Please welcome my guest blogger today: Ed Galloway
I have a lot of shortcomings; just ask my wife or children. Some of them even I recognize.
One shortcoming is being too ready to judge people based on their formal education or the way they talk – people who know how things work, who work with their hands, people who actually make things – even though, or maybe because, that’s where I came from.
Trying to learn what I need to know on Dover Road, I now know what it feels like to be on the other end of that position. Recently, I went to a used farm equipment auction to see about buying a tractor. The auction took place in a field. There were several hundred attendees. It was hot. There was no shade. There were hundreds of items for sale, only a very limited number of which could I even identify.
“Oh, look, there’s a nice garden disk.”
“A garden disk? No, that’s a post-hole digger lying on its side.”
There was a clean New Holland tractor about the size I wanted, even though I didn’t know how to start it, much less what all those levers and pedals were for. To prove my sense of these thing (and fortunately), the bidding on it started about where I was going to stop.
Anyway, my point is every one of the people there (little kids included) knew more about the equipment than I did. And everyone that I talked to was kind to me despite my abysmal ignorance (although I expect that they get a good laugh when I move on). My esteem for these folk is great and growing. I know that if I pay attention to what I’m told I’ll learn something, and I’m learning to go easy on the prejudgments.
And so it goes.
“Except as a fellow handled an ax, they had no way of knowing a fool.”
– Robert Frost, “Two Tramps in Mudtime”
– Robert Frost, “Two Tramps in Mudtime”
I have a lot of shortcomings; just ask my wife or children. Some of them even I recognize.
One shortcoming is being too ready to judge people based on their formal education or the way they talk – people who know how things work, who work with their hands, people who actually make things – even though, or maybe because, that’s where I came from.
Trying to learn what I need to know on Dover Road, I now know what it feels like to be on the other end of that position. Recently, I went to a used farm equipment auction to see about buying a tractor. The auction took place in a field. There were several hundred attendees. It was hot. There was no shade. There were hundreds of items for sale, only a very limited number of which could I even identify.
“Oh, look, there’s a nice garden disk.”
“A garden disk? No, that’s a post-hole digger lying on its side.”
There was a clean New Holland tractor about the size I wanted, even though I didn’t know how to start it, much less what all those levers and pedals were for. To prove my sense of these thing (and fortunately), the bidding on it started about where I was going to stop.
Anyway, my point is every one of the people there (little kids included) knew more about the equipment than I did. And everyone that I talked to was kind to me despite my abysmal ignorance (although I expect that they get a good laugh when I move on). My esteem for these folk is great and growing. I know that if I pay attention to what I’m told I’ll learn something, and I’m learning to go easy on the prejudgments.
And so it goes.
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