Mark Carroll's Journal

I have had only white-collar jobs, even my summer jobs as a student. One of those early jobs was calculating and typing up invoices in the back office of a store in Cornwall that, among other things, sold tools to tin mines. My colleagues included an older local man who had the job of translating orders: each mine had its own terms for different tools and he would translate them to something meaningful for our inventory. An order would come in from some mine for some mattocks and biddicks and whatnot and he would tell us to send them a certain length of shovel or somesuch and it all worked out. I wondered what they would do were he off sick.

Mostly I learn my way around by studying a map. For that job I had not done so for my drive to work: instead I adopted the stopgap but adequate technique of knowing what to do based on what I saw. Once somebody came into the store wanting to know how to drive to near my home, so very much what I did every weekday after work, but I was quite unable to help them. With better drawing skills perhaps I could have provided a series of views of intersections together with arrows showing what to do at each.