While At The Repairers Shop

Just a few days ago, I was at a sound repairers shop, it was my first time patronizing him, we've never met from Adam, in fact discovering him was a miracle for us because we've scouted around us and couldn't find one person who could repair our faulty speaker.

We've asked around for weeks, the near breakthrough experience we had was a friend of mine who told me he knew someone who does but the person passed about a month ago. I'm giving this background story so you can properly understand my point at the end of this write up.

So we found this man eventually and that was because we later resolved to take the speaker back to where we purchased it, perhaps they could do something to revive it or better still swap it for a new one with some money added to the faulty one.

Guess what, we couldn't find the shop but we got a shop nearby who is into the same business who then showed us a place where we can repair it. Somewhere I would love to call a backside, not by the roadside, so hidden that only those who have been fortunate enough to know the repairer would always come back to patronize or refer.

Now here is my point... As he looked at it he figured out what was wrong almost immediately, he told us the cost and gave us time to check back and pick up the speaker. This brought us a very big relief I mean after toiling for weeks to get a solution and then someone decided to come to the rescue and even promised to deliver the next day...

As I thought about this, I wondered, why we had to go on intense search to get this fixed, why we have to go very far to find just one person not even two in that field which of course would have played a role in making fixing fees less monopolistic, trust me I wasn't even bordered about the cost of the fix, the joy was in the fact that it was fixed.

But I could not discard the thought of traveling far from my environment to fix a speaker and then it dawned on me that people are becoming less interested in learning "handiwork" and technical skills like this. An average Nigerian is looking for a soft skill and a quick means to make money.

If the quest for soft skill was even higher than the quest to get rich quick in this part of the world, I would have even commended it but the reverse is the case. More and more youth are getting really uninterested in learning hard skill that helps in solving day to day problems.

They see it as some menial dirty stuffs that wont bring the kind of money they want at the time they want it and for this reason they pull out almost immediately even when they attempt learning one. I wasn't even surprised after my careful observation that the young man who repaired the speaker didn't even have an apprentice.

Mind you, customers were checking in and out, paying for the services rendered for the two day I showed up at that shop. He is making his money without noise, I know how much I paid just for that fix, interestingly, nothing was changed in the panel, yet it seems to me that we paid so much in appreciation for the knowledge successfully deployed.

My fear is this, would we still have folks around us who in a few years to come who would still be into businesses like this when young people are showing less interest in acquiring skills like this, would online money not replace the need to have many folks with hard skills(handy work) designed to fix things around us...

I really do not know if there would be a turnaround story in a few years to come, maybe we have only focused on one side of the technological advancements we are enjoying today and neglected the other part. If the youth think the way these hard skills things are done is too crude then they should invest in getting sophisticated tools that technology has made available and venture into it.

The good old golden rule remains...it says, money flow in the direction of value. Give value, in the form of service and watch money gravitate toward you.

I think I want to drop my pen at this point and allow you share your thoughts as well.

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Regards
@lhorgic❤️