Respect other people’s professions

There is always a tendency among professionals to downplay the importance of professions outside their own.

I once worked for a large printing company. One day there were rumours of a strike among the staff and one secretary remarked: “Malebala a kufakitale kuvuta” (these labourers from the factory are a notorious lot).

I found it intriguing that a secretary would call machine minders labourers. At that time it took two years to train a secretary and four to train a machine minder. It was the height of rudeness, by my reckoning, for a secretary to refer to machine operators as labourers.

The problem was that she did not appreciate—indeed much less, understand—what machine minding involved. It is dangerous to rush to conclusions if you do not understand a process or anything before you. You end up despising people or professions you should not have despised.

A new 10-colour printing press will land in Malawi roughly at K2.5 billion. That amount is the price of a small jet. No investor in their right mind would let a labourer touch that machine. To run it would require a whole range of skills from the operator. The two equally priced machines, a 10-colour press and a small jet, would require the same level of competence from their operators. A machine minder is, therefore, a good deal closer to a pilot, in terms of competence levels, than to a labourer.

The inventor of what is known as lithographic printing, Alois Senefelder, was not a printer. He was a playwright. After publishing one of his plays, he discovered that although he had made money, he would have made more, had the printing costs been lower. He, therefore, resolved not to contract out the printing anymore, but to do it himself.

No sooner had he engaged in the printing operations than he discovered that it was not as straight forward as he had imagined. In those days the art of printing involved polishing and engraving stone to create the image carrier. Senefelder discovered that this was far from easy, not least because he found the stone too hard for him to work with. Thankfully, he did not give up.

Having been thus baptised into the printing trade, Senefelder quickly came to his senses and decided to experiment with limestone, which was softer than the stone being used in printing operations at that time. This was in or about 1790. It was while he was working with limestone that he discovered the new art of printing known as lithography, which today is the most dominant printing process in the world.

We all have the tendency to belittle somebody else’s profession. Many football fans pass all manner of judgments on players; even to the extent of declaring some of the players totally useless. And yet the fans themselves cannot do half of what those “useless” players are capable of doing.

Whatever service is provided by anybody sounds easy and straightforward so long as it is not you providing it. A friend of mine, a surveyor, expressed his frustrations to me at how some clients want surveys done within impractical periods. They just do not understand what is involved, and think it is simply a matter of touching a few buttons on the computer and survey plans or deed plans get churned out.

Very often, I hear people ask: “How much would receipt books cost?” and begin to curse if they do not get a speedy response. They obviously do not appreciate that they need to provide more information before a meaningful cost can be relayed to them. What size (A4, A5, A6)? How many copies per book? Will it be in duplicate, triplicate, quadruplicate or quintuplicate? Printed on bank paper, newsprint or self-carbonised paper? Answers to all these questions, and more, will help a printer arrive at the actual cost of the desired receipt books.

As we search within ourselves, let us take time to attempt to understand what it is that other people do and why they do it the way they do it. Obviously, there are high levels of inefficiencies in the delivery of most services in Malawi as a result, mainly, of laziness, and that needs to be condemned entirely. But if people do their work professionally and you have difficulties understanding some of their stipulated time frames or other aspects of their work, then some learning needs to be done. n