Though I am certainly an “intellectual elitist” of the worst type, never let it be said that I do not have the highest respect and admiration for those whose jobs (or pastimes) are not just sitting around and thinking. My girlfriend was a barista for a few years before moving into Starbucks corporate. I love talking to her about her time there because here you have a very smart person doing, what to some, might be considered a fairly ordinary thing. She worked at Starbucks before they had quintillion different combinations of drinks, but also before you were allowed to write anything on the cups. Someone would come in and ask for a double tall breve latte and it’d be up to her to remember the drink order. Easy with one order; hard with fifteen. So she worked up the most rich and elegant way to remember this stuff. I will not attempt to recount the tale here, but I will provide a simple demonstration. Double, you put two cups on the counter. Half anything, you turn the cup so that it is facing one wall. Breve, you put the cup on the lid facing up. Americano, you put the cup on the lid facing down. And so on. The level of combinations handled in this way was staggering to listen to. Yet in nearly every industry I see the exact same sort of distributed skill smarts. Sometimes it’s more physical skill… a painter I hired to do my shelves came in and did perfect lines all the way down my shelves without even using tape. Sometimes it’s simply procedure which can be learned but is rarely passed on… I remember watching a window washer use a single squeegee swipe to do a whole window, without ever lifting the blade up and without leaving a single streak. This lack of knowledge is particularly apparent to me when I attempt even the most basic of these tasks and fail miserably.I suppose my admiration will simply result in one more topic for a book I’ll never write would be to walk around and simply capture this intelligence. It does not have to be everything about the job… just the non-intuitive stuff that differentiates the amateur from the professional (how does that window washer do that anyway!?) I'd love to record that stuff on this website.Thought for the day? When painting anything, pull the tape off the edge before the paint has dried (in fact, pull it off as soon as possible!). This will lead to a much cleaner edge.D