It's all in the Details, but You've Got to Have Patience

Two of the greatest virtues that I learned from my dad were attention to detail and patience.  More often than not the two go hand in hand.  It took many lessons when I was younger to see how they both worked together but believe me, if you don’t learn from the lessons you will always have mountains of worry and headaches a whole bottle of aspirin won’t cure.

 There is no better way to teach someone the importance of patience and attention to detail than to put them to work laying a 1000 foot glue together waterline in the middle of a blazing hot summer in a ground as hard as concrete.   Every step of the process is a lesson in patience.  Imagine yourself sitting on top of a washing machine in the spin cycle with an unbalanced load.  Then put a couple of heat lamps over your head and a space heater turned on high at your feet.  Then grab a bucket full of dirt and throw a hand full of it in your face every few minutes and let it meld with the sweat running down your brow.  If all that isn’t bad enough, throw some silverware in the garbage disposal and turn it on.  Five minutes of that would be enough to drive you insane, but imagine 5 or 6 hours of it! 

Now sitting on top of a machine that is a kin to doing all that makes you want to get it done and get the hell out of Dodge as fast as you can, but you can’t rush it.  You have to take your time and have patience.  See that machine might be doing all the work but you still have to guide it along and keep it moving forward.  Being in a rush one might tend to try and accelerate it forward a little faster, but in doing that you lock up the drive chain and choke out the engine.  Once it knocks off, you have to disengage the chain, restart the machine, back it up a few feet and start it digging again.  It is like taking two steps forward and one step back.  You will eventually get there, but it will take you a lot longer than if you had the patience to take things a little slower. 

Once you get the ditch dug, then your lesson in attention to detail begins.  Putting together plastic pipe doesn’t take an engineering degree, but if you don’t do it right you are headed for trouble.  First you have to make sure you don’t get any dirt in the pipe.  Then you have to clean the bell of one section of pipe and the plain end of another section with a cleaning solvent that will eat the hide off a baseball and leave your hands stained purple.  That stuff won’t wash off in a week I don’t care how much you wash and scrub.  Once you get it cleaned you have to swab both ends with glue, slide them together while twisting, and hold it tight for a few seconds so it doesn’t slip apart.  Oh, don’t forget if you get dirt on it before you slide it together, you have to start the cleaning and gluing all over again.  Now multiply that process times 50 and you are ready to throw it in the ditch and cover it up.

After you have it all hooked up and backfilled you get a brief lesson in faith.  Faith that you had the patience to pay attention to all the details so that when you turn the water on and the pipe starts filling and the pressure starts building water doesn’t start gushing out of the ground like a geyser.  If you didn’t learn the first two lessons your penance is to dig up the pipe by hand with a shovel, cursing every rock you hit on the way down, cut out the bad joint and repeat the lesson of attention to detail as you make the repair. 

Now I still sometimes overlook details and patience wears thin when you have a mound of work to accomplish, a short time to get it done in, and you get flooded with calls from people who didn’t learn their lessons in patience and want you to get something done yesterday.  But every time I forget the lessons I learned long ago on a hot summer day I still curse every rock I hit with the shovel as I dig back down to fix the problems I could have avoided if I had just slowed down, paid attention to the details and had a little patience.