I often get the sense that I’m in the only one here doing manual labor but I’m sure there are others.

Identify yourselves.

  • @[email protected]
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    16 months ago

    Hands themselves stay clean, but through my gloves/gown, I’m regularly elbow-deep into blood, guts, and poop.

    Surgical technologist. It gets pretty nasty.

    Pay is kinda shit though, so I’m trying to switch over to nursing.

  • @[email protected]
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    16 months ago

    I do occasional vehicle maintenance, like replacing brakes, starters, alternators, water pumps, radiators, etc.

    Last one I did the other week was replace an old rotted leaky fuel line. Fun fun…

  • @[email protected]
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    16 months ago

    Shipwright welder. I crawl all throughout the bowels of Navy and civilian ships with my gear in tow. I build new areas, cut out old areas, and perform repairs on hulls and pipes.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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      16 months ago

      Do you get covered from head to toe with grease and grime? Does it pay well? I have a friend who’s about ready to wrap up his underwater welding classes, and supposedly he’ll make some big bucks after he graduates.

  • @[email protected]
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    16 months ago

    My boss just had me change two coworkers’ passwords so they wouldn’t be able to log back in.

    I keep washing and washing, but the blood won’t come off.

  • @[email protected]
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    16 months ago

    Facility maintenance. We grease motors, change belts, tighten bolts. One of the fuel pumps on our generator has a leak, so that’s a fun bit of dirty hands.

    My approach to maintenance also involves a lot of cleaning, because I believe clean equipment runs better over time. So cleaning off fan blades, insides of electrical cabinets, sumps, etc. We also fix sinks and toilets.

  • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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    6 months ago

    I don’t have a dirty job anymore, but the dirtiest job I’ve had by far was industrial carpenter. I’d go to work with clean jeans and a clean white shirt, and every day I’d come home with jeans that were black from the knees up, and a shirt that was black from the chest down.

    I had to wear white shirts because nothing else would come clean. Only white with a lot of bleach would give any appearance of being laundered after a day at work on that job.

    I still have a T-shirt from that job, some-odd 20 years later, and it has Hilti C100 industrial epoxy stains all over it, just as hard as the day the shirt was stained. That’s my “shit’s about to get real” work around the house shirt.

  • @[email protected]
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    16 months ago

    I unload pallets of computer gear. That’s not the main part of my job, but it’s something that happens from time to time.

  • @[email protected]
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    06 months ago

    Machinist here. But not just any machinist. I work almost exclusively with graphite. I’m sure you can imagine what a mess that makes. We do have a powerful dust collector that runs all day, but it doesn’t catch everything. We get covered in the dust every day. The company does have a locker room and showers for us though, so it’s not too bad. We still leave nice and clean.

      • @[email protected]
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        16 months ago

        Sorry for the delay. Apparently this app doesn’t tell me when people reply.

        Most of what I make ends up in space. We use pyrolytic graphite, which we actually make ourselves on site, which can stand up to some pretty extreme temperatures with very little expansion or contraction. There are other applications as well, mostly involving any situation where conductivity is important. Some hospital imaging machines use it instead of aluminum in high temperature scenarios. It’s very good at what it does, but its use is fairly limited due to its absolutely insane price tag.