I worked at Dow Chemical during summers my first 3 years of college. We made Styrofoam insulation. Dow was a fantastic company to work for back then. Worked me hard but over-paid me. Lol. Really helped me get through my first 3 years of school.
Anyway, I worked with 4 men on my shift. I was the "recycle guy". My job was to remove scrap off the line and grind it up to go back into the system. One of the guys I worked with was a hillbilly who had an 8th grade education. Reminded me of Ernest T Bass. Lol.
The company hired engineers to oversee production and they made them the mid-mgt bosses. If I have a criticism of Dow, this was not the best idea because while these guys knew their stuff, they were massive nerds who had trouble relating to and communicating with employees - and that caused some problems.
I had a huge warehouse to stack scrap to the ceiling. We could make scrap for 2 weeks before we ran out of room. Normally 2 weeks would be plenty of time for the engineers to figure out what the problem was. Styrofoam is basically a recipe of melted plastic and a blowing agent gas that comes out of a dye and expands when it hits air. It needs to be a certain density and thickness and it can't have flaws in the surface - lines or waves.
One time we made scrap for 13 1/2 days and I informed the guys that we could make it for another 2 hours before I ran out of room. The hillbilly went over to the computer and moved the engineers out of the way and started making changes to the recipe. The engineers were freaking out. "You are ruining our efforts!" In 10 minutes we had a perfect board going down the line.
Now, the hillbilly couldn't show you on paper why what he did worked, but he had been making Styrofoam for 20 years and he had a practical understanding of what needed done.
I never forgot that. Life is complex and no one has it all figured out. A difference between the educated and the non-educated is sometimes arrogance vs a humble confidence. Some of the smartest people I know have been people with no more than an 8th grade education and some of the dumbest people I have known were those who taught me or studied with me in my 8 years of college. I'm very pro-education, but when that leads to the kind of arrogant superiority the Left has for those they see as beneath them, it makes me want to puke. Some of those people they look down on have something they will never have - wisdom.
I worked in a factory for four summers going through school; it was hard work in a hot factory. There was a small, spunky, older woman who worked there for years - wore a headband, had at least one cigarette (if not two) dangling from her mouth at all times while still talking a mile a minute and getting her job done. One of the owners came by and asked her how Tommy was doing, the son of a family friend who was attending Princeton and working the summer with us college kids; she replied "It's a good damm thing he is going to college because he is too damm dumb to work in a factory".
Will never forget it.
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