Plumbing
One of the things that I’ve heard a lot of people say in recent years when they are a bit cheesed off with their job is that they wish they hadn’t gone to University and then got an office job but that that they’d trained to be a plumber instead. It’s said as a joke of course, usually when the bill comes in but there’s always an element of wishful thinking too.
The idea that they might have been better off being a London plumber is usually based on the idea that plumbers make a fortune and that it must be easy. These beliefs are also to blame for the rip-off training scams where unscrupulous ‘training’ companies take thousands of pounds off someone who wants to be a plumber – but they don’t get any qualifications and they certainly don’t see any of the well paid work that they are promised at the beginning.
One of the things that I always tell young guys when they are thinking about taking up plumbing is firstly that it isn’t easy and secondly that if you haven’t got the aptitude for it you might as well forget it. Some people no matter how much training they have will never ‘get it’. There’s a logical way of thinking that is essential to being a plumber and if you don’t have that you might as well do something easy like get a job in a bank and make a fortune there.
If you do have the aptitude for it and you’ve had all the training, passed your exams and had the work experience plumbing can be an enormously satisfying job. When you tackle a tricky problem and get the heating running for some family in the middle of winter it can give you quite a buzz.