OT:Trade You Always Wished You'd Learned But Didn't

[Ash]

My father always told me, "Learn a trade because if your primary career of choice fails because of a bad economy or for whatever reason, you'll always have your trade to fall back on if you need to."

Wise words if you ask me.

What trade do I wished I'd learned and may still learn someday you ask?

Well...
I've had this weird fascination for the past several years of learning butchery.
I've always thought it would be cool to be able to take an entire dead animal such as a cow or a lamb or whatever...to know every part of it and to be able to butcher it into fine edible and even salable portions.

I have no idea why I have this desire to learn what some view as a morbid thing.
To me it isn't morbid...it's a skill.
To me it's cool and I can't explain why.
Animal blood doesn't bother me.
Now as for the slaughter of live animals, NO WAY!
I won't be a part of that.
I'm just interested in cutting them up AFTER they're dead.

What trade have you always wanted to learn but haven't yet & why?
Or HAVE you learned your particular trade?



Post Edited (02-12-04 19:12)

[-=NiGHTS=-]

If you could butcher them with the shards of a freshly-squeezed lightbulb, you could make millons.

[AndyC]

Nothing wrong with being a butcher. I know a few people in the meat business, and they're all especially community-minded people - volunteer fireman, township councillor, fundraiser. Not what most people would expect from a guy who cuts up dead animals.

I really wish I'd been an electrician. That was my plan through most of high school. I've always messed around with electronics and electricity (melted my share of plyers as a kid), and I've been doing household wiring projects for my parents and myself since I was about 15.

I had a friend in high school whose father was an electrician, and he never had any question of what he wanted to do. We were both going to be electricians. So, he became an apprentice after graduation, while I went full-time in my job at the newspaper (bird in the hand) and eventually went into journalism. I did test for the police department at one point (father, brother and brother-in-law are cops), but that never went anywhere.

My buddy, meanwhile, owned a house before he even had his ticket, took vacations to warm places, and always had the nice car, bike and snowmobile. He went into business for himself a couple of years ago, and paid off his house within the first year.

I don't even want to tell you what a reporter makes.

Weirder still, another friend of mine, who never knew a thing about electricity, just got hired as an apprentice at age 32 (he'd been in the army). He just decided that's what he wanted to do, sent out resumes and had the job within about a week - no problem. I could have done that.

I'm pretty tempted, let me tell you. Wonder what my wife would say?

[odinn7]

I always wanted to be a SWAT sniper...

[Ash]

An electrician is something I could never be.

Fooling around with wires and poking around conduits & sockets scares the hell out of me.
Even if I were properly trained it would bother me knowing that I could possibly DIE doing my job!

[jmc]

I've never had any aptitude for working with my hands so most of the trades are out for me.  

What I do wish is that I'd majored in something a little more marketable in college, though....I'm going to have to go back to school pretty soon just so I can get a job that requires more than a HS diploma.

[Brother Ragnarok]

My girlfriend's dad is an electrician.  I don't ever want to have a job on the books.  Union jobs suck unless you're in a fixed position like a factory or something.  When he works, he has plenty of money, but last year he went for almost 9 months before the booking place got him another job.  f**k that.  Give me a real job where I know I can show up the next morning and still work there.
I would, however, love to learn blacksmithing.  Be able to make swords and stuff like that.  Or perhaps mekume gana (I probably spelled that wrong), which is the way samurai swords were made.

Brother R

[jmc]

I guess I'd like to learn how to brew beer...that would be good.

[Neon Noodle]

My fraternity brothers were fond of saying that I was a storehouse of useless movie knowledge and if I just learned to apply myself I could find a cure for cancer.

Maybe I should have done that - then my sister would still be here.

Sorry about the morbid thought; but I was a pallbearer yesterday for my wife's aunt, who just passed from liver cancer.

Man, these last couple of months have really been a b***h....

[Evil Matt]

Am I the only person who thinks that we could've wiped cancer out years ago, but all of our medical research grants were going to people discovering new ways to grow hair and to keep old men from losing their erections?


Sorry...my ire is showing...I'll tuck it back into the dark recesses of my psyche now...



happy thoughts.  happy thoughts.  serenity now...

[Evil Matt]

Does "supervillain" count as a trade?  If not, rocket science always seemed like fun, if not for the overwhelming amount of math involved.  And despite the obvious risks and physical demands involved, it would TOTALLY kick ass to be the guy in the Godzilla suit, even for one of the crappy movies.

[Brother Ragnarok]

I'm right with you, Noodle.  Saturday, I'm going to be fitted for a suit to be a pallbearer in my grandfather's impending funeral.  He went into Hospice on Tuesday.  The cause?  Liver cancer.  Damned cancer.

Brother R

[wickednick]

While I think that there are alot of politics that have gone into trying to discover a cure to cancer, you have to understand that you can't just make one drug that will cure all forms of cancer.Cancer comes in dozens of diffrent forms and I highly doubt that there could be one singular cure for it.

[Evil Matt]

True, but it rubs me the wrong way that there's like, 10 different ways for my grandfather to get a boner, but it doesn't seem like there's any new drugs that actually do anything USEFUL.  I mean, we should have at least come up with a cure for the common cold by now.  We've known about it for God knows how long.

[Ash]

Brewing your own beer is actually pretty easy.
The difficult part is controlling the temperature because if you don't, the whole damn batch is ruined.

When I was in Australia a friend of mine there brewed his own beer and showed me how.
He had all the necessary equipment and walked me through it step by step.
Dude it's so easy!
Like I said, controlling the temp is the hardest part...you must constantly monitor it.

He brewed his own beer because South Australia (not sure about the rest of the country) has an insane alcohol tax so going to the "bottle shop" can get to be quite expensive.

I might pick up the supplies to start brewing my own grog someday.
It should cost you no more than $50-$100 to get fully started.

Go here for tons more information:  

http://www.soyouwanna.com/site/syws/makebeer/makebeer.html

Good luck if you try it!



Post Edited (02-13-04 05:38)