The first Wednesday in May was chosen to celebrate the skilled trades in this country. A company in Youngstown, Ohio founded National Skilled Trades Day to bring attention to the importance of skilled trades and to the shortage of skilled tradesmen in this country.
So I'm going to write first about my father, who was indeed a skilled tradesman. He was a mechanic, and by all accounts a very good one. I knew this from growing up and hearing people talk about his work. When my family moved to Australia, it was based on his skills as a mechanic. At the time, Australia was looking for skilled tradesmen to come as potential immigrants, and we qualified because of my father's skills.
This was really brought home to me when I wrote a blog post about my father and included an advertisement from the Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) in which he was shown working with a piece of equipment. A friend of mine who reads my blog immediately recognized the machine as a Sun 1120 Engine Analyzer and said that you had to be a pretty smart mechanic to be able to use one. My father confirmed that my friend had identified the machine correctly. I figure if you have an independent assessment of your skills like that, you must actually be pretty good.
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