Take an even strain

My Dad, Wendell Combs, was a carpenter. In 1950 he built the house I would grow up in. I was 8 years old at the time and I was not a very good carpenters helper. He would lose patience with me sometimes for being haphazard and helter-skelter when I worked with him. All I did was fetch things or hold one end of a measuring tape, things like that. Dad was very methodical and thorough in his work. He was in the Carpenters Union for many years. Union members relied mostly on construction on the IU campus for jobs. Home construction was always non-union.
Some IU projects I remember Dad working on were the expansion of the Student Union building, the football stadium and the School of Business building. Building concrete forms was a common task and then hanging doors and windows followed by interior trim work. All carpenters are not created equal. Some are more suited for rough work and nail pounding. My Dad did those things too but he was often chosen to do the skilled interior trim and finish work because he was good at it. I should add at this point that some of Dad’s relatives teased him about being slow and deliberate in everthing.
Dad told me that If there was a task not clearly belonging to a trade it was usually assigned to the carpenters. He claimed that carpenters had to think and plan ahead more than other trades. Dad was often the one who put the finishing touch on many of the interiors of IU buildings and he was well suited for that work. Some of his Union brothers were not.
I did not inherit Dad’s methodical nature and it has often caused me problems both at work and at home. After all these years I am sometimes still helter-skelter. I have heard of adult attention deficit disorder even though it is normally a childhood problem. Maybe I have a little of that. Maybe too much caffeine. But I have a theory that goes like this: Dad spent 8 hrs a day and 5 days a week on doing carpenter work that would be inspected afterwards and have to be redone if it failed. If you start out working in a rushed, thoughtless manner you are headed for trouble. If you are to survive you will have to develop a steady pace you can maintain for months on the job. Dad said “take an even strain”. You need to be a long distance runner, not a sprinter. This is both physical and mental. My guess is some of Dad’s Union brothers could not do this and were only given the rough work. Dad was often the last carpenter to be laid off at the end because he was needed to finish interior detail.