In 1972 I was a senior in high school.
Most kids my age were thinking about Friday nights and who they’d take to the dance.
I was thinking about wire.
The original nerd of the 70s electronics, visual aids Forestry and wood shop all electives finishing out my credits to grad midterm.
In the morning I sat in a classroom like everybody else.
In the afternoon I drove to Lockheed and clocked in on the swing shift.
I was an electrical installer on the L-1011 line.
That was a big airplane. A wide-body jet. Three engines. Hundreds of people would ride in it someday.
And a seventeen-year-old kid was running wire through it.
Think about that for a minute.
Nobody on that line cared how old I was.
They cared if the job was right.
A wire that goes to the wrong place doesn’t care about your birthday.
A bad connection doesn’t forgive you for being young.
The airplane doesn’t know who built it. It just knows if it was built right.
That was the first real lesson I ever got about work.
The work is the judge. Not you. Not your boss. The work.
School taught me to hand in a paper and wait for a grade.
The line taught me something different.
There’s no grade coming. There’s just whether it holds.
The older men on that line were patient with me. Some of them, anyway.
They showed me how to lay a bundle so it stayed clean.
How to check a run twice before you called it done.
How to leave the work so the next man could follow it.
That last one stuck with me my whole life.
You don’t just build for yourself. You build so the next person can understand what you did.
If he opens that panel ten years later, he should be able to read your work like a letter.
Neat. Labeled. Honest.
No surprises hidden behind the cover.
I’d get off shift late at night.
Drive home tired. Sleep a few hours.
Then get up and go sit in a classroom again.
Some mornings the teacher was talking about history, and my head was still inside a fuselage.
I’m not saying it was hard in a way that makes me special.
Plenty of people worked young. My father’s generation worked younger.
I’m saying it shaped how I see things.
It taught me there’s a difference between looking done and being done.
A lot of things in this world look done.
The paint is on. The lights come on. Everybody smiles.
But behind the panel, somebody cut a corner.
And you won’t know until the day it matters.
That same year, a draft notice came.
I enlisted instead, so I could pick what I’d do.
At the recruiter’s office they gave me a choice. Vietnam or Germany.
I picked Germany.
But that’s a story for another day.
What I want to leave you with today is simpler.
Somewhere up there right now, there may still be a piece of that airplane flying. Or maybe it’s parked in a desert somewhere, done with its work.
Either way, it did its job.
Not because anybody watched every wire I ran.
Because the men around me expected it to be right, and so I expected it too.
That’s the whole secret, as far as I can tell.
Standards aren’t something somebody hands you.
They’re something you pick up from the people who hold them.
You watch a man check his work twice when nobody’s looking.
And one day you catch yourself doing the same thing.
That’s how it passes from one hand to the next.
Not by rules on a wall.
By example on the line.
I’ve done a lot of work since then.
Mining. Pipe. Construction.
Every job had its own tools and its own dangers.
But the lesson from the L-1011 line went with me to every one of them.
Do it right. Leave it readable. Don’t hide anything behind the panel.
I’m an old man now.
I sit at a keyboard more than I stand on a job site.
But I’ll tell you something.
That seventeen-year-old kid on swing shift is still in here.
He still checks the run twice.
He still wants the next person to be able to follow the work.
And he still believes the work is the judge.
So here’s my question for you today.
Who taught you what “done” really means?
Not what looks done. What is done.
If you had a person like that, you were lucky.
And if you didn’t, it’s not too late to become one for somebody else.
Somebody young is watching how you work.
Right now.
What are they learning?
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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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