Part Time Employment Does Not Have To Be Your Destiny

The best part of the entire article was the last sentence...

"Who wants one size fits thinking all when it results in debt and underemployment for most?" [In reference to individual's education cost and loans.]

We start by assuring that OUR kids have skillsand critical thinking ability. That's job one. Then we try to have a conversation with others - before they get on the college debt moebius strip of underemployment and debt. Very thoughful and passionate reply. Thanks for advancing the conversation. Milo

Absolutely!

I surely haven't given up.

I teach her independence; i.e., do it yourself, I'm not here to serve you.

It's okay to be better at things than other people are, just don't try to make them feel bad about it, because they will whip your ass in something else.

Do your best; you are not indebted to anyone. They live in a country where they can be anything they want to be...it's up to them, not you.

It's almost worthy of it's own thread, and we, (as a country), are failing our kids by not allowing them to get bumped and scraped.

I'm damned sure not gonna teach my daughter that she is safe now, because the government has instituted anti-bullying laws. What a crock of crap!

Always enjoy your blogs Milo.

Thanks Kramarat. Why don't you start that new thread? Milo

I will; but first I must convince admin to place off topic discussions on the front page in "sections", and make it so that anyone can chime in, rather than a secret club...which we have already witnessed.

If the same rules apply, I would like to discuss lots of things. I just happen to enjoy the perspective of engineers...whether it's economics, politics, or the weather.

I'm not an engineer by degree, but I don't relate well with non-engineers.

They don't get it.

Now I've stepped in it.

Here we go.

Speaking from a Canadian perspective, the entitled group are the civil servants and basically all government employees who feel they are to be afforded full job security in tough times, high salaries, and indexed pensions that start when they reach some magic age based on years of employment and chronological years. A person starting a government job at age 25 retires at age 55 because his magic number was 80. The pensions are most often under funded and based on their best 5 years of earning not what they contributed over the employment span. And today the person can easily live to collect a pension to age 90 or more. That is 35 years of tax payer expense not fully earned. By the way I was a civil servant for 12 years before starting my own company.

When I ran my own company, I could not afford to provide these services but I did submit taxes to pay for others. Grr..we really need to allow governments to manage and steer not serve themselves. When does a government get rewarded for saving money. Heck elections are based on promises to spend money. We reward the spend-a-holics and make light of any attempts to save or at least curb spending. Meanwhile the real employers that actually make the contributions based on providing economic benefits are stymied by bureaucratic red tape and making us spend far too much time on justifying our business.

My rant.

Schools can help but if governments want to really help parents and kids go to schools then they have to provide a method of saving in tax free accounts or tax free shelters. We can to some degree in Canada put money aside in shelters to be used for education and it does work. I did manage to save enough for three kids to go to university with no debts incurred. However, I also recognize our education in Canada is cheaper than in USA because of government grants to universities.

As an employer, I have hired from bothcommunity colleges and from universities. A community college grad may be a real gem but you will catch a lot of variants in quality. When I hire a chemistry grad form a university, for the most part they would a least have a sound starting point. I sold my company to employees. The current owners are a chemist from a university and an instrumentation technologist from a community college. They both contribute a lot and have a good synergy.

A bigger problem had been hiring field staff with good skills and work ethic. Expansion of the company depends heavily on the quality of field staff.

Training was provided but you cannot teach work ethic and behaviour if there is no foundation. It is like teaching speed in soccer, you have it or you don't. You can teach your children to have the foundation and Kudos to you.

I am not worthy of kudos.

I've got two older daughters that have become ensnared in the government safety net, 28 and 32. Both have lost their children and are dealing with drug/government dependency...I lost the battle, but hopefully not the war.

I could not get them to understand the virtues of hard work, and I lost for a good reason. They were living for free, not working, and each was getting $5-6K each year, back from taxes they never paid in, due to some tax credit. Raises came in the form of more babies.

The republicratic party has taken our country, and we are headed for full blown socialist dictatorship. Their Achilles Heel, is that their are 300 million of us, and even the dumb ones will figure out that they're being screwed.

Life is an open opportunity; sitting on the couch waiting for the end of the month is not a viable option.

The people that created this situation are the embodiment of evil. The interests of our country do not enter into the equation...only votes and continued power.

The people that earn the money to pay the bills, are running out of reasons to stay in business, and it has to stop.

NOW you sound like John Galt...

grin!

Who is John Galt?

Kramarat,

If you haven't already, check out the book "Road to Serfdom" by F.A. Hayek.

I haven't read it, but I know what it's about, and it's dead on. I've seen it first hand.

Most people are completely unaware of how damaging it is for young women, particularly, to become dependent on government. It destroys lives.

Your comments also remind me of the Cloward-Piven strategy. They "proposed to create a crisis in the current welfare system - by exploiting the gap between welfare law and practice - that would ultimately bring about its collapse and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income. They hoped to accomplish this end by informing the poor of their rights to welfare assistance, encouraging them to apply for benefits and, in effect, overloading an already overburdened bureaucracy". Basically, collapse the system by spending and then restarting a socialist society.

We may be witnessing it.

But back on topic...

Milo's right. There are lots of jobs that have to be done, and they have to be done by humans. There is also a shortage of qualified workers in a lot of areas.

So what if it's dirty? Drink a beer and take a shower when you get home. It feels good to be worn out at the end of the day. A beer and a shower feel almost miraculous.

It's a long list of jobs that need to be done, and if I were a kid out of high school, I'd be looking at the ones that nobody else wants to do, and bust my ass and learn as much about the field as possible.

The way to beat the Obamacare nightmare, is to make sure that you're valuable enough to the company, that, not only will you be working 40 hours, you'll probably be getting overtime. Once it fully kicks in, it will be the slackers that get kicked to the curb....unless you're in a union.

I enthusiastically support the idea of entrepreneurship rather than underemployment, but all those college debts are a bit of an obstacle. Thanks for sharing your Canadian and personal experience. Milo

How would YOU suggest developing a work ethic? For me, it was a nine week hitch hiking tour across the US and Canada at the age of sixteen, during which I discovered that I actually had to eat EVERY DAY! And that I had to buy that food. And that people would not just give it to me like my parents did.

I went home, discovered that my dad was not as stupid as he was nine weeks prior. And I got a real job.

I don't recommend boiling cat tail roots and scraping up road kill off Highway 17 to make into stew as a character building moment for most kids, but it worked for me.

"......I discovered that I actually had to eat EVERY DAY!"

There is no bigger motivator than a empty stomach.

Yep. The real learning comes after college, when you have to make yourself valuable enough that someone will pay you money.

I gripe about getting old, but I don't think I'd want to be a 20 year old in this economic atmosphere. I started working as soon as could; cutting grass and shoveling snow by 11, and working the tobacco fields during summer, by age 13.

Lots of reasons why companies will hire part time workers over full time workers. I don't share the doom and gloom of this article. It took me getting so ill that I lost my employable skill set and I had to start my own business. If I could do that in business unfriendly Canada during a recession, you KNOW you can do it in a business friendly place like the US. Milo's own stats show this.

Some folks don't think of factory jobs as "jobs". They look at their heroes in University...the top end architect drawing in a six figure income, the highly skilled and highly paid engineers who came in and did the "talk to the class" in third year. They look at a factory job as low skill, low paying, slave labour, and no way they can buy a Porche or raise a family on that! To a large extent, I agree. Such jobs are often hard to fill for those reasons, among others. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Milo's article reminded me strongly of Howard Roark, waiting a year in an empty office awaiting the "Big Break". Filling his time by doing unpaid internship scut work, wondering how he was going to pay for that toothache which is NOT going to get better by itself. A community college course in metalwork, welding or Cordon Bleu cooking, or hotel management. Heck, MY community college (the one I teach at every week) has marketing, and business management. It is the only place to learn a unionized trade. I guess I am suggesting that instead of working IN the factory, that you open and run your OWN factory.

Or the coffee shop. Or the ice cream parlour. Or the burger joint. These are not "part time" activities. Nor are they "something to do until the big architect job comes along".

So, although I enthusiastically endorse this post, I would add a strong caveat to it... rather than filling in part time hours serving coffee while waiting for decent paying jobs "in your field" that you turn the whole thing around. Do part time work "in your field" while doing full time work in a business for which you are solely responsible. This model was reluctantly arrived at when Nortel shut down here in Ottawa.

Every laid off employee thought they would become part time consultants in their field. Very few became that. Many started their own consulting firms, some bought franchises, and some found work in similar industries. All, when pressed, tell me that they were becoming too fat and happy in the "big ship" that was Nortel, and the best thing that ever happened to them was the collapse. One fellow spent a year in the gym working off his frustrations, and is now a professional fitness trainer. If you had seen him scarfing back the pizza and potato chips ten years ago, you would not recognize him. Another became a math teacher. All of my laid off friends do not miss the long hours, the loss of social life as they prepared for "roll out" of the "new product", and the phony smiles of the execs who were carving up the carcass to get their big buy outs.

Hmmm...quite a rambling series of thoughts here. I guess Milo's article really WAS thought provoking.

I am sure there a lot of people with different stories. I would love to hear their take on the value of Community College, small business, and ways to deal with the economic upturn which really IS happening.

I tout the advantages of tech school whenever I get the chance.

These kids need to understand that it's unlikely that they will become rich; of course they should go for it if they can, but a person with a manufacturing skill can live a decent and stable life on $30 bucks an hour, or more.

PS- The US is not business friendly anymore. The cost of government compliance gets higher every year; all of those spent dollars have a direct impact on the wages of the workers.

It pisses me off to no end, when some idiot politician gets on TV and says that corporate greed is responsible for holding people back.

They've got the "greed" part right.

Anti- union types will move us back 50 yrs! Since when was doing carpentry less than? No union equals do everything yourself,no benefits,worry about the help not showing up,and in the end making 30k. At least the union give benefits,overtime,rewards those who work hard,and pay is over 60k! On the back nine now,hard work is not the younger people's motivation anymore. No respect ,no ambition,entitlement wannabes. Trade schools are not teaching anyone how to work hard! Everyone wants to be in management ,all chiefs with no Indians ! 1350 classroom hours on top of 38 yrs in the trades allows me to complain. How to make it better? Let teachers teach real life ,not this everyone gets a ribbon stuff.to truly be equal,get in the ditch and dig! That will earn you respect( along with sweat,and arthritis ) . But to drive by the home,supermarket ,mall,and say I built that! Rewards plus a check! Kill your TV/ Cell( dumb) phone!!!!!

"Trade schools are not teaching anyone how to work hard!"

Kids will never learn to work hard at a school. That for the most part will only be learned by the example of the parents at home or mentors that speak and show example into their lives.

My son is 23 and has never gone to college, but he knows more about working with people than about anyone I know. We Homeschooled our kids and he has done more reading about many topics and applied what he has learned than most older adults will in their lifetime. That applies to mechanics, welding, carpentry, business administration. He always has people who want him to work for them because they know he'll get the job done in less time than they thought and more thoroughly. That kind of work ethic will never be taught or caught in school of any kind.

Part of our societies accepted "modus operandi" is at fault here. Kids graduate from HS and they are expected to go to college right away. Why? Half the time they aren't mature enough to be away from home without supervision and they also probably don't know what they want to accomplish in life. They also don't have the money. They then go to school somewhere where they aren't motivated because they don't have a goal, they don't go to class all the time or study hard for their classes; they start stacking up tremendous amounts of debt for an education of dubious value.

My youngest daughter who just graduated wants to work in a particular trade and she will work, save her money and then go to school without debt. She will work as she goes to school so she doesn't have to borrow money and have leveraging working against her.

If someone has the vision of what they want to accomplish, the funds to do it without incurring debt, the maturity to be away from home and be responsible, I have no problem with that, in fact, more power to them and I would help empower them as I can.

The old Industrial Age way of thinking (get a good education, find a good company to work for and you'll be set for life) is archaic and doesn't work anymore. We need to think differently about business ownership, being an employee, entrpreneurism, debt, etc.

Too often kids think it is their "right" to go to college. The problem is is that the entitlement mentality has started way before that as parents have too readily made it "easy" for their kids. They have given them about everything they want and expect and that continues happening as they get older.

Work ethic comes from the people you work with. Having worked on a farm as a younger man,and while working for a 90 year old caretaker ,the ethic part came from my co workers all wanting the same thing. A better life through hard work. More for the family means more for me. Empathy is it. Learned lessons from the depression fueled my elder boss. Respect that at his age,there wasn't much he didn't know. Fill the shovel or fill your coat. That's what he said. As a result everyone worked hard, Or. Be replaced. He saw that then,as is now. Trades got it made. That was in 1976, now robotics,technology ,rapid change. It is what it is. Adapt,overcome. Or fade away. No machine can put on a roof,nor give you a haircut. Service industry is just that. Service! Create value,now your on to something. It's America,go get yours....

At least the union give benefits,overtime,rewards those who work hard,and pay is over 60k!

And each state has Workforce Development has a department that protects employees that the employee can go to.

And if a company does not pay overtime, and an employee can file a claim, of which on states expense (Taxpayer) the company has to prove otherwise at the companies expense. That is not the union doing that, that is your taxpayers dollar.

As far as $60,000.00 /yr depends what the work is. And the quality between a $60,000.00/yr union employee can vary greatly even in a union.

And your comment of:

Everyone wants to be in management ,all chiefs with no Indians !

BS, they do not want to be held accountable....

I just had a conversation with a journeyman pipefitter, We were welding 304 Stainless fittings to Carbon Pipe and a Union worker was popping his mouth off that they were using 6010 filler for the tack and 7018 for the weld even though in our scope clearly stated as well as the contract of which they bid on stated 309L as filler.

When I talked to the journeyman pipefitter, he refuse to answer what filler he used of which he had the filler rod in his hand. His only response was to talk to the project manager. I am not going tell you what lies I caught the PM saying (who by the way was also at one time a Journeyman Pipefitter)...... unless you would like to know.

Unions can be a Gutless breed that are taught to be unaccountable because there is strength in numbers when it comes to incompetence.

Not all are like this, I have met Union employees that are competent........ the interesting thing is, union does not guarantee better quality.... I have seen it's about the same quality and efficiency outcome between union and non-union..... with just one exception.

A negative response to a union employee can generate hostility....

Anybody that's been in management, would take a pay cut to get out of it and go back to worker status. Well, a lot of people would. I hated being in management.

I had an engineer that thought that my job as a engineer/engineering manager was a cake walk, I took a 10 vacation and went to Jamaica. I gave him the reins....... He was the most qualified........ He told me not to call to check up........ He was very glad to see me. Problem is , I had to put in 70 hour week for quite a bit of time to bring things under control........ Management is not a 40 hour work week.

I always said anyone that wants my job can have it......... Now they know I was serious.

I agree that unions can be gorging at the trough if left to. That said,I was a union roofer,allied waterproofers ect . If you worked hard,the company called you back. My boss would call the hall,ask for ten roofers. Starting the day with ten four hr show up pay checks in his pocket. By noon,you KNEW who was going to work out. WE policed ourself,making no room for slackers. Helping the company increase production,we all got bonus money versus liquidated damages . Working hard is what we did,but having one hour of pay in my annuity ,plus pensions. Not everyone can be a money manager,let alone a good one. The company is still doing well,the hard workers who got it up and going still stop for a beer. There is NO adversarial relationship. We needed him,he needed us. Managers are turning into babysitters. When my kettle mans wife had a baby,I went to run the kettle. Yes,after the field beat me up,I became an estimator. Corruption and greed are a given. Does that leave no one to be honest? I think not.Just do it .

Not all unions are bad, nor all union workers lazy.

I've just always been the type to go outperform everyone around me, and negotiate my own salary and raises. Of course, I will also be working until I die.

It's not so much the work part that's so destructive...it's being able to comfortably retire at the age of 45 or 50, and collect a nice pension for 30-40 years. It's unsustainable, and it's wiping us out.

It's what got the car companies, and it's what's driving one city after another into bankruptcy. I understand the union people being mad...because promises were made.

It's time to stop making those promises.

There are pros/cons with union and nonunion, as I mentioned earlier, the quality and output is about the same. I cannot say if the costs are the same...... I doubt it.

I either saw, or read something one time, that explained how the primary objective of unions, is to take complete control of the entire labor pool in a given area, leaving the companies no choice but to go through them for labor.

It put things in an entirely different light, and explained some of mafia like behavior of some of the unions. It will be interesting to watch Michigan, and their new "right to work" status, which is what we have in NC.

I suspect that business is going to pick up...that's if the new governor isn't assassinated and the law rolled back.

If you look at Washington attempting to push through card check, along with some other heavily slanted rules, it really begins to resemble government sanctioned extortion.

and explained some of mafia like behavior of some of the unions.

NO! well I'll be......

The problem (at least around here) is to get work to spec. Call backs are the norm when you pay piecework. Its not the union's fault...nor can I blame the worker. The PM is usually looking after two or three dozen houses at any given time, and shoddy work is the norm.

In Canada, we have a TV show about a guy who comes in and fixes all this shoddy work. He says that as long as unions allow piecework, he will never be out of a job. There is only one developer here in Ottawa who pays wages instead of set price for the job. His homes are consistently five to eight percent more expensive, but are very much in demand even so. At least in a Hxxxxxxxxxx home, you won't get a cold air return in your garage, your hot air pipes will be taped....and you WILL get ice and rain protection under your shingles. And yet, the other developers don't seem to "get it". They hope that you don't figure out that your house is unattached to its foundation until after the "new home warranty" is up.

Oh well. I personally like unions because I personally don't like most bosses. Now that I AM a boss, I try not to be "that boss". The result...amazing loyalty, even from the unionized guys. The key of course, is to treat people with respect.

I have had situations like that one with the bad welds. The project manager must be held responsible. Unfortunately, you have to let the bozo's finish the botched job, and issue a call back notice to fix it, it really is hard to get them to do it to spec when they are stuck into a bad job. Diplomacy is key in that case.

In my case it was just a quisitive mind that looked into it. And that we caught it in time. We were bringing the units on line during this past holiday, (2 days) (US holiday was labor day, Sept. 2nd), the process is rarely taking down, only for inspection and/or PM.

If this would have been missed, the down time would have been at best a week. And with the pumps @ 6,000 GPM, these pumps would have ran dry because they had mechanical seals, (I love dynamic seals).

I felt I would have been out of a job, the cost of loss of production alone would have been $3,420,000.00. Being the project manager of this, I wouldn't expect to have been working here long. I felt very fortunate that this was caught in time. And with any project their are problems, if its well managed all problems are manageable. When all is said and done. Issues like this carries less weight, it all about how the problem was handle.

But when a problem comes to light, deal and address it at face value, nothing gets me more upset when its covered up, and if I'm lied to, I have very little patience with the offender. Whether the offender works on the floor or is my boss.

As far as a relationship with the people on the shop floor, you always have to put yourself in their position and have empathy for it. But it does come down to accountability. But with any position they comes responsibility ownership.

I think I would like to work for you.

well, you can have my job,........ if you want it.

In your dreams dude...

I know what you have to go through.

But you would be interesting to work for...

You lead by example. Everyone seems to be getting it in your case. All good. Respect is the true thing. Isn't that what we all want for our effort in the end? Pride in craftsmanship as well. Cool heads will win the day. ( Sometimes)

Thank you. I go with what works, and what makes me like the guy I see in the mirror. In very few occasions, it has bit me in the back, but much fewer than seems to be case in discussions with my peers. I had a case couple years ago where a worker I had hired on for the day for a bigger job than ususual was yelled at for slacking by one of my union workers. I marked it on the calender!

I disagree. What's wrong with piecework?

Shoddy jobs are a failure on the part of management.

I was running a paint and glass job, on a new federal penitentiary, back in the 80's.

I had mechanical rooms that had to be painted; all pipes different colors, and I knew my people were going to be getting stoned and screwing me if they were working by the hour.

Piecework saved my butt. I put a $500 pricetag on each mechanical room, with no pay until it passed muster.

My boys would bang out one a weekend; and they were done right.

There or positives...... The company left (2) go from the crew, one because he had a very vocal mouth and would incite our employees.

There are positives, one you mention drawing off the pool of workers from the hall, the other, is getting the workers from the area. All in all, I am satisfied, the company corrected the issues on their dime, now we don't want to see a company lose money on a contract, because they had to grind out the old welds and reweld with the correct filler. But it was their mistake that they could not cover up which initially they did. That pissed me off, and they were surprised that I was able to call them out.......(they dropped names of people that were basically independent weld inspectors that I knew, small world)

After they corrected, we ended up given them more work

State and government unions are a different breed. They have slanted the field by nepotism. Independent contractors,now that's a mouthful ( Snowden?) I live in RI,very much on the bottom of everything. We all know someone. That said,do you want that someone inspecting weld? Writing spec? Perspective and perception are everything. When GM became a healthcare company that built cars. Why? Power negotiating? Like a court case,who has the best lawyer wins. The best is still to come,that has always carried America thru. Lets hope it's true. New tech will bring big changes. In the last ten years we have seen amazing. Lets hope to see more. Many have made it with part time starts,turning into full time$. The power of belief.

It definitely going to be interesting..... one of the biggest deterrents of potential entrepreneurs was their own health insurance. That alone scared them off. There still is and if not even more uncertainty.

But taking risks is what entrepreneurs do, while other don't.

Practical, progressive thinking. Will move us forward. The limits are only mental. We all need to help solve problems,and we can

Now you're sounding like a bloody free-market capitalist!

Why, thank you! I would like to think so. I would also like to think I am a realist as well, and play the cards as I am dealt.

Of course, I FOUND John Galt. Or rather, he found me, and I am planning my trip to Colorado.

But keep in mind that there are some things I don't think free enterprise does very well. Trains that get routes cancelled because they are making not enough money and thereby leaving outlying villages and towns stranded. Those towns can only now be serviced by "socialist" automobile carrying roads. Socialist because the government pays for them. Courier services that charge double and triple for Northern towns as opposed to the "socialist" postal system. A socialist medical system which is not a burden on small business because the "state" pays for it instead of a free enterprise insurance system that is only less expensive because they let granny die instead of curing her cancer. A socialist welfare system here in Canada which I agree is possibly broken, however of the dozens I know who went on welfare, only one would be of the "have another baby so that daddy can get another pack of smokes" which make the whole system look bad. When you see a guy with Parkinson's begging outside union station in his wheel chair because welfare covers his rent and not much else, you realize that to get the guy a new wheel for his wheel chair is just common decency! Such a drag on my taxes, I accept. I don't regard "socialist" as a bad word when it applied to trains, roads, cancer patients and the truly needy. It seems to be a (name of political party removed) battle cry in the States though! Ah, the power of emotionally laden words. I think it is because the Nazi's highjacked a perfectly good socalist party back in 38, and turned it into a fascist dictatorship which was as far away from being socialist as the Tea Party is. Although I am happy to support such "socialist" programs, I am as free market capitalist as anyone, I run my own business, I believe in international trade and fair competition and employ some of the finest craftsmen on the planet. Happy to pay taxes to keep the road plowed, and the kids educated, and not many people think I have sold out to the socialists.

But I am straying into politics. Its just that I felt somebody had to speak up for the poor "socialists" on this thread. Its only neighbours helping neighbours after all, not the evil empire!. And believe me...I have plenty of stories of socialist waste...military stupidity mostly because that is what I know, (submarines!!!!) but the recent "stimulus" spending might have been better used to expand small business rather than supporting big business.

Oh well, I expect I will be shut down by the administrators for getting into politics, if only politics painted with broad brush strokes. But when you consider that small business is the backbone of the Canadian Economy (86 percent of businesses employ less than ten employees!) the perks offered by the Canadian government make failing to get into your own small business a foolish thing.

And I hereby invoke Godwin's Law of forums for mentioning the Nazis! And by the rules of the internet (there are rules!) I hereby concede.

I am sorry cr4 members, I tried to mark this post as Off Topic. I can't do it on this edit either! Please feel free to consign it to Off Topic Oblivion. I don't know why it is sometimes so hard to post things...often I have to cut and paste a couple of times to get the post to actually load. Sometimes I lose it entirely. Oh well. Forum gremlins no doubt.

I think admin will be just fine. Don't worry about it.

Maybe I'm just naive, but I'd like to think that neighbors will take care of neighbors, without being forced to do so by government...or having government redistribute money from the rich to the poor, with the government administration using most of the money.

There are a lot of people taking, (criminal), advantage of our social welfare programs, and it's not right. It should be in place for those that truly need it.

I have to agree with some of what you say...people that are truly incapable of taking care of themselves, should be cared for. I have no problem with that.

I really don't think you understand the Tea Party, so I'll hold back on responding to that particular comment.

The bottom line...

Working is war, and each project is a battle.

The harder a person works; the more they know about the field; the smaller the pool of possible replacements gets.

A person that keeps their head down, learns the ropes, and knows their shit...will not be downsized or fired. They will thrive.

Unions shut that type of independent behavior down.

I would love to have the opportunity to compete against a union painter...one on one.

I would be done and cleaning up, before that b*tch finished his coffee.