‘You are bloody useless,” the erection manager said to me. He was referring to my proficiency at scaffolding. His name was Alan and that was his job title. And he was making a fair point. We were on a housing estate somewhere on the blurred line between Birmingham and the Black Country, putting up rigs for the council’s painters. And I had just dropped a steel coupler through someone’s veranda roof.
This was 1985. When Doves Cry by Prince was getting a lot of radio play and I was on a gap year working for the family firm. Even though I was the boss’s son, my colleagues felt free to point out my limitations, which were many.
Nearly 40 years later, I was in a pub near King’s Cross station in London watching one of England’s matches in the Euros. The best way to learn important stuff is to read, watch, study and listen, examining data rather than anecdotes. But brief conversations with strangers also have a place.
The great big bloke beside me worked in fire safety, installing sprinkler systems and whatnot. “I can’t pretend it’s my dream job – I wanted to be a footballer – but it’s OK,” he said. I asked him if he had enough work to be getting on with and he said he had plenty; his issue was finding the staff to do it. “Young people are the problem.”
This, I assumed, would turn out to be the opening line of a discourse on the laziness and entitlement of the youth of today.
But it wasn’t quite like that. He said something different, which went a bit like this: “It’s not that they’re idle, that they don’t want to work, that they don’t want to learn. It’s just that you can’t teach them anything because they’re too distracted to take anything on board.
“I get pissed off with them, but I feel a bit sorry for them as well. They just don’t seem capable of concentrating for long enough for me to show them how to do the job so they can get on and do it with me.
“Every 10 minutes, they’re reaching for their phones. Even if I ban the phones, their minds still seem to go somewhere else, as if they’re thinking about them and what’s on there. God knows what’s on their minds, but it’s not what I’m telling them. Meanwhile, I can’t get the bloody job done.”
This observation isn’t news, obviously, but it’s my bad that I had related this epidemic of scattered minds only to white-collar work and learning. I had never thought of it in terms of what happens on construction sites and so on, where, apart from anything else, the consequences of distraction are more immediate and potentially grave.
On the big screen, one of the young men of England cocked something up. We laughed, agreeing that lack of concentration might be the issue there, too. But my mind – distracted now, ironically – took me back to 1985 and how much more of a liability I would have been then, up on that scaffolding, if I had had a smartphone in my pocket.
As it was, years before anyone I knew had a mobile phone, over and again I would be woken from a reverie by Alan the erection manager yelling: “Brillo! [Nickname; don’t ask.] Eyes on the job! For fook’s sake, pay attention.” But with a phone about my person, connecting me and my already scattered mind to everyone I knew, and all the information, hopes and anxieties in the world, I shudder to think of the consequences. It would have been more than a steel coupler falling through a veranda roof. Yes, I would have been an even worse scaffolder – and that’s saying something.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
• An evening with Adrian Chiles
Join Adrian on 10 October 2024, 7.30pm-8.30pm, where he will discuss with fellow columnist Zoe Williams his brilliantly bemused tour of British life as captured in his new collection of Guardian columns. Book tickets at theguardian.live.com
