Rocky Lake Heating And Plumbing

Dear Angie List Members: I?m writing this recommendation for Mr. Rocky Lake, Master Plumber and Plumbing Contractor and Craftsman, Rocky Lake Plumbing and Heating, 207-897-6779, 197 Boothby Road Livermore, Maine 04253-3801. Over the years, Mr. Lake has worked for us and members of our family on our water pump, draining our house in preparation for us leaving it empty for the winter, hooked up a new washing machine when I butchered the discharge connector hoses, rerouted pipes for our newly changed and greatly modified kitchen sink, and much more, always providing us with reasonable charges, timely responses, and good practical advice for work we planned to do before calling him for finishing the project. Rocky has the ability, maybe learned, maybe genetic, that allows him to adapt quickly if he runs into an unexpected problem, like when my wife?s rebuild of the cabinet holding our new sink meant the boards were substantially thicker than traditional countertops. He looked at the thickness of the countertops and the clips that came with the sink and noted that he would have to use longer screws to make them work. Note there is no loss of time or increase in charges in what appears to be extemporaneous adjustments. There are other core abilities that distinguish a craftsman from other workers, like this ability to improvise, maybe because the unexpected is the nature of a craftsman?s world so exceptions are more the rule than the exception. Another ability that distinguishes a craftsman from a mere practitioner, and it?s difficult to write about in detail because it?s also present in other professionals who possess craftsman level skills, is that of achieving a form, a whole, a gestalt, that is far more than the some of its parts. A craftsman can see not just the parts and the whole of a project, or person, but how those parts go together, or work together to create a gestalt of the task they have to repair or to create or to build. I don?t have the gift, and it is a gift, though someone who has the desire, who are ready to learn, and have gifted teachers, gifted mentors may learn, with time and experience, the craftsman?s process. You can see the abilities of craftsman physicians as they work with a patient, collecting information and signs from the different body systems, going back and forth between a ?evolving draft? diagnosis and the facts and suggestions of specific tests. Achieving the gestalt is achieving a proper, effective treatment. Much of the craftsman process can be taught, but only to those who are desirous and ready to learn. The craftsman process can be seen in Navy pilots, this ability to see the parts and the whole, going back and forth in focus on gauges and meters and feels of their machine in achieving optimal performances, gestalts. How the parts, figure and ground, go together determine a safe or otherwise landing I?ve seen the craftsman process in attorneys, trial attorneys especially, those who not only know how to weave together precedents with statutes and common law decisions with facts, ultimate and local, some time bound, some not, and present them together in an integrated fusion, a tight, logic driven and emotional carrying narrative that captures the gestalt of their particular case, often using voice tones as only tone-talkers can do, to make the narrative of their unique case a gestalt having a near mystical, crystal clear, resolution that no honest jury or devout judge can refuse. We need craftsmen, some to create structures that please the mind, some that help the body, with some creations revealed by the touch of a warm hand, and some creations that use word images to show us how we can use empty buildings, blank walls, chunks of wood and granite, for future inventions and innovations that feed our democratic capitalist system to provide more for more people, as the Pope has stated, than any other system that has existed. Maine is ranked 28th among the states in measurable innovation and much higher, close to 4th, on raw creativity. We need the craftsman to transform the gestalts they create into hard realities.