Building Our Modern World


Our world is made of thousand million small little parts working in tandem, most of them unseen and unaccounted for by all except a few. Let’s run through a typical day in the life a fictional person, a woman. Let’s call her Shelly. Now Shelly is an accountant down at a bank in the financial district her city, a new employee who recently started last month. She lives in an apartment with two roommates in borough nearby, all of them living in a building that is connected to a few other buildings by means of a concrete pathway. So how does Shelly’s day start specifically? Well she wakes up at around 8 in a bed she bought from Ikea, a piece of furniture manufactured by a factory in an entire other country. The money she used for the bed went to the company and was distributed and spent and eventually wound up in the hands of someone else in her city, let’s say a police woman who is directing traffic somewhere else. On the west side, let’s say. Money this other woman used for food and to feed her children. That’s just one simple connection out of millions. Now Shelly wakes up and uses the sink to brush her teeth, the water passing through hundreds of individual pipes to get to her then passing out of her sink and back into the system where it is going to be treated and, in all likelihood, used again in a few days by someone else. The noise she makes on the floor wakes up her downstairs neighbor who needs to get to work himself. His waking up a bit earlier than normal reminds him that he needs to go buy a present for his brother and so he showers quickly which makes Shelly’s water a little colder. By being a little colder, she is moving a little slower and forgets to tie her left shoe so she has to stop before she leaves to tie it. When she does leave, she says hi to several other women and compliments one of them on her dress which makes Gertrude, the woman she complimented, feel so good that she goes out and buys another, thereby giving another store enough money to get their lights fixed or their ceiling replaced. They have to do this by hiring an industrial company that specializes in fixing roofs and ceilings and so the story goes on. But, what, you might ask, does this have to with industry and our society?
Switching It Up
We don’t often understand it but our society is built for and by us through one thousand hundred million tiny parts that all interlock. And all of these parts are important . You might not spend your days thinking about underground boring contractors but they make an enormous impact on your life. You might stop and say that trenchless drilling, texas directional boring services and the general machinery of industry and infrastructure drilling has absolutely no bearing on your life but you’d be very wrong. You can talk to your spouse on your cell phone precisely because a company hired underground boring contractors to dig up a spot, drill holes and put up a cell phone tower. You only have cable because underground boring contractors were hired to dig long tunnels so that your cable could be funneled directly to your house or apartment. And what’s more, most of us have no idea how these processes even work or that they happen. We think that our modern high tech world is just built out of nothing, given to us by some outside gift that came down and just put all of our infrastructure here but that’s not true at all. It’s the work of millions of people that gives us what we have.
What Comes Next
So how will underground boring contractors, accountants, CEOS, shipbuilders, daycare teachers and the millions of other jobs in the world give us a bright and sustainable future? Well that’s a hard question to answer but if we just pay attention to the details, if we just hang for a moment and be thankful for everything we have, we will see.


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