You never know when life will teach you a lesson when you least expected it.

I was at the local Farmer’s Market in Homewood, Illinois, last Saturday.  I was hoping to buy the last good peaches of the year.  I surveyed the sellers’ wares, and nothing looked spectacular.  I finally found a batch that appeared okay.  I asked the farmer, a young woman from South Haven, Michigan, how the peaches were.  “They’re good, last ones of the season,” she said.  So I bought them.

I took them home, left them out overnight and tried one the next morning.  Awful.  Mushy garbage.  I threw them all out.  I made a quiet vow never to buy another ounce of fruit from her again.  It was not just that they were bad. It was that she had to have known they were bad, yet sold them to me with a straight face. I am a bit of a fruit fanatic.

The next day I went to my favorite farmers’ market to buy apples for the winter’s applesauce.  I went to my favorite fruit vendor, Mr. Hardin of Hardin’s Orchard, west of Kalamazoo.  I bought a bushel and a half of apples from him and then asked if he had any good peaches.  I’ve been buying from him for 10 years, and he always tells me the truth about fruit.  If he’s selling blueberries and too much rain made them look plump and delicious he’ll tell me to wait a couple of weeks when the good ones will be ripe. Hardin knows his apples, and I rely on him.  He told me his peaches were sweet and delicious, and they were.  Every single one.  He earned my business for another year.

By the way, Hardin is the busiest vendor at the market every Sunday. It was a business lesson relearned on peaches.  If you want long-term customers always be straight with them, especially the less-experienced ones who may not know what they don’t know.  Don’t promise more than you can deliver.

Mistakes will always be made.  When Graff-Pinkert resells used machinery we do not get any guarantees from the people who sold us their no-longer-needed machine tools.  Sometimes they answer us honestly if we ask the right questions.  Actually, most people are straight if you know what to ask them and ask it in the right way.  But at an auction rarely do the sellers volunteer information, particularly if it is negative. But if you are in the business of trying to develop long-term relationships you have to tell people when the peaches are mushy when you know they are.

Question: What stories do you have about being duped?

I’ve really been trying to stay away from political stuff in this blog, but the Kavanaugh sex allegations are just so juicy I feel compelled to comment.

I was aghast when I first heard that Senator Dianne Feinstein was pulling a “Hail Mary” with the Christine Blasey Ford letter, but the more I read about it and her, the more I felt she really does believe that Brett Kavanaugh, as a 17-year-old prep school basketball player and self-proclaimed virgin, assaulted her, groped her and left her indelibly scarred. Did he really do it while “stumbling drunk”? I doubt we will ever know. But if I were Kavanaugh testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as to his wife and children, and Christine Blasey Ford, I would say, “I do not remember ever doing what you accuse me of, but if I did do it when I was drunk at a party as a teenager, I am horrified and appalled, and I ask forgiveness for being such a stupid awful lout.

I think about myself. I am a person who does not drink alcohol but certainly does not have a perfect memory of events 35 minutes ago, much less 35 years ago, and that is without being impaired by drinking. Could a selective fallible memory cleanse an unpleasant event 35 years ago at a noisy party? Absolutely.

Georgetown Prep School Football Team. (Kavanaugh on far left)

So Brett Kavanaugh, you’ve spent three decades trying so hard to be the guy worthy of the Supreme Court, why not step forward and set an example for the country, but even more so for your wife and daughters, by apologizing for something you can’t remember doing but Christine believes you did do. Be a Mensch (Yiddish for “man in the best sense”) Kavanaugh. It may get you your seat, or it may cost you, but you won’t be left with scars like those of Clarence Thomas after Anita Hill testified in his confirmation hearing in 1991.

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I have very positive memories of this year’s International Machine Tool Show.

I felt grateful just to attend IMTS. Ten years, exactly, since leaving St. Francis Hospital after almost dying of a heart attack and undergoing quadruple bypass surgery, I walked McCormick’s halls for hours with a purpose.

At 73, with the experienced eyes of a writer and used machinery dealer, my goals were different than those of a person trying to decide between buying an Okuma or Mazak. Spindle rpm and software were of little interest to me. I was interested in the people, the captains and lieutenants of manufacturing who managed the exhibits, and the foot soldiers like myself who schlepped around the endless corridors.

I talked to Bruno Schmitter of Hydromat about his son who is finally working full time with the company. I connected with Mindy Mikami of Okuma, who sets up the company’s spectacular exhibit every two years and then hauls it back to Charlotte, North Carolina. The Okuma folks were all worrying about how hard Hurricane Florence would affect their homes and travel plans.

I talked to Mette McCall, who has worked so hard to put Universal Robots on the map. She told me about how Odense, Denmark, has become the robot capital of the world. She’s Danish but now lives in Mobile, Alabama. Before robots Odense was known primarily as the home of Hans Christian Andersen.

I was very happy to catch up with Michi Tajariol, whose family owns TAJMAC-ZPS, which builds its machines in Zlin, Czech Republic. Michi lived with our family and worked at Graff-Pinkert when he was 23 years old for three months. He has a close relationship with my son Noah, and he and I also have much more than a business relationship. I caught up with Michi at the ZPS booth the day before he was leaving to return to Europe. We embraced, talked about some business, but mostly talked about the important family stuff that we could access without preliminaries. Life and death, marriage and divorce, cancer, birthdays of kids, the stuff that counts. This is business too, because relationships give you access.

Finally, perhaps the most important of all my meetings at the show was spending good time with my brother Jim after a long cold period.

These are the things I’ll remember from IMTS 2018.

Question 1: What are your favorite and least favorite memories of high school?

Question 2: What left an impression on you at IMTS 2018?

How much would you pay for a bottle of clean water if you were thirsty and could not find drinkable water? How much would you pay for a room if you had no place to sleep?

How much would you pay for a programmer for your CNC machines if they were down there was nobody to hire?

We are apparently in a period, or on the cusp of one, in which there are almost no skilled machinists available. In such an environment the logical thing to expect is that men and women with skills that the market demands will begin to auction their expertise to those who will pay the most. We may be entering the “gig economy” for machining people with quantifiable expertise. Smart entrepreneurs will develop websites that sell manufacturing skills by the hour or by the day. Businesses have employed freelance specialists for many years, but today’s Google economy is empowering more individuals than ever before.

The machining world has thrived in the land of the reliable and predictable—long-term clients, machinery that lasts for decades, dedicated employees who spend a career with one firm. It has worked pretty well for both employers and employees in a period of employment stasis.

Ten years ago, some companies in the machining world would have extra workers paint the floors when there was no production work. They had core people who they believed in and who believed in them. Today, life is quite different. Skilled people who dutifully worked loyally for humane owners have retired or died in many cases.

Private equity firms with professional managers own many medium sized manufacturing firms and are acquiring more every day. Their mission is to pay off debt, build equity and sell the businesses to the next firm in line. They have a short-term horizon which affects their view of employees. I would think that they would buy into the idea of a gig economy where employees auction their services, if that was necessary.

Traveling Knife Sharpener in Paris.

I think the gig economy has plenty of negatives for both employers and workers. I write this as somebody who has hired many gig workers for both Graff-Pinkert and Today’s Machining World. Paying for hotels and rental cars for the pricier freelancers can bite.

For workers, shifting to new work environments is scary and can wreak havoc with family life and relationships. Stable businesses with long-term employees develop community and rapport. Gig people are often not accepted easily in that milieu.

I think we have a real predicament in the machining world in late 2018. There’s lots of business, but not enough skilled people in the wings to hire. Owners and managers have a logical reluctance to upset the status quo by hiring new people for $10-$50/hour more than steady, loyal current workers. Meanwhile, they see contracts for the plucking or projects running late or unfulfilled.

Silicon Valley has lived with this dilemma for a long time. Workers have been drawn to the riches of the Valley, but the side effect has been sky-high housing prices and cost of living. The buses on Highway 280 and 101 are filled with folks who commute long distances for the wages in Palo Alto and Mountain View.

Most of the manufacturing in the Bay Area has moved to Nevada, which is causing a similar mini-inflation in Reno and Vegas.

For the moment, I expect a significant bump up in wages in the machining world. It will be hard to stomach for employers, who are dealing with tariffs and escalating metal prices. The result may be more work heading to Mexico and possibly China and Europe. But American manufacturers are extremely resourceful. They have weathered 20 years of headwinds. They will train young people, get by with fewer workers and hire the pricey experts when absolutely necessary. We will see the machinist as entrepreneur in isolated situations, but I doubt it will become the norm in the near future.

Question: In the future will more skilled machinists quit full time jobs to become freelancers?