Serfing Holiday

Not a project this time, and not a typo either :)
I'm referring to my just-finished contract as a part-time minimum-wage worker... Being a modern-day peasant... Essentially working as a modern Serf in a feudal system.

My last Engineering contract finished in December and I've been waiting/looking for another Engineering job since then... I'm kinda specialized in my recent work history and there are few companies in Vancouver that need my skills, so I just have to wait till the right opportunity comes along.
In the mean-time however there isn't much to do and the priority is to not spend money!... I've done pretty much all the "home based" projects I can think of and the ones I have done, I've dragged out over several months to maximize the time spent and minimize the money.

Anyway, a few months ago, I decided that Id try some minimum-wage type work to help a bit with finances and use up my spare time... and I figured it would be a good experience to see first-hand just how privileged I am as n Engineer :)
So, I applied for a seasonal type job at a couple of places where I thought I might be engaged by the work, and I was fortunate enough to be offered a job fairly promptly, and for the last three months Ive been working about three full shifts a week in a minimum-wage job (actually just above minimum wage as its technically defined here in Vancouver at $11.30 per hour)

And having completed my "tour", these are my thoughts about the whole experience.

Well, first off I should describe what type of work it was since there are many different types of "minimum wage" jobs. It was not manual labour (which I'm a bit old for and doubt my body would put up with for long) but it was work that meant I was on my feet and actively walking around all the time. It was a local sales outlet for a specialty tools company, and for the most part, all of the employees do all of the jobs (there is not much specialization in different activities)... So, I restocked shelves and took phone calls and served customers and operated check-outs and gave advice and took returns etc etc.. I did a fair bit of everything :)

And I can tell you that after a full day of running around constantly doing all that stuff I was always pretty pooped, and my feet were really killing me... every time!   And for that full day of effort I took home a bit less than $100... And the tax man ends up taking about 25% of that in personal income tax too!
So, when they say minimum-wage, they mean it... I did my own calculations on the matter of personal finances and I can say with a pretty high degree of accuracy that a person can survive on that income (assuming they work a nominal 40hr week)... The money earned will cover basic living costs and includes accommodation, food, transport, health, mobile phone, and some money for clothing replacement etc... but it is very minimal and a single person living alone would not be able to afford to live in the inner-most suburbs of Vancouver and certainly could never afford a new car of any sort or aspire to save enough money for any sort of property ownership dreams.  It would be easier if the person shared accommodation but still... Its a pretty subsistence way of life.

But adding to the "basic struggle for survival" situation, it would also be really difficult to extricate oneself from that state... All your days are full up with tiring work that leaves you just beat... It would be really hard to find a way to get a better job... There is no time to go looking and no way to pay for or acquire skills needed to get a "non-minimum-wage" job. There is virtually no way to be able to save up enough money to go back to school or to be able to invest the capital needed to start your own little business of some sort... Its tough... You would absolutely need to find a way to share transport, food and accommodation costs with a couple of other people in order to get ahead at all.

But that's not my biggest "issue" with the whole experience...
My big disappointment is on a much larger scale... Its about the way we (we the "western Democracies) practice Capitalism...
The company I was working for is not a big corporation; its a family owned business that has slowly been building and growing for over fifty years... Its kind of a "model" good family business done the truly Canadian way... And to be sure, I liked all of the people who worked there and that includes the managers and the full timers and the part timers... all good people who cared about each-other etc.
And yet, with all that, the vast majority of the jobs in the company are dead-end minimum-wage type jobs.
The company pays just above the legal minimum acceptable wage.
And its a moderate sized company (about 1000 employees across the country) but the management structure is pretty flat so there is about one senior position for every 10 employees, and one manager position for every 100 employees or so.
And that means that in any kind of career progression, only the top 10% of employees will ever have any chance of moving ahead to the next level...
And that traditionally is how our capitalism works... the best workers get rewarded with promotions and that provides the motivation to the workers and the competition that is needed to maintain innovation and efficiency too...
But the actual experience of it is not nearly as rosy!   As any worker knows, within a short time on the job, you know who the top 10-20% of the workers in a given area are, and if you are in that group then that's great, and there is some hope for you... But if you are in the other 80% then there is NOTHING but the job as it is.
There is in fact de-motivation!
Instead of being motivated to try to improve the company performance (by more efficient practice or by more sales or better processes etc) you are in fact motivated, because no-matter what you do you will never get promoted and will only ever get minimum-wage, to do as little as possible!
Your only real goal is to aim to not get fired, and that usually only means avoiding being amongst the least productive/valued 10-20% of workers.... If you are not in that group then your only motivation becomes "how can I do less work".   Oh how sad!
And its all because the company's whole purpose is to funnel profits to the owner... There is no attempt to share any improvements or company success with the employees at all... And that accounts for the vast majority of jobs as practiced in Western Democratic Capitalism!

But what about the sales-people in most corporate jobs who get a limited salary and are paid significant bonuses on their sales results I hear you say? ... Hmmm yes, well, we all know what the caricature of the car salesman is, and we all more or less apply it to "sales-people" in general... And its not a very flattering caricature... And the reason is that because when you motivate people that way, they become extremely "self" focused and are motivated to ignore/abuse other people in order to benefit themselves...
In short, with heavy bonussing on making sales you get a focus on only making sales... They are not team players and don't support anybody or any thing that does not get them personally a sale. It works with sales-people because that's their only job but its very hard to put a bonus plan together that effectively motivates other types of job... As an engineer in silicon design/manufacturing companies I'm very well aware of this...
Almost all professional companies have a bonus system and some kind of profit sharing plan for most/all of their employees... And it certainly helps...
But sadly only slightly... By and Large its still the same problem with the middle performing 80% of the employees being effectively motivated to do as little as possible, and the company focussing on generating profit that is funneled to the top (ie the owners or in the case of public corporations, the shareholders).
And the system works... and its better than pretty much any other system that has been developed!
But my issue is that it is absolutely wasting the potential and focus and effort of about 80% of the people employed!
The biggest problem with effectively motivating that middle 80% is that its almost impossible to put together an effective bonus structure... Its either too complicated to put in the hard metrics (because the job "productivity" has so many different aspects and many of the factors affecting "productivity" are outside of individual employee's control) or the people "managing" the bonus assessment (the employee manager) are incompetent or unaware of the full scope of what their individual employees are always doing... Ive seen it being attempted for about 20 years now in my engineering jobs, and without fail the annual "performance assessments" are an incredible pain in the ass for minimal increased employee performance!... And its all compounded of course by our human nature which is essentially to cheat the system if we can to get more than our fair share!
In short, its not that the corporate executives are always screwing over the employees... The employees are just as bad and are just as likely to screw over the executive if given half a chance!

And so, sadly, I can say with surety that the existing system really sux, but that its virtually impossible to define a simple and effective alternative that is better!

The end analysis is that its not really our Capitalism that I despise, its our flawed human natures... but there is nothing new there    :(

So much for my Serfing Holiday.

Another Coffee Table

I'm still unemployed (well mostly anyway), so I did another project...
There was a lovely large slab of Maple burl at a wood place that I saw and I decided to do something with it.

The problem however was that the board was too warped to be used as a single piece. It is a common problem with thick lumps of wood in that the shape changes as the wood dries out after being cut and what started out as a flat board just after having been sawn, becomes a warped monstrosity after a couple of months of drying.
And even then if you plane away the warp to make it flat again, it is very likely to re-warp again simply because you have removed some of the wood that was generating "internal stresses" that created the old warp... so now it will un-warp somewhat... which makes the nicely re flattened board that you just made, warp again!
So, there isn't really a lot you can do about it all.

I decided that rather than try and fight with the large warped board, I would cut it into smaller sections that would have less warp and would require less planning and flattening etc.
So, I cut it into three sections. Two were about 60cm x 45cm and one was 60cm x 30cm.
But since it was a slice of burl (which gave it very interesting grain and figure patterns) it had a few voids in it and especially near the edges of the two larger pieces. So I set about cleaning them out of debris, painting them gold, and then filling the voids with a clear epoxy (like I did with the previous smaller piece of burl that I used for the dresser table top.

Then I planed all three chunks flat again and I had three pieces that I planned to arrange into a coffee table top. I wanted the coffee table to be 150cm x 60cm (5'x2' in North American parlance) so I had to use some other timber to "fill in the gaps". I chose bloodwood which is a rich red in colour.
Note though that no-matter what the freshly cut colour of the beautiful exotic wood you choose, after exposure to UV and IR light for a couple of years they all turn to one or other shade of brown... Its a shame but all those beautiful bright reds and purples (Paduk, Bloodwood, Purpleheart etc) end up as more or less the same dark-brown!
Anyway, as I said, I decided to contrast the golden coloured Maple with the deep dark-brown of Bloodwood.

The next problem however was how to rejoin the three major pieces of the table in a way that was very strong, easy to do with minimal tooling, and would result in an attractive end product?
I decided to use very large dowels... 25mm diameter maple dowels that are 25cm long.
OK, that will be good and strong, but the trick is to get very good alignment between all the dowels in a joint and both adjoining slabs... If you get it wrong then the slabs will not slide together and/or they will end up with a bend at the joint.
It would be pretty easy to drill all the 25mm holes in straight and parallel if I had a big drill press, but all I have is a hand drill!
I solved the problem by building a wood jig that allowed me to drill the four holes into the edge of one of the slabs in a way that would ensure they were at least parallel.
Then I started by drilling the four holes into a "joiner" piece and continued into the edge of the slab. After that was done, I took the joiner piece off the edge of the slab I just drilled, and clamped its other edge to the other slab I wanted to join it to... and then I "back-drilled" into the edge of that slab using the four holes in the joiner piece as guide holes. Then, just to give myself some "wiggle room", I sanded down half of each of the four dowels into a slight cone so that once it was all assembled, there would be a little bit of up-down play in the alignment of the two slabs.
Then I repeated the procedure with another joiner piece for the other end of the table.

Then it was time to assemble the beast. I mixed up a batch of slow-set epoxy and slathered the four dowels with it as well as pouring it into the holes in each slab. Then I quickly slid the dowels into the holes of one slab, slipped the joiner piece over the dowels and upended the other slab onto the first one and slid it down over the dowel ends... That was all done rather hurriedly as you can imagine, and then the whole thing was laid flat on a good level surface for 24hr to set.

I used glad-wrap and masking tape to stop all the epoxy leaking out and sticking everything to everything else :)

Once that was done for one joint, I repeated the exercise for the other joint.

So, now I finally have a pretty flat slab of tabletop :)

 

So then there was another round of planning everything flat again and then sanding it smooth and slicing off the slightly uneven edges, and rounding off the corners... And then I was ready to coat it. I was going to use the epoxy coating again, so I brought the slab indoors and set it up on my existing coffee table in the living room (with suitable drip catching) and set about mixing up a large batch of epoxy which I spread over the whole tabletop.
Now I put it on in an even coat but since there were two different sorts of wood as well as various sized voids that had already been epoxy filled, the new layer of epoxy was absorbed very unevenly (I knew it would be this way). So, after I coated the bottom side of the table, I did the same to the top side of the table... with the same very uneven result.
Then I took the whole thing outside again and sanded/planed it all smooth again on both sides, but being careful to NOT sand through to the bare wood again... So now I had a smooth epoxy layer to work on. I took it back inside, mixed up more epoxy and recoated first the bottom side and then the tops side again.

And this time I got a nice smooth finish that reflects like glass :) Its not quite perfect but if I want I can sand it again with very fine grit and then polish it  (with finer and finer grits) to get it like a mirror.

I'm pretty happy with the outcome. It took me a couple of months to slowly work through all the steps involved because the epoxy always takes at least a day to set up and I must have mixed up at least thirty odd batches for all the void filling, panel joining and surface coating.

But, now its done and I like how it looks (and I think it will get better with time as the bloodwood darkens)

... There is just one small problem though... There is nowhere left in my house where I can put it... I already have a coffee-table that I like!

Typical me... just doing something to keep busy, not because I "need it"... I'm clearly either very privileged or very lacking in foresight or in fact both! ...

Just like most of the people I know :)