{"id":1072,"date":"2015-05-23T12:23:52","date_gmt":"2015-05-23T00:23:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=1072"},"modified":"2015-05-23T12:23:52","modified_gmt":"2015-05-23T00:23:52","slug":"were-all-technicians-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=1072","title":{"rendered":"We\u2019re all technicians now"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Piano2\"<\/a>Find something that you love doing and you\u2019ll never have to work another day in your life.\u00a0 At least that\u2019s what we are often told.<\/p>\n

My maternal grandfather combined his aptitude for things mechanical with his love of music to become a piano repairer<\/em>.\u00a0 That was back in the days when every second middle-class \u2013 or aspiring to be middle-class \u2013 household had a piano.\u00a0 The piano was the family\u2019s centre of in-home entertainment.<\/p>\n

But pianos tend to require quite a lot of maintenance.\u00a0 And so my grandfather travelled from house to house, tuning, regulating, voicing, repairing, and, sometimes, basically rebuilding the household\u2019s treasured (but often neglected) instrument.<\/p>\n

If my grandfather was plying his trade today, he\u2019d be a piano technician<\/em>.\u00a0 And he wouldn\u2019t repair <\/em>pianos, he would service<\/em> them.<\/p>\n

Something similar has happened to the mechanics<\/em> who used to repair<\/em> motor cars.\u00a0 They too have become technicians.<\/em>\u00a0 And rather than carrying out repairs<\/em> in a garage<\/em>, they provide service<\/em> in a service centre<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Back in the days when many university students managed to get a summer job that would almost make them enough money to see them through the rest of the year, I spent a couple of summer breaks working at a meat processing plant.\u00a0 I started out as a general hand<\/em>, progressed to being a packer<\/em>, and then becoming a strapper<\/em>.\u00a0 The following summer I started out as a lab assistant<\/em> and moved on to become a production analyst<\/em>.\u00a0 (Knowing something about chemistry helped.)<\/p>\n

As you might expect of a meat processing plant, a lot of the employees were butchers.\u00a0 But, from the slaughtermen<\/em> at one end of the chain to the graders<\/em> at the other, there were at least seven or eight different kinds of butchers.\u00a0 And that was before you dropped down a floor to where perhaps the most skilful of all the butchers \u2013 the boners<\/em> \u2013 worked.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere in the plant,\u00a0 you could find pattern makers<\/em>, founders<\/em>, fitters<\/em>, turners<\/em>, riggers<\/em>, fellmongers<\/em>, tanners<\/em>, cutlers<\/em>, and fettlers <\/em>( the chaps who kept the plant\u2019s private section of the railway in tip top order), as well as men and women from many other trades.<\/p>\n

Not far from the meat processing plant there was small building that housed a luthier<\/em>, a maker and repairer of stringed instruments.\u00a0 About 25 years after I last clocked off at the meat plant I went past the luthier\u2019s building.\u00a0 It was still there.\u00a0 Except its sign now proclaimed that it was the workshop of a guitar technician<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I guess that makes me a word technician<\/em>.\u00a0 But I can\u2019t help wondering what sort of technicians the fettlers have become.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Find something that you love doing and you\u2019ll never have to work another day in your life.\u00a0 At least that\u2019s what we are often told. My maternal grandfather combined his aptitude for things mechanical with his love of music to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1072"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1074,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1072\/revisions\/1074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}