Ok, I’m kinda bored right now so I’m going to tell y’all about my job. I am the equipment mechanic for a mid sized landscaping/landscape construction company (and because I live in a rural and heavily forested area that also means land clearance company). I am pretty much just left alone in a garage to fix everything from chainsaws and weed eaters to ride on mowers to backhoes and skidsteers. Occasionally I have to drive to a job site to do on site maintenance. This is great for my autistic ass- i interact with my elderly maga nut boss minimally, I’m not excessive bored and most weeks it’s only 20-30 hours of work (though with an occasional 12 or 14 hr shift thrown in lol). It pays well enough that I can get by and have money to spare, and still have time for organizing. Ok the bad.
Everything about this companies work is satanic. We take land and just make it sterile and desolate, destroying bushes and trees and putting in or maintaining ugly hardscapes or lifeless lawns. It’s spiritually draining on a certain level knowing my blood and sweat is going to destroy plants so rich assholes can have uglier yards. Also, Fox news is on in the main office literally at all times, including when I’m in a meeting there. Given my bosses appalling views on almost everything (which she’ll bring up in entirely unrelated meetings) I’m surprised she hired an extremely openly queer person at all, but hey. Say la vee or whatever the French 🥖 say
learn everything you can and take zero guff. i’m not as on-the-ground as i used to be, but holy shit, people who can effectively troubleshoot and engage in small engine and landscape equipment maintenance / repair are worth their weight in gold. every place has one and when they leave to do something else, the place is fucked.
i can half ass my way around typical farm and residential-commercial level equipment, but as it becomes more complex i can just follow maintenance schedules. clean, and that’s about it. i ended up going back to school for agriculture after some moves didn’t pan out, and that set me on a different path. i think a lot of really small residential equipment is going to keep transitioning to electric/battery, but there’s probably a trillion dollars worth of diesel equipment in the US that nobody is in a big rush to replace because diesel technology is so reliable.
anyway, there are absolutely land management groups out there doing good works that need those skills. yeah, the people you work for sound like shit wizards, but bigger equipment like skidsteers and backhoes, in a day, can do incredible things in terms of earthworks that would take a village of people months of perfect weather to do.
if you learn how to service and maintain lots of different equipment like that, such that someone can bring you something new but you can figure it out, there’s no reason you can’t take and use those skills for good when you find an organization that takes contracts restoring wetlands, building affordable eco-housing, pond development, or other custom hire land management projects.
landscaping and landscape management can be extremely cool things. it’s just that usually, the visible version that makes really phat stacks and run large, highly visible crews are owned by mercenaries tearing shit up for fast loot.
if you take those skills of maintenance, repair and safe operation… and add to them with some basic credentialing in soil science and ecology to help with the pitching, you could eventually recover and repurpose old equipment to take those contracts yourself.
I think of myself as some greasy schmuck with an autistic hyperfixation on machinery, basic problem solving skills and a high pain tolerance but Your probably right about this. It’s much harder than my old automotive grease monkey days, as the manuals for small engine and landscape equipment are generally lacklustre and there isn’t just a YouTube tutorial for almost every imaginable repair.
Bold assumption
I guess that’s the dream. cooperative restoration contracting with the comrades. Probably a long ways out but would be really cool.
lol relatively speaking, of course. shaking hands with danger is hard to avoid. keep all your fingers, knee pads are cheap, since you have spare money buy some nice/comfortable PPE for yourself so you always have it handy, always ridicule, without mercy, people who do “safety squints”, and practice a knowing headshake for the next time you see somebody do something dumb as hell, safety wise. my favorite response to a big fuckup (where nobody got hurt) is, “that looks expensive.”