When I was out on the tools, I hated working on people's houses, especially when they were home. I just seemed to focus better on the task when the owners weren't there, plus I was used to working on new construction projects so for 95% of my jobs there was no owner as such (yet). I was quite happy for them to stay inside or do whatever they had to do, kept them out of my hair. As long as they paid their bills on time who cares right?
I have noticed though, since progressing into the engineering consultancy field, I get so much more respect from people than I did as a tradesman. It's really quite disgusting the way that people treat tradesmen as a lower class of people then certain other professions. I used to do a lot of retail fitout work (electrical) and sometimes I would have to go back to a shop after it was finished to do something, and the snotty girls behind the counter (especially in shops like Mimco, Guess, Hugo Boss etc) would treat you like absolute dirt, I felt like saying "honey, I earn more in an hour than you do in your whole pathetic day of selling this useless shit so you can be as much of a bitch to me as you like, I'm the one laughing..."
That being said, a lot of tradesmen bring down the rest of us, by acting totally unprofessional, dressing like a slob, doing shit work, using bad/dumb language around customers etc etc. I got pretty disillusioned by the whole "tradie" term, it has basically stereo-typed every tradesman as a dirty, slobby, pie-eating half-a-brain - which I know for a fact most of us are not.
