www.nickhodge.com

(from July 2007 Vista Magazine)

Nick, a recent addi­tion to Microsoft, is a long time blog­ger, presenter and geek. Read Nick’s exploits and stor­ies at http://www.nickhodge.com. A part of Nick’s “job” at Microsoft is to col­lect and record Australia’s Geek Stor­ies. Turn your web browser to http://thegeekstories.com. To hear what Nick is doing almost on a minute by minute basis, catch Nick on http://twitter.com/nickhodge

Grow­ing up on a farm in coun­try South Aus­tralia, I remem­ber the smell of the work shed. The work shed is not where vehicles or anim­als were stored; it is where the weld­ing, banging, fix­ing, wir­ing and gen­eral repairs were made. The smells of oil, grease, pet­rol, arc weld­ing and sea­sons waf­ted out of the nooks and cran­nies also con­tain­ing bolts of unknown vintage.

Out the back of the shed, engines from long decom­mis­sioned cars and trucks stood idle under­neath the gum trees and galahs. In sum­mer, the shed was a cool refuge from the 35 degree heat; and in winter a shel­ter from the rain and wind.

Farm­ers fix all their own equip­ment. From pet­rol and diesel engines to swap­ping the shears on ploughs. Black­smith, engine mech­anic, elec­tronic tech­ni­cian, radio engin­eer: all bases were covered with a myriad of tools and bit logic­ally organ­ized in con­trolled chaos.

Sheds migrated to the back­yards of many sub­urban houses at the same time as the pop­u­la­tion moved to the quarter acre block. Albeit smal­ler than their coun­try cous­ins, the same smells of two-stroke pet­rol for the mower and a half-repaired wash­ing machine from Auntie Joyce usu­ally shared the same corner as a fam­ily of mice who immig­rated from next door. The pool shed con­tain­ing nox­ious chem­ic­als just didn’t suit the poor noses of the domestic mouse.

The shed is a place of sanc­tu­ary for the blokes of the fam­ily. A hid­den esky or bet­ter yet, a small fridge, con­tains a col­lec­tion of beers and after the barbe­que is turned off – the men retreat to the shed to talk about whatever men talk about. Their castle, the house, may have a spare room – but the kids have taken this over with their board games, or the wife has star­ted a home busi­ness and the racks of stock just don’t mix with a good yarn and stories.

Also in the shed, are what are called “weekend shed pro­jects”. Apart from Auntie Joyce’s wash­ing machine – there is a half-completed rock­ing horse – prom­ised to the kids for their 5^th birth­day, but never com­pleted; a ran­dom inven­tion for the garden that just didn’t work and a bicycle or two from the vari­ous lengths of the kids. Each of the bikes has some­thing wrong: miss­ing seat, flat tyre or a handle bar that’s found its way into the wash­ing machine. These pro­jects are never com­pleted as there will always be time at retire­ment to pot­ter around the shed.

Sheds, and week­end shed pro­jects, still exist in the online age. The human ima­gin­a­tion has taken us blokes from paint­ing anim­als in a cave to sort­ing out the 6000 digital images we cap­tured on our last trip to North Queensland.

What is your week­end shed pro­ject? I’ll give you a tip: start now. Retire­ment is just too far away.