We Need the Trades, and the Trades Need Young People

All of us, at one time or another need plumbers and electricians, and when we find one who’s conscientious and punctual, we feel as if we’ve struck gold.

When we find a plumber, a painter, or an auto mechanic who's conscientious, knowledgeable, and punctual, we feel as if we’ve struck gold. Shutterstock

Things were going wrong. And fast.

The basement of my daughter’s house where I now live alone—she, Mike, and the kids moved last August to Pennsylvania—is inhabited by a water heater, a furnace, a compressor, three 4-foot-high tanks for softening the water, and a metal box beside these tanks containing salt whose purpose remains a mystery to me. For about a week, a thing-a-ma-jig at the base of the furnace had run continuously, the water softeners sounded off at irregular hours, and the compressor kept clicking off and on about five times per minute.