This is a photo of a tenon that I cut off entirely at work the other day. How it happened is not because I had too little focus, but too much focus on the wrong thing.
When it happened, I immediately thought about the story I heard from a carpenter about the only apprentice ever to get fired from a legendary Kyoto firm. He wasn’t fired because he was too sloppy; he was fired because he was working so tightly that he forgot what he was supposed to be doing.
The apprentice was the son of a client. The client asked multiple times if the company would take him on as an apprentice, and after the third request, the company said yes. He was a university graduate with a technical degree, such as math, engineering, or the sciences.
One time, he tore out a ceiling that was supposed to be left alone in a renovation. When asked why he did it, he told his boss it needed to be removed because you “have to draw the line somewhere,” implying the ceiling had flaws that no one else in the company could really see or thought were worth replacing.
The final straw was when the apprentices caring for him found him sitting on the floor surrounded by screws.
