When I was with Willow, I worked in her father's cabinet shop. It lasted until we decided to break up - maybe two years in all. He said that I was on the super high intesity training programme (s.h.i.t. programme); he worked me like a dog - I was afraid of him, became he would poke me in the chest, tell me to look him in the eye when he was talking to me, and berate me heavily in front of all the other guys. At lunch, one of the guys would ask softly why I put up with such abuse. All I could do was shrug - I didn't know any better - I had only held one other real job at that time and it was pretty much the same thing; verbal abuse verging on sado-masiochism.
But I learned. I could take a sheet of 5/8 melomeen off the shelf drive it through the saw and dribble it down to uppers or lower's, drawers, shelves - what ever I needed. The first few times I did the cross cut with six and a half feet hanging off the table it kicked- I was so fucking peeked I slammed the thing down and had to then push it through the rest of the way with my adrenallin flowing like I was on crack. I hated that job.
Later I was transfered over to the window plant, and left the white slabs of melomeen for good to work with ceader and fir. A 10" horse saw can kick a board like nothing else. Sometimes it would do just that. Carving up a 12" plank of fir 2" thick and 18 feet long, sometimes you could see the cleff pinching in and you'd have to ignore your mounting fear - take a better grip and push like a mother-fucker. But learned to make windows, and I suppose I did learn the entire kitchen cabinet operation. Sometimes I think that I would like to make myself a kitchen - just 'cause I know how to - and if you did it all yourself, even though it would take forever mickey-mousing around with hand tools - the money would be all yours so it might be worth it.
The thing is each process, in making cabinet (and windows for that matter), each step is refined to a science. There is one way to do it, and only one way. The rest might be safer, even less efort - but there is only one way to do it and that's the fastest way. Each time that they ask you to do something, it likely takes so fucking long that it's almost not worth asking you to do anything, 'cause anybody that knows exactly what to do could probably do it in a mere fraction of the time. I wasn't very good at this. Each time I started a task, I would try to invent a new way of doing it. It was once commented that I needed to be retrained after every break. Coming back from coffee (stoned, we all smoked pot everyday), I would be enthused about getting to 'make' something and let my feeling guide me. It took time. Slowly I stopped identifying with what I made, and started to think about the way my body moved. Smoothly, with grace. I tried to forget about what the end product would be. I tried to ignore that fact that each step locked together like a puzzle, that each cut was carried out just so many times - focusing on each nail that I shot - I was able to divorce myself from the creative process completely. This took a long time. After making so many kitchens, or filling so many kitchen order - these steps were second nature and required no thought. That was the point - do it the way that works - the fastest way. The way that the old guys are doing it. If I wasn't thinking about my posture, the way that I looked when I was working, I was fucked. If I started thinking about what I was making, the different ways that I could tackle this problem, I might have been fired because I would try to refine, and diddle around wasting time. I still have that problem, it's like when I walk to the grocery store, I like to go window shopping on the way there - I would get trapped in a store marvelling over something that I thought that I needed, getting back late - I would never know where the time had gone.
I guess my advice to you is spend as much energy trying to make the boss like you, laugh with him if he tells jokes that sort of shit. That way they don't want to fire you cause they start to like having you around. My gig, besides being a prospective son in law, was to shamelessly take shit - I was the lamb, and in the morning if there was a lot to do - I'd be the one to catch shit - then everybody else would work harder - seeing one of there own roasted on a spit kinda does that to a guy.
Also when ever you can watch how other people are doing things - not so much the steps, one can't follow that sorta thing when your working - but a quick glance can teach you a lot about the right way to hold a hand tool - stuff like that - how to push the file down the edge of the counter to make it all shiny black without having to fuss. The way it sounds too. That might sound odd. But tools all make their own sounds, when they're working properly you can hear that. Mostly you'd know when something wasn't working because of the sound. Something might happen, wrong, and everybody will turn and look, like they were actually watching you work, but it's the sound more that anything else. How fast to push a board throught that table saw - shit like that. It's the sounds - and the intervils between them that really give you away.
