Happy Labor Day…one day early. Tomorrow, I have to write about something else.

If you’re a regular reader of the Ewellogy, you know I admire work in all its forms. This year, I want to focus on tools. A few months ago, one of my neighbors moved out, and they used “U-Boxes” to do it. I regret I didn’t get my own picture. This one comes from the U-Haul site.

The U-Box is like a PODS container, only smaller:

I was fascinated with the process. Six U-Boxes were dropped off in my neighbor’s driveway. I watched them load the last couple of units. Then, the interesting part. A lady, just as in the U-Box picture above, drove a flat-bed trailer up and using a forklift, picked up each container and put it on the trailer. Six units, one lady, and a special forklift. If you’re wondering where the forklift goes when the trailer is loaded, she just pulls up behind the trailer, inserts the forklifts’ blades into a special slot, and the forklift lifts itself up and rides behind the load.

Amazing. The pickup lady I watched was 63 years old. The Labor Day lesson? The power of tools. One person of no special strength or ability (other than training, of course) with the proper tools – a flat-bed trailer and a forklift – loaded and transported a whole houseful of belongings in a very short time.

In India I’ve seen labor without tools. I’ve seen small men carrying 100-pound sacks of potatoes on their backs. Bless them for their effort, but it takes a long time to move potatoes that way.

I saw guys in India laying a foundation for a house by hand using 50-pound sacks of concrete. It might take a month to build that small foundation.

By contrast, my friend, house-builder Gary, poured a 3600-square-foot foundation before lunch with four men, a caravan of cement mixer trucks, and a device that pumps that cement through a pipe directed by one guy to exactly where he wants it. (Not a picture of the process I saw, but they used a machine like this one.)

Tools: the labor multiplier.

We are blessed in this country with tools, built by labor assisted by yet other tools. I give thanks for the men and women who invent and build tools. A huge factor in our productivity. And, of course, thanks as always to the folks who use those tools to serve us.

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. (Genesis 1.31, ESV, emphasis mine)