A PERFECT PAIN

Historically, when it came to carpentry and the related fields, I was always one of those “good-enough” guys who never much strove for perfection. This lassitude was reflected in the quality of my tools. In a double garage too cluttered for the cars resided an unimpressive assortment of woodworking tools including an old table saw I picked up at a yard sale for $10; a skill saw that tended to moan to halt when faced with anything bigger than a two-by-four; a bottom-of-the-line cordless drill that my wife bought me at Sears for a birthday; and an assortment of mismatched hand tools of varying age and efficacy. From time to time I would employ this motley arsenal on household projects such as building a picnic table, reconstructing the cedar deck, laying laminate floors, or, in concert with my wife, renovating a bathroom. The latter took years off our marriage and, if stress be the life-shortener the medical profession claims it to be, off my life. I can still remember those miserable hours beneath the floor joists in the basement, a butane torch in one hand and a roll of solder in the other, globuliferous copper piping seeping water all about me – mocking me - and me screaming at the malevolent gods of plumbing to please fucking end it now.

The less than sterling condition of my tools usually provided something other than myself to blame for the imperfect results. But that consolation only lasted as long as it took me to remember the aphorism – a favourite of my cabinet-maker maternal grandfather Frederick Cooper Biddle – that a bad workman blames his tools. Frederick Cooper Biddle – FCB of the initials chiseled into the gargantuan dark oak hall seat/table combination he built in Birmingham England in 1930 and which now reposes, chidingly, in our bedroom – was a perfectionist. The seamless joinery of the hall seat – in which nary a nail or screw can be found – attests to this perfectionism (the bane of my imperfect late father’s marriage). Other censorious sayings passed down from this grumpier of my two grandfathers were: If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well; and, The right tool for the right job.

My memories of Grandpa are limited to little more than these general character markers and a sepia, mind’s-eye image of a short, wiry old man who smoked a pipe, spoke in a Brummagem accent and wore those elasticized metallic garters to keep his shirtsleeves up. I am, however, reminded of him by my present supervisor, mentor and nemesis Brian. Although a “rough carpenter” who builds the superstructures of buildings, not their furnishings and fittings, Brian insists on doing things right, and having them look nice – “finished” is the word he favours - even when they will never be seen.

A week ago Monday – which happened to be Edmonton’s second hottest day on record, hitting 35 C - he had me use the scissor-lift, a motorized hydraulic platform on wheels, to go up to the tropical region near the ceiling of the factory portion of our building and put some additional steel backing around the garage door motor. This steel framework – known as “hattrack” – is what is used in a metal building to screw the drywall to (in the office at the front, the drywall is screwed to the wood-framed walls, as in most North American houses.) The hattrack I was to add would enable the drywall to come to a nice clean straight edge twenty feet up the wall - where no one would ever see it because the motor blocks the view.

“Maybe I’m anal,” said Brian, with one of his quick, defensive grins. “But what’s the matter with doing things right?” Grandpa might have said the same thing if it didn’t take four of five generations for dribs of scholarly jargon to filter down to the working classes. Instead, he’d have said, If a job’s worth doing…

(Hasn’t anal retention been thrown out with the rest of Freud’s fantastical extrapolations? I guess there must still be those who actually believe over stringent potty training can lead to obsessive-compulsive adult behavior – the same people who believe that boys subconsciously want sex with their mothers and girls their fathers.)


“Everything needs to be perfect,” continued Brian, launching into one of his morning-time rants, and fixing me with those bulging green eyes that, through the the wrap-around safety glasses, make him look like a malevolent insect. (But then wrap-around safety glasses make all of us look like malevolent insects, giving the worksite the aspect of a hive of wasps.)

“In fact, you know what?” he continued. “I want it to be ten times as good as it needs to be. There’s too much of the other around here. Some of these fuckin’ trades, you know …” And here Brian started listing the deficiencies of a selection of the sub-trades that he had hired along the way – the steel-building fabricators that took two months to do what they had insisted would take two weeks; the concrete pourers whose imperfection had given us a floor in the factory where – back before the building was sealed – rainwater could gather in shallow puddles on low points; the hot-shot framers who had rapidly erected the two-storey wooden office portion of the building, but had left behind bowed walls and missing backing that I am now spending much of my time correcting ...

Maybe a part of the problem is that Brian is doing everything he can to stay on budget. This means that he usually hires trades working for small companies or for themselves, rather than paying the bigger bucks demanded by the larger companies who can afford a half-page display ad in the Yellow Pages.

My former business associate, the (self-described) Crazy Fucking Frenchman, was similarly parsimonious - a characteristic endemic to the rich - but he took the cost-cutting to extremes that made one wonder how he’d ever managed to become so rich in the first place. He’d hire incompetents for 50% below market and finish up paying three times as much because of lost time and wasted materials.

Brian doesn’t take things to CFF’s extremes, and his thrift has in fact kept our $2-million project on budget and on schedule. Keymay, the pipe insulation company for whom we are building the factory/office, is happy with what it sees. But the thriftiness has resulted in some of the imperfect results that so upset him.

I seriously doubt, though, that he would get better results from the more expensive companies. Perfectionism isn’t something much in vogue these days and on the occasions Brian has hired the bigger corps, there hasn’t been a discernible difference in the quality of work. Freud and the rest of those turn-of-the-twentieth-century Viennese alienists, whose theories informed the social policies and the educational systems that kicked in around the time that Baby-boomers like me were hitting middle school, had their effect. Doing a job properly became tainted with pathology. Brian’s vaguely apologetic description of himself as “anal,” acknowledges this taint.

Once upon a time in a kingdom far away, philosophers like Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas – to name a few of the As - posited a natural, universal “good” that existed in a world created by the grandpappy of good – i.e. God. That all men naturally know what is good (truthfulness, constancy, loyalty, etc) just as they know what is bad (mendacity, deceit, murder, etc.) proves that we are made by a Creator who is the very essence of good. When we do something that contravenes this essence, our conscience, acting like some sort of divine laser level, emits opprobrious little beeps.

On a micro-level, I suppose, this innate awareness of what is good or bad is what makes a good carpenter get all his edges flush, his angles square and his verticals plumb, even when no one will see it, and/or there is no apparent practical advantage to meeting these requirements. This is rather like the definition of conscience as being what makes us behave well when no one is looking. A job well done, in its small way, moves us in the right direction. There’s not a whole lot in The Bible about Jesus Christ’s carpentry technique, but I’d bet there were no off-kilter studs when JC framed a house.

Of course the overwhelming majority of western thinkers and academics ejected God from the pilot’s seat a century ago, anointing Charles Darwin as the prophet for our modern, scientific age. The ultimate good has been reduced to the exigencies of survival and reproduction.

How would conscientious workmanship fit into Darwin’s laws of natural selection? Hard to say. Evolution is such a slow process that it is probably too early to determine whether those who say “good enough” have a genetic advantage over the Brians and Grandpas of the world or vice versa. The Brians and Grandpas do seem to be in decline, but perhaps that’s just in West. The Turks who just put the two-tone stucco on the outside of our building worked conscientiously and produced outstanding results. Are they doomed to extinction, or are they part of a vanguard that, ultimately, will win the war of survival against a decadent, good-enough West that is already losing the reproductive part of Darwin’s war of attrition?


The other day Brian had me make one-foot-square, three-quarter-inch-thick plywood forms that will temporarily frame the bases of the supporting steel posts and contain the liquid grout – a type of cement – that dries to creates a rigid join between the floor and the post. Even though the resulting pedestals at the edge of the factory floor would be, as far as I was concerned, out of sight and mind once the shop is operational, Brian insisted that the grout forms be mitre-cut at 45 degrees both on the ends and on the edges so when the grout is set and the forms are removed there will be perfect little perimeters protruding an inch out from under the base of each posts, then sloping 45 degrees to the main floor.

Having been conditioned as a good-enough guy, I inwardly scoffed. But a couple of days later when I pried the forms loose and saw how well those perfect little pedestals looked, it occurred to me that there might be something to this perfectionist stuff. Brian, as is often the case, was looking over my shoulder as these wonders were revealed. “Man, that’s beautiful!” he said, half-jokingly. And he was right.