Epiphany moment #213242

Lately I've been coming across talkative customers who have been extra nice and friendly at work.

I'm starting to be suspicious that they feel sorry for me, subconsciously dribbling out of boredom while having a staring match at the dude at the takeaway kebab joint opposite the restaurant (who is just as bored waiting for customers)..God only knows.

Anyway, a lad in his early 20s came for a meal today and after small chit chat about the weather ("bloody freezing") and recommendation for food, we started talking about what we were doing with  life, bladibla. As it turns out, he worked in the construction field, to which I expressed interest in (I'm starting to morph into a building and construction freak which I presume is a good thing..?).

This dude started telling me about projects he's worked on, groundworks and piles and concrete slabs, clay boards, tree officers in UK building regulations, OSP boards, Cellotex or whatever it was, laying bricks and blahblablah like he was the walking talking Barry's Manual of Construction book that I was so frantically cursing at during the final hours of my hand in.

As it turns out, Mr. Genius was thrown out of school, had no qualifications in GSCE O Levels whatsoever, and has been working as a builder alongside quantity surveyors, architects and developers for four years. And here I am, so called part 1 architecture graduate, supposedly an "Ooh Wow" profession, with less than 1/8 of this guy's knowledge. Talk about an-IT-graduate-being-compared-to-Bill-Gates moment. 

 Somebody tell me why I went through these many years just to get a piece of paper again?

It's true what they say that the real learning begins when you get launched into the working life.

Just like how real driving happens when you start getting onto the crazy road--not from the so called driving lessons where your tutor tells you to stop when you see the third pole in your side mirror, or from the theory booklets that you have to browse through. When you start driving out to the road, all of those things fly out of the window and you start driving like a maniac because the theory books don't tell you that the rest of the road drives like a madhouse.

 Just like university.

At the end of the day, university is pretty much a running business. You pay them heaps of money to secure your status as a graduate, a status that makes you a step higher and noble and more significant to those who don't have the qualification. Yet it's ironic that the people who step in for hands on experience end up with broader knowledge on dealing with things on a practical scale, but are undermined because they don't have this piece of paper that puts them on a higher rank in society. 

It's a weirdly put catch-22.

But from now on I will see no difference between a person with qualifications and a person without.

And I will honestly tell someone off if I hear them belittle someone else for not being academic enough or for not having good qualifications.
(Typical Asian parents,aunties and uncles are soooooooo guilty of this mindset!)

The only difference is that the one who went to university decided to take the long,winding and 'scenic' route to the same finish line.