Vive la différence

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This article was published 07/01/2017 (3490 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Chantale Lavack leans back in her chair and laughs as she recalls a homework assignment she was given when she was a Grade 2 student at École Précieux-Sang.

It was one of those classic, what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up-type projects, she explains, which required her and her school chums to choose a profession that appealed to them from a list of careers depicted on a poster affixed to their classroom wall.

“It was the regular humdrum,” Lavack continues. “The women (on the poster) were mostly pictured as nurses and teachers and the men were all police officers and firefighters.

“So what I did was modify the sign by changing mécanicien, which is the French word for mechanic, to mécanicienne, which is the feminine version. So yeah, I guess this is something that had been burning in the back of my mind for years, before it finally happened.”

“This” is La petite machine, the one-cylinder engine-repair shop Lavack opened at 298 Enfield Cres. in March 2016.

“I understand there’s a bit of a novelty to the fact this is what I do for a living,” she says, accepting a scribe’s compliment that her fingernails are surprisingly spotless, given the amount of time she spends changing spark plugs and adjusting carburetors.

“Occasionally somebody will say it’s odd to meet a female mechanic, or make the assumption that I’ve got a guy hidden somewhere in the shadows.

“But for the most part, people haven’t seemed too surprised that I’m a woman, when they’re dropping off their stuff. Or if they were, they covered it up pretty well. I mean, nobody’s keeled over, as of yet.”

Lavack, 39, grew up in Norwood. Before her father retired, he was the director of the Desjardins Funeral Chapel, but neither Lavack nor her three siblings were particularly interested in the family biz, she says.

Ten years ago, Lavack worked as a customer service representative at CN Rail. One evening over dinner, her mother mentioned that the son of one of her friends was hoping to take an outdoor power equipment technician course offered at Red River College, but because there was a lengthy waiting list, he wasn’t certain he was going to get in.

“That was when the little wheels inside my head starting turning. I figured, ‘ooh, if I even want to contemplate being a mechanic someday, I should probably get my name in the game, too, before it’s too late.’”

About a month after filing her application, Lavack received a call from one of the course’s instructors. Two weeks after her phone interview, an acceptance letter showed up in her mailbox.

“That was a bit of an exaggeration, but it wasn’t too far off the mark,” she says, when she is asked about an old article from a Red River College newsletter, in which she stated she could distinguish between a wrench and a screwdriver “and that’s about it” when she entered the college’s Notre Dame Avenue campus for the first time, in September 2008.

“I mean, I had a basic knowledge of tools, but as far as how the operation of an engine went, I knew nothing, zero,” she says, noting she wasn’t surprised to discover she was the lone woman in her class of 15 students.

“But I pretty much buried my nose in my textbooks for the next 10 months and by the end of it all, I wound up winning my course’s Snap-on Student Achievement Award, which, for sure, was a nice, little pat on the back.”

From 2009 to 2014, Lavack repaired gas-powered devices such as lawn mowers, rototillers and pressure washers at various small engine repair shops around the city.

Because her profession is largely weather-dependent, however, she sometimes found herself looking for work during winters when it didn’t snow very often (“Snowblowers don’t break down if you never have to use them,” she says matter-of-factly) or summers when rain was scarce, and people weren’t cutting their grass more than once or twice a month.

“Immediately prior to this, I was let go from another shop. If you had asked me at the time, I would have told you I was very disappointed about losing my job.

“But because I was also tired from moving around, and never having that feeling of calling one place in particular home, it allowed La petite machine to happen,” says Lavack, who, with her partner’s blessing, began converting their garage and gazebo into her primary workspace and office, after completing a provincially run business start-up program in June 2015.

Since opening her shop, Lavack feels she’s really started “to come into my own.”

Because she’s a one-woman show, she can’t spin around and yell, “Hey, Joe, have you ever seen this before?” she says with a chuckle, when she finds herself staring at a part or piece of equipment she’s had little experience with.

“Now my only resource is my brain, and trial and error. There’s a lot of that going on, for sure, but that’s OK… that’s how you’re going to learn,” she says, mentioning she feels like “a kid in a candy store” when she’s flipping through Canadian Tire and Princess Auto sales flyers, checking out new tools.

Although Lavack has never asked any of them directly, she gets the sense the women who visit her shop are more at ease dealing with a member of the same sex, versus “some crabby old guy” who answers their queries with a raised eyebrow and a remark along the lines of “You didn’t already know that?”

“If a person lived in an apartment most of their life and never had to own a chainsaw, for example, why would I make the assumption everybody knows how to run one, when they ask something basic like do they have to put oil in it, every time they use it?” she says.

“I might say something like ‘Your car takes oil, but you don’t put oil in it every time you drive it, right?’ But at the same time, I don’t want to say never check your oil because obviously, that’s proper maintenance.”

A couple of weeks ago, Lavack received an email from a woman who had recently completed the same technician’s course she took. Lavack doesn’t know if her correspondent already has a job – she had asked a general question about carburetors, Lavack says – but it got her thinking.

“If La petite machine ever went really big, I think it would be awesome if we could franchise it out as a women-owned-and-operated kind-of-deal across Canada or whatever,” she says.

“On a smaller scale, if I was to have another employee turning wrenches in the back, I would like to think it’d be a woman. I know we’re kind of few and far between but that girl’s email the other day was kind of promising.”

For more information on La petite machine, go to www.lapetitemachine.ca.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca