What I Didn’t Learn in School

By The Phantom

When I decided to haunt the cable TV industry, I had to disguise myself as a human student and go back to school to pick up some book-learning on this thing called electronics. When I was there, we had a saying that 50% of what we were learning we would never use, and 50% of what we were going to need, we were not being taught. So why not scrub the half that we didn’t need and replace it with what we did need? Couldn’t do that because no one knew which 50% we were not going to need and the other 50% we were going to need had not been invented yet. That’s a good argument for life-long learning.

Interesting thing about it, some of what you need are things they would never teach in technical school anyway. Sometimes you need to pick it up elsewhere, or just think it through when the time comes. Let me give you an example from my long life… uh, extensive experience. I was working in this big building with a flat roof, and one afternoon I needed to go up on the roof and do something, I don’t recall what. I needed to take a technician with me, so I asked the closest victim if he would go. He said yes after I described access to the roof, a metal ladder built into a concrete wall on the loading dock, then through a horizontal metal door in the roof.

Well, we went up and did whatever it was we had to do, and it was pretty late when we came down – almost everyone in that and surrounding buildings had gone for the day. John (not his real name) started down the ladder first. When he’d gotten down just enough that his hands as well as his feet were on the ladder, he looked up at me with panic written all over his face. “Phanty” (he actually used the pseudonym I was using back then), I’m too scared to move.” That was the first time I’d actually seen a human scared stiff.

“What am I going to do?” thought I. “Everyone else has left, so I can’t call down for help, and I can’t get down myself because John is in the way, on the only ladder there is.” Obviously they hadn’t taught me about this in engineering school. So I think I must have gone back to something I’d read in the Boy Scout magazine when I was but a Cub Scout. In the most reassuring voice I could muster, I said something to the effect, “Don’t worry John. I’ll help you get down. Look at me and don’t look at anything else. Especially don’t look down. Now move one foot down to the next rung. Good. Now move the other foot down, but keep looking at me. Good. Now move your hands down, but keep looking at me, and whatever you do, don’t look down. Good. Now do it again.”

Well I don’t know who was more surprised, him or me, when he got all the way to the bottom. But then, if you’d had to look at my face for that long, you’d move away too.

That’s just one example from real life, of something I had to do in my career that had nothing to do with my training. I could list other examples, but you probably have some better than that yourself. Shows that you need a lot of different skills to get through life. And don’t sit around waiting for someone to feed you all of them while you’re dozing in a classroom. You have to develop a life-long interest in learning a lot of things, most of which you’ll never use. But you never know which one you will need.

The Phantom
the.phantom@youwontfindmeanywhere.com

You never know when The Phantom is standing right beside you. Sometimes he is in a meeting with you or walking the floor at your favorite cable show. Sometimes he’s hanging with the suits and other times with the front liners. But be assured, The Phantom sees all, The Phantom knows all and, most importantly, The Phantom tells all.

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