Drill Chuck

Just a funny memory I had today, and thought I would share it. My first real introduction to construction was a shop class in college. I was kind of flailing around at the time as an English major, but I was worried I wasn’t going to find a lot of jobs with that degree, so I expanded my interests in classes and took a shop class.

I was REALLY bad at it in the beginning. Most of the other guys in there had been doing shop work for years, tinkering around on their own, working with their dads…me? Nope. Nada. Zilch. I still remember the lab exercise where we had to reassemble a two-stroke engine, and I was so lost that my partner did all the work.

Ah…building concrete forms…woodworking…an ugly extension cord/power outlet we made…good times, as Adam Carolla (a fellow construction worker…or used to be) would say.

The biggest short-term benefit I got out of it, though, was when I visited my girlfriends’ parents at the time. I was still an ‘egghead’ by her standards, and her parents had heard all these stories about my English and Latin classes (did I just admit that on a construction blog?). Her dad was a submarine tech at the local navy base, and her mom was a train conductor for deliveries into the base.

I remember them kidding me mercilessly about my major at the time. Her mom said at some point, “I bet you don’t even know what a chuck is on a drill, do you.”

Why she picked that, I have no idea, but thank God we’d covered it a couple of weeks before.

“Sure I do. It’s the thing on the drill that you use to screw in the drill bit.”

They didn’t kid me too much after that.

Good times.