Getting It Done

This past week I was part of my rowing club’s trailer loading brigade in advance of the Head of the Hooch in Chattanooga, TN.  For those of you not familiar with rowing protocols and various aspects of the sport, trailers are the means of transporting rowing shells [boats] and as such must be loaded with care resulting in a long, cumbersome and tiresome assignment for the men and women of the participating crews.

 

This week’s trailer loading involved more boats than our club has ever loaded onto a single trailer so it was particularly difficult.  What started out at 6PM with over 50 participants helping,  slowly but inexorably dwindled in numbers as the sun set and the evening wore on.  By 9PM there were less than a dozen of us and many boats still to go.  All this was made more time consuming because the best light we had was from the landscape lighting at the Four Seasons Hotel next door.  At that point I knew this loading was going well toward midnight.

 

As is common at that late hour during any such “all nighter”, or close to it, we started the “ol’ gallows humor” going.  The stories told are those of one’s youth, college and high school mostly.  And a lot of “when I rowed in college….”.  Ya, ya, you rowed uphill, in the snow, both ways.  Right.  But what became apparent at 10:30PM, with only 8 people left to load and another couple hours ahead of us, was that here in a side alley in Austin, Texas three of us were from Pittsburgh.  And we were the loudest, should I say most enthusiastic, of the group and definitely kept things lively.

 

So there you have it.  When the job needs to get done, it takes Pittsburghers to do it.  No fuss, little complaining [OK, at least a little], pitch in, make it work, get it done.  Go home with a smile on your face and an attitude of at least it could have been worse.  Yep.  I hope and believe that sort of attitude can translate into more jobs and a rising standard of living for all Pittsburghers as the city and region move forward.

Blue Collar, Schmue Collar

A quick rant regarding recent comments in the media on Pittsburgh that's related to coverage of the Pirates. Allow me use Michael Keaton's blog for ESPN.com as the foremost example, although what I’m complaining about permeates the media when referring to Pittsburgh in any context. 

Keaton is a great fan of Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh’s sports franchises so I criticize with affection as I would to a family member.  But he almost never fails to make reference to Pittsburgh's "blue collar" attitudes, in this particular case those attitudes being a key to the Pirates’ success.  C’mon people!  How many times?  Years?  Decades?  does Pittsburgh have to labor under that old saw?  I mean really, it's the fallback explanation used by every second rate reporter in sports, business, or arts reporting.

And Mr. Keaton: blue collar work ethic, huh? Like NYC doesn't have a blue collar side? Houston? Dallas? London? Shanghai? I won’t get wonky on this one: a rant is supposed to make liberal use of grand assumptions and platitudes. But look at the most recent statistics that tell us Pittsburgh is less blue collar that most of its cohort cities in the US.

Great cities run on a diverse mix and that refers to job and economic mixes as well. And do only blue collar types work hard? I worked on Wall Street and I'll put up my 12 hour days, 8 days a week as a "slave of New York" next to any time card punching dude. Success is hard work anywhere, period. Stop the back-handed compliments from people who do not or no longer live in Pittsburgh.

Finally, if you’re using the term “blue collar” as a proxy of a close knit, well functioning community, then why don’t you just use that description?  Pittsburgh’s always been a great city, when it was dominated by heavy industry and even now when it’s largely a knowledge based economy.  Communicating the facts in an interesting way is difficult.  It would be great if more folks who love Pittsburgh did it.