I'm slumming it a work.

When I go to rich companies for job interviews I realize how much I'm slumming it in my current job.

Today I had a job interview at a huge auction company - a company that makes billions and billions of dollars. Their building was like a glass palace. They had an in-house cafeteria, daycare and fitness room.

They had glass elevators and huge walkways and giant pillars. They had LCD monitors embedded in the glass for chrissakes.

Here, I work out of a classroom in an old elementary school that's closing in a month and a half. The fluorescent lights in the classroom hum. My boss sits so close to me that I can hear her breathe. The hallways smell like chemical disinfectant.

There are no LCD monitors embedded in the glass, but there are stick-figure paintings of people and animals pinned to bulletin boards along hallways.

We don't fix or make things anymore.

I can't draw worth crap and I can barely work a screwdriver. I always blamed it on my hands. But this can't be the case. I can play guitar a little and I can type 60 plus words a minute. So what's wrong with me?

I'm typical, and that's the problem according to Matthew B. Crawford. His book, Shop class as soulcraft : an inquiry into the value of work laments the fact that most people in our society can't fix or build things with our hands anymore.

We don't need to. Everything's made cheaply in China. It's easier to buy a new item than repair an old one.

Crawford says this is a shame, because building things with your hands is good. It makes us happier, we're creating real things of tangible value in the world, and the pay's not bad (now that there's a shortage of trade workers since no one wants to do that anymore.)

He contrasts this with our current "creative" economy where we sit around in our post-industrial cubicles thinking of ways of doing things "being creative", but not actually doing them.