Help Wanted

Caitlyn wasn’t anything like I’d expected.

After years of threatening to retire on me, Alfie finally did. To make matters worse, he and his wife moved to Florida. I desperately needed someone to work alongside me in my woodshop.

I run a commercial wood carving business, a specialized niche. For many years like any other small business, I was either swamped or wondering if I should find a new line of work. Over the last few years, however, I’ve managed to steady the workload and have forced myself to learn how to turn down some projects too. It’s a stable two man operation.

I didn’t think replacing Alfie was going to be so difficult.

I tried a couple of young guys. One guy, Matt, was great, but after several weeks he decided to start his own contracting business. Another guy was just plain unreliable. His workmanship was good, but his attitude wasn’t. When it’s just the two of you working alongside of each other, you’ve got to get along. I had to let him go.

Another guy had a serious drinking problem. Alcohol and a table saw don’t mix. Gone, the next day.

Caitlyn was the daughter of a friend of a friend’s brother. She was an art school graduate, still living at home, unable to find serious work.

I’d never thought of going the art school route. I needed woodworking skills not artistic skills. I needed someone who could cut wood, plane it, use a router, set-up a jig and do lots and lots of painting. The artistic element was usually conceived by someone else. My shop requires technical skills mainly. Artistic skills are a secondary consideration.

I asked my friend to have her email me.

She was twenty eight currently working part time in a clothing store. Her hobbies included art, sculpture, and music recording. She didn’t list any skills. Her experience was working in retail.

She included several photos of her sculpture. Three were in metal, four in wood and one was in what appeared to be wood, metal, glass and plastic. The stuff was okay, not my cup of tea but what I saw was a fine eye to detail and clearly the ability to work with her hands.

‘Come on by for a visit,’ I emailed back.

She was five four, stout, bum too big. Nose ring, short black hair, black raccoon-like eye make-up surrounding green eyes, dark lipstick, little leather neck collar with a Christian cross pendent, funny silver jewelry and when she reached out to shake my hand I could see there were multi-colored tattoos running up her wrist.

Great a Goth chick. And I thought that stuff was out of fashion. And at twenty eight?

“Come on in,” I said. She stepped into the shop from the January snow outside. She wore a short black leather jacket, black jeans, I think they’re called Doc Marten’s boots and had a burlap handbag or backpack or something. I watched as she put it down on a pile of lumber.

“It’s hemp,” she said.

Oh brother.

“So this is it,” I said waving my hand through the air, “this is the shop.”

She looked around for a moment and then said, “What exactly do you do?”

“Commercial wood carving, signs, railings, balusters, odd bits, some furniture restoration, always in wood.”

She picked up one of the pieces I was currently working on. It was a 20″ x 30″ x 1-1/2″ thick piece of laminated maple with the outline of the 9th hole on one side and the Whistling Swans logo on the other. It still needed sanding, painting and finishing.

“This is what you do?” she asked with an incredulous look in her face.

“Yeah.”

“You can make money doing this?”

“Yeah. If you do it right.”

“So how much do you get for one of these?”

“I don’t know, but it’s not finished. It still has to be sanded, stabilized, painted and polyurethaned and then hung from a bracket which still has to be made and installed.”

“But how much do you get for one of these?”

“I don’t know exactly, it’s part of a job that I bid on.” I took the piece from her and continued, “This sign here, once it’s painted and polyed twice is probably a day’s work. I set up a jig for the logo on the back, the hole itself has to be scaled, carved, lettering carved, sanded, painted. You do them all at the same time, but there’s twenty seven frikkin’ holes. That alone is more than a month’s work. Plus I’ve got the front entrance sign. I’ve got the tee-off markers, each one is carved. There’s two hundred of those. The ‘carts’ signs, they’ve ordered fifty, but I’m making seventy five, I know they’re going to want more. There’s twenty nine miscellaneous signs, ‘parking’, ‘washrooms’, ‘to 10th tee’ that sort of stuff and twenty two banisters that need to be carved front and back for the patio, but that’s easy ’cause it’s a jig.”

“Wow and you do all that by yourself?” She said as she continued to look around the shop.

“No I can’t. That’s my point. I need help.”

“How much is the whole job worth?”

Odd line of inquiry, but fair enough, I figured she was trying to establish if I was legit.

“The original contract was for a hundred and nineteen grand.