Who notices that someone is better at mounting tvs? How does one notice this? What is this made up scenario?
Besides watching someone to try to learn, craftsmen can just goon over other’s works.
At a job once updating some central lighting control there were some awesome rooms some (probably long retired) electrician had planned and installed. man that shit was so clean. Another time me n another guy were 'mirin this single ¾ conduit bend for 5 minutes.
This isn’t exactly 100% relevant to your story, but it is related and an anecdote I enjoy sharing.
I recently moved to a small town and hired an electrician to make some changes to my house. After showing him around the house, we went to look at the fuse box to determine what changes could be made.
As we were looking, he said “I know those fuses are original.” When I asked how, he pointed at the labels and said “because that’s my father’s handwriting.”
Kinda cool to have a legacy like that. The electrician did do good work, so far as I can tell, so it was likely earned as well.
I’ve been contemplating sending a business rival a bottle of whiskey for proper capatilization on the word “FastLane” as well as strict adherence to correct PLU usage in the face of absurd custom store-level PLUs, 100% get it.
You should!
Do you have an example of a good and bad PLU, actual if possible?
(I did search engine/LLM it first :) )
What made the old electrician’s work especially clean or notable? Just curious what caught your eye as I’m someone not in that industry
Hmm, i used to have pics. Hard to describe with words. Beyond the beautifully square pipe runs and can punches he had a kinda signature with his sweeps and the rooms he musta done looked like he had made a master plan rather than just making it work. Oh and very little evidence of covered up mistakes (short pieces of conduit) that youd maybe only notice if you were doing demo anyway.
We would wonder who this dude was cuz there were like…a lot of rooms he had a hand in in this building. His clean work trademark was one thing, but we never knew for sure it was one of his until we’d pull the old cabinets to find his other trademark, peurile cartoons about how he really felt about his boss.
Not the person you’re responding to, but an electrician as well. The difference between someone who just showed up to get it running and get paid versus the ones who take time to sinch as close to perfect as possible are night and day. A good installation would have the basics like clean pipe runs, level cans and boxes, minimal mistakes (extended conduits, plugged holes in boxes where someone mismeasured, no missing parts, etc). The perfection guys go beyond by having everything laser level with themselves (pipes, boxes, etc), thoughtful layout to make working on it easier, forethought with layout as far as system expansion and futures, sometimes even sizing pipes and boxes a little bigger to accommodate future additions, and often just the little simple details like aligning screw heads where you can tell that the original installer really took their time and had passion for doing things right. Especially compared to installs where it’s a pain to try and do anything and you’re basically putting lipstick on a pig, it’s always a wonderful treat to work on something where someone really gave a shit.
That didn’t involve you learning how someone can hang tvs better than you on Facebook. Having hung a TV or two in my day, I don’t know how one can learn to respect another’s ability there based on social media
Quick edit: I’m also super annoyed at op to tie it to ‘positive masculinity’ while describing the quintessential male trait - they like teaching or displaying their abilities. Go grill or work on cars with a group of men and see what happens. It’s a fucking trope. This nonsense wholesome schtick is gross.
I don’t know how one can learn to respect another’s ability there based on social media
Well i haven’t used Facebook in a long time but i have seen (both through reading accounts on social media and a few guys personally that use Facebook successfully for their side-work. Facebook gets like 2B eyeballs daily (if not our 4)
Edit:
edit: I’m also super annoyed at op to tie it to ‘positive masculinity’ while describing the quintessential male trait - they like teaching or displaying their abilities
But toxic masculinity is definitely not asking others for help. as a tradesperson i can speak to the fear of outting myself to ridicule if i all for help. Not just me either, I’ve seen whole days of work wasted cuz guys are afraid to ask. I don’t of it’s all jobs but Construction definitely be that way.
Op reached out even so and got help instead of ridicule and are now partners instead of competitors. Like what’s not to like here?
Professional handymen, electronics installers, contractors, people who do this kind of thing for a living.
I’m one of those. Anyone else think it looks a tiny bit higher on the right hand side? Lol
At least in the US and Canada, where wood frames with drywall are common, you’re going to want the screws you use to go into a stud, I suppose.
If the guy’s running cable inside the wall to reach the TV, I suppose that that’s got potential to go wrong. Like, I guess “mounting” might include stuff other than just the mounting itself.
Better work with the cabling, perhaps. In this picture you can see that there’s a new work box in the drywall so he’s running hidden cables. There could be drywall patching or he’s really good at making the holes so there doesn’t need to be patching.
He could do more types of mounts than this guy is used to.
He could be faster.
Is that you’re completely unimaginative so you can’t come up with ways someone might be better or do you have so little respect for trades that you think there can’t be skill involved?
Why the hostility? I would’ve asked this question if they hadn’t, and I don’t consider myself unimaginative or disrespectful. Just uninformed…
Who notices that someone is better at mounting tvs? How does one notice this? What is this made up scenario?
Do you honestly think someone asking, “What is this made up scenario?” is asking their question in good faith?
Pros notice tiny details that most people don’t even think of.
Maybe they did the job 5 minutes faster or the mount job just looks cleaner than yours.
One example: Check the screws on your electric outlet/light switch faceplates. If the screws are aligned, your electrician gave a shit about their work
I see it all the time.
Like someone shares a photo their desk and their setup is so slick. Or someone shows off their kitchen. Those are things I like a lot and want to improve. So rather than scroll past, or leave a hater response, I ask questions to pick up what they’re dropping. You can try that.
That doesn’t address the quality of hanging a TV. The things you mentioned are superficial. Being good at hanging a TV is structural. The only way one would know if another was good or bad at it is if the TV eventually fell off the wall or was loose, which one could not see from a FB post.
“okay, the camera is rolling, now whip out your dong and fuck that TV like it’s your mother’s sister!”
15 seconds later
“damn, how do you even… in the hdmi… it comes back out of the coax?! could you teach me how to do that?”
and from that day forward, it was a duo of TV mounters
Advertisement for whatever slrpnk dot net is trying to sell?
I definitely have friends who I know are a lot better at this kind of stuff than I am (mostly because they get less anxious over what happens if they screw up but…). I have never seen a difference once the tv is mounted because… you can’t see the fricking mount once the TV is mounted.
I dunno. I also kind of have problems with the underlying premise too. Yes, toxic masculinity is a massive problem and people very much do not realize how few “male role models” there are for kids who aren’t bald human traffickers and the people who sniff their chairs. But “Hey dude, I see you are a super masculine strong man with a bubble level” is not the answer.
The answer is to teach kids they don’t NEED role models that fit the same gender roles they do (or, more often, their parents think they should). An athlete is an athlete and a smart person is a smart person. Same with being “handy”. This is a lesson girls/“girls” were forced to learn long ago and is one boys/“boys” would benefit from. Because then you don’t need to say “Well, I like what this person is saying but they have the wrong genitalia and aren’t muscular enough”.
What you see isn’t the issue with proper mounting, its what you don’t.
Leveling, positioning for cable pathways/junction box positioning/planning, heights for good viewing, proper blocking for support, so on. And someone who foes this for a living is going to notice.
And slrpnk.net, the Lemmy instance, is about working towards a sustainable future (solarpunk concept), so that’s the only thing that instance is selling is a climate friendly future. Well worth checking out some of the great communities on there.
If you need help leveling a tv mount (especially considering they all come with really nice paper templates) then you have no business doing anything professionally. Even one of the shitty pocket bubble levels is more than good enough for visual inspection*. Let alone having a proper one for “real” level.
Cabling is generally a home owner’s problem unless you popped two holes in the wall to run some conduit. Which, again, is not visible in a facebook post unless someone just never thought of doing that… which gets back to “you have no business doing anything professionally”.
There is no situation where even Super Elite Mega Masculine And Muscular Contractors are going to be impressed by someone’s tv mounting game to the point of wanting to learn. Especially on Facebook of all things.
This is engagement farming. Nonsensical engagement farming at that. It is on the same level of an AI generated jesus and a caption about how it is strange that those posts never go viral.
Knew that part but figured it was an article based on the link. Apparently just a picture of a facebook post.
So… no idea what that facebook post was trying to sell but I guess this is why all that AI nonsense is spammed endlessly on that site.
My step-brother and I weren’t family until a decade ago. He goes into incel mode and projects his insecurity by hating on everybody.
But today, he shared this with me about something he wants to get better at as he was getting tired of being angry all the time.
So hopefully this message gets across to more people.
Though you’re right Instead of doggin im gonna follow OPs lead an upvote the positive intentions this comment were written with
Clearly…Do you know how kind words work.
I’m an angry individual lately due to society’s failings and being constantly lied to and jerked around with ally business dealings…thanks for reinforcing the stereotype of society crumbling under capitalism. Really helps when I’m trying to be a different person. No reply needed.
True kings fix each other’s crowns.
It’s a sign of the times that this is upvoted so much. When I was growing up, this was called normal behavior and was boring and nobody talked about it.
Because we all did it, our entire family, all of our friends and every coworker.
I had a plumber once, older guy, who was really eager to teach somebody the trade. He “made” me do half the work and I didn’t even mind because I learned how to do a lot of shit I didn’t know how to do before.
Be coachable in life and you will be surprised the info you can get from qualified people for free.
Also if you are handy you always have a fallback job if your 9 to 5 shitcans you unexpectedly.
Anytime I need to seek something outside my skillset, I basically offer myself as “apprentice for the day” and you’d be surprised how many will take you up on it.
Like, you hire a contractor to do work for you and ask them to let you apprentice for them at the same time and they go for it? I would love doing this so I don’t have to hire a contractor the second time! What do you say to them to get them to agree?
