Is it just me? Whenever an electrician, plumber or painter comes to my house, I never know what to do. If I am alone I wonder if I should leave the front door open in case Mick or Dave turns out to have a secret penchant for hitting women over the head with paintbrushes or screwdrivers and I need to yell out to the neighbours or make a quick getaway on my pushbike.
But of course I don’t for fear of being rude, so instead I hope that my playing kindly hostess will delay any attack until I have at least had my breakfast.
“Would you like some herbal refreshment or Coke?” I ask, to which the tradie shoots me a suspicious look.
“Oh – no,” I yelp, as it slowly dawns on me he might think I am suggesting getting high together. “I mean herbal tea or Coca Cola.”
But this is met with even more gruffness: “If I’m thirsty, I think I know where the backyard hose is.”
Long pause.
Suddenly the sight of all those tools makes me nervous so I blurt out, “Ooh, that’s a big cable? What does that do?”
And either the tradesman is hard of hearing or he doesn’t know what the cable does either.
“Well,” I humph, because who likes being ignored in their own house? “Well, if you don’t need me anymore I’ll just be upstairs.”
And I flounce up the stairs feeling terribly like Scarlett O’Hara and that I have just dismissed the help.
I’m sure there are lovely tradesmen out there who actually converse and who buy their wives tools for Christmas (“Oh, look, what daddy got mummy kids, a, er, jointer,” one blonde beauty chokes out, wondering as she has for the past five years if she should have married that other boy who went on to own a hotel chain).
But I have only dealt with tradies who grunt and have always wondered vaguely (as they are knocking holes through my walls and flooding my bathroom) if I should become one of those handy women (think Sarah Palin meets Home Improvement tool girl Heidi).
But that would mean actually being handy and the last time I checked I was still unable to bend my thumb after an unfortunate incident involving a cat hammock and a hammer.
The next best thing would be a tradeswoman. A female tradie, I feel, would be happy to join me for a tea or hot chocolate and a plate of warm scones and, well, communicate.
So imagine my delight when I heard that a young female plumber had won a fancy trades award. Canberra Institute of Technology plumbing student Rachael Keiley was named Australian Apprentice of the Year at the 2008 National Training Excellence Awards. And apparently there are loads of them – female tradies.
Keiley, 23, now works as a contracts administrator for Canberra fit-out and refurbishment company SMI and wants to move into project management. But when she was doing her apprenticeship and fixing leaking taps and whatever else plumbers do, she came across people who would have been much happier dealing with a man.
“For a female to be in this industry you really have to market [yourself and target clients], so for me I’d definitely do all the single women and the elderly,” she says.
“I wouldn’t necessarily not go to blokes’ places, but you’d always have a lot more problems because they didn’t feel comfortable and they had this ego problem.
“They’d feel more comfortable with a bloke coming in and fixing [a problem] than a girl.”
However, Keiley concedes things are “slowly changing” although she thinks that “blokes will always be really easily intimidated [by a tradeswoman]”.
To succeed Keiley decided she needed to act like “one of the boys” – which doesn’t mean putting up dirty pictures or having spitting competitions from the top of building sites.
“What I usually say to girls who just get into the trade is if you’re onsite you have to work like one of the boys because you have to get that respect level,” she says.
“Like a lot of girls think they can wear makeup and flirt with all the boys but it’s not about that at all.
“You’re getting paid to do exactly the same job they are, so why should they be carting everything around for you or doing twice the work? That really is a big issue for some of the blokes.”
That even extends to doing “gross” or “dirty” jobs (what on earth can she be talking about?).
“You just have to be up for the challenge and just go in and do it. As a female you’re always putting in [more].
“Like I always felt I was putting in 200 per cent more than all the boys but you’d get less recognition and that’s just the way the industry is at the moment.”
Keiley says when she worked as a plumber “less than one per cent [of my job] was dealing with pooh” although she does have some “gross stories”.
She remembers one house where the sewage had overflowed on to the front yard.
“So I got out the gumboots and was wading through this crap trying to find this drain and I had to get a shovel out and try to dig all this sewage away.
“And sewage is pretty gross, like it’s stinky and there’s toilet paper and shit flying everywhere. I was like, ‘Holy crap,’” she laughs, without a trace of irony.
These days, working mostly in the office she can “look a little bit nice at work”, but surprisingly says she can miss the plumber uniform.
“When I was on the tools I always thought, ‘Oh, I wish I could just wear nice clothes to work, wear jewellery and makeup, have nails.’
“But now that I’m here I’m like, ‘Oh God, I wish I could just roll out of bed and jump on the floor and wriggle around a bit and put on these big clothes on that you’ve worn two days straight and go to work smelly, no makeup, and your hair’s everywhere but you’ve got a hat on so it doesn’t matter.’”
Keiley never set out to be a plumber (“Hell no, who grows up wanting to be a plumber?”) and had the marks to go to university but is amazed at the diverse employment opportunities the trade has given her, as well as the added advantages of no HECS debt, on-the-job training, and high employability.
As well as being able to fix her own leaking shower, learning a trade has changed her life.
“When you go into a trade straight away you’re into the workforce and you're making all these networking connections and you’re getting all the skills you need up front,” she explains.
“I’ve got a lot of friends at uni and they study and they party and they’re really institutionalised almost, whereas going out on a trade we’re learning a lot of [life skills], like we definitely have to budget because you do start out on a low wage.”
Entering a trade has also changed her perception of tradies.
“A lot of the comments that have been made to me is that trades are for people who drop out of school, who can’t go through to Year 12, who aren’t smart enough to go to university, who can’t sit in a classroom and get a degree.
“But for me I’ve completely seen a different side to it: [trades are] for people who don’t want to waste their time getting a degree.”
Keiley was quite the talker when I met her at a Dickson café, where we both, yes, had hot chocolates.
Now, anyone have the number of a female sparkie?