Editor: Here “Accidental Designer” tells us the epic tale of how he backed into a career in designing and building by discovering something no one else had. We won’t tell you the name of our protagonist for now, as we don’t want you to Google him yet and find out how the story ends. Just sit back, enjoy, and see how a man with no formal industrial design training launched into a career many of us would envy.
I knew that I’d screwed up, but knowing it didn’t make it any better. I was made to stand up in front of the class, where thirty pairs of wide eyes all stared at me, afraid of what was going to come next, yet glad that it wasn’t one of them up there.
You see, before I had any inclination that design was going to make me a success, and before I even learned how to design, I learned how to build. I read in a previous True I.D. Story that the designer learned how to build in his grandfather’s woodshop as a kid. Well, I didn’t have a kindly grandfather teaching me: Instead I had a hard-ass I’ll call Mr. Barkington, who ran the Wood Shop class in my high school. And I thought he was a complete asshole.
Wood Shop was a mandatory class, and Mr. Barkington was quite the ball-buster. For our first assignment, we had to make a checkerboard—pretty basic, cut squares out of two different colors of wood, then put them together in an alternating pattern. Well, I forgot to account for the kerf, the thickness of the blade, when I cut my pieces up. Add up a 3/32″ kerf across the entire board, and by the time I got it all together the damn thing was a couple inches too short on each side.
Mr. Barkington called me out in front of the entire class. “Take a look, everybody,” he said, “take a good look at what this fucking idiot did! Jesus Christ!” He held my board up so everyone could see. “Does that look right to you? Hey asshole, do you even know what a kerf is? Jesus, Saint Mary and Joseph!”
As you Millennials can probably tell, I went to high school a long time ago, back when it was perfectly acceptable for a teacher to say these kinds of things to a student. Today Mr. Barkington would probably have been fired, but back then, I dunno, I think we didn’t take stuff so personal, or we learned to endure it for our own betterment. When he humiliated me in front of the class, sure, my cheeks were burning, but I didn’t cry, or go tell the Principal (who wouldn’t have given a shit) or go whine to my parents. And no, I didn’t throw the checkerboard out; it became a cutting board for my mom.
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