability, and pride.  Our focus should not be on how much money we can save, what the turn-over rate will be, and how fast we can get another person into the product to keep us afloat. That never works, except in scams. (Enron, anyone?)

There is nothing wrong with doing crap jobs as long as you know that the job might be crap, but the work is quality.  I have worked with too many people with bad attitudes and even worse work ethics, only in it for the money.  Nothing in life comes easy and especially not free. Everything requires sweat, ink, blood, or breath in payment.  Hell, even Death requires you pay for it with your Life.

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