So, how did you spend Saturday evening? Here's mine. Elaine, Melissa, Nan, Jerry and I picked up a pile of pizzas at Pizza by Alex, a couple of bottles of wine and some beer and drove 28 minutes (according to Google maps) to share with Nancy and Craig. After we ate the pizza, we discussed the rest of the evening. As you might expect, we went in different directions. The girls, decided that they were gonna go to the piano bar at the Front Porch, a gay bar in Ogunquit and the guys decided to stay back, talk fishing, woodworking and business while watching a chick flick on TV.
Yeah, you read it right. Girls to the gay bar. Guys and the chick flick. (You should've seen the girls when they got back. They were the hit of the party.)
OK, so that's the entertainment part of the post. Now we need a lesson. If you explored the links above, you may have realized that both Jerry and Craig are into fishing as well as working with wood and we (they mostly) started talking about making fishing flies, seasons, spots, varieties of fish, etc. and they started talking about their approaches to fly-tying. Jerry said that he could copy, reproduce or manufacture anything, but Craig tended to be more original and throw in an extra loop here, gizmo there. (Sorry. I didn't write down the terms.) The point is that Jerry described himself as a craftsman and Craig as an artist. (Think about that for a minute.)
Then they started talking about woodworking. The tools they used. The techniques. It was fun to watch these two guys have so much in common as they met for the first time. Back to woodworking. I've seen Craig take something that he finds at a junk yard, broken, missing pieces and restore it to it's original, sometimes better, beauty. So, again, they started using words like craftsman, artist and then expert.
So, here's the question. Should you call yourself an expert? Is it important that you call yourself an expert. Is it more important for someone else to call you an expert? Is it detrimental to call yourself an expert? What do you think? What do you call yourself?