Martin Konkel - Being a Mechanic

I still need to make one or two "whatever post" and figured this would be a good topic to write about.


I've always found it odd that so many of my peers do not know what they want to do in life. They're already in college spending thousands of dollars to learn future skills, and some of them even waste that money on degrees that I honestly do not see what purpose they serve in a career setting.

It did not take me long before I knew what I wanted to do, and when I started working in the field half way through community college I definitely knew this was it. Even though the work was hard, and sometimes I got into jobs that were out of my league, overall I still enjoyed it, and I got a sense of accomplishment more so then I ever have had in a classroom. It was awesome standing over a huge diesel engine, firing it up for the first time, and realizing I was the one that fixed this monster.

Also, I'm not much of a people person, so it was nice working in a shop and not having to deal with idiots day in and day out. At times, when help was short, I even had the whole shop to myself for hours at a time. I like the people I worked with too, even though they were all a bunch of pot heads who smoked up on the job, they were a funny crowd. We were pretty brash though, and if somebody had something to say they would say it; espicially the boss. They were a rowdy crowd too and we had times of shooting each other with 160psi air guns, throwing firecrackers at each other, and on occasion when the boss was gone his son would fabricate a small explosive device in the machine shop and blow it up behind the shop.


I liked what I did, and the money isn't bad at all (although at that particular place it was awful). Most people who graduate the CNU business school make the same that I could right now, and the "peak" is pretty high in the field too, sometimes even absolutely astonishing (gone is the times of the old grease monkey mechanics). I like what I do, I can't wait to go at it again, and I can make a decent living at it; I consider myself pretty lucky.