Opinion by Sharon DuBois

This is a paean to American workers and to the people who hire them and the people who train them to do their jobs.  I suppose it should have been published before Labor Day.  Forgive me.  I didn’t know until a few days ago that I was going to write it.

The fellow who collects my trash on Thursdays must be one of the most fit persons I have ever seen.  It’s a one-man show, and it’s hard for me to believe how much he does all by himself.  He hoists the container onto the special platform on the side of the truck and pushes a button.  The truck lifts the container and dumps it into the receptacle, then lowers the container.  My fellow lifts it off the platform and puts it back in my driveway.  Then he jogs across the street and jogs back trailing another trash can.  But the real show is the way he moves the truck to the next driveway.  He just steps up next to the right-hand seat and maneuvers the truck a few feet down the street, standing sideways, with most of his body hanging out the door.  Obviously there are special controls that allow him to do that, but I’m impressed anyway.  All that jogging and lifting are one thing, but how in the world did he ever learn to drive that big ol’ truck like that?  Is there a special huge paved lot somewhere with orange pylons where you can learn to drive standing up and sideways without knocking down mailboxes and driving a jillion pounds of metal over someone’s newly-seeded grass?  I checked the Yellow Pages under “Garbage-Collection Schools” and found nothing.

One of my dearest friends, with less formal education than some of the others in our group, possesses a wealth of practical information.  Driving across western Kansas on a group trip in which she and I participated, I mentioned that I don’t understand how windmills work.  I get the part about the wind pushing the angled blades around and around, but how that translates into water for the livestock is beyond me.  She explained the whole thing to me.  When I asked her how she learned about that stuff, she didn’t know.  It was almost as if she had been born knowing.

A few days ago I pulled into the left-turn lane behind a large truck.  This wasn’t some Dodge or Chevy with a cartoon in the back window of Calvin being rude to the competitor’s logo.  No, this was a humongous thing with many, many wheels and its own gravitational field.  As we were sitting there waiting for the light to change, I noticed a big sticker on the back: Student Driver.  I grinned, thinking that was a pretty good joke – a student driver getting ready to drive a vehicle the size of a small house, a vehicle that doesn’t bend in the middle, left across two lanes of oncoming traffic into one of two rather narrow lanes without demolishing any passenger cars in the vicinity, turning the thing over onto its side, or scaring other drivers in the vicinity badly enough to require medical attention.  The truck made the turn – slooowly – and pulled into the target right-hand lane – slooowly.  I turned into the left lane, and as I passed the truck I saw the logo on the side.  Somebody’s Truck-Driving School.  The sticker was not a joke; it really was a student.  I noticed in my rear-vision mirror that the truck was proceeding down the street, slooowly.  If I were a student driver who had done what he (or she) had just finished doing, I’d be driving slowly, too, until I quit shaking.

There are a lot of jobs out there that require skills and knowledge that I suspect you can’t find in the catalog of any school.  I understand where doctors and dentists and lawyers and teachers learn what they need to learn.  I have a pretty good idea where you would go to learn to be a plumber or an electrician or a barber or a car mechanic.  But I marvel daily at the people I see around me with knowledge and skills I can only envy and wouldn’t know where to learn.

So this is in praise of you small business people who sit beside your workers teaching them to do what needs doing, and for you workers who listen carefully and learn and practice.  This applauds those of you who send your new employees out on the job with a skilled worker who can teach them to drive a garbage truck sideways, and for you workers who are willing to learn that.  This lauds those of you who absorb information so early and so readily that you don’t remember ever being taught how a windmill works.  This celebrates those of you who start small businesses that teach workers how to do hard jobs, like driving humongous vehicles through heavy traffic on narrow roads.

I thank you for my trash-free house.  I thank you for the clothes and food and tools and toys your truck brought to my local stores.  And I thank you on behalf of the livestock which have fresh water to drink.

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Sharon DuBois is the president of Senior Ease (www.seniorease.com), as well as the editor of KsSmallBiz.com. Comments and responses may be emailed to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .

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