One of my lecturers at Uni had been a professional sculptor when he was younger. He was maybe 60 when i met him.
One one time he had a couple of drinks and confessed that ALL his sculptor friends were dead, and had he not become a lecturer he probably would be too.
Regular contact with harsh chemicals (even on your own terms) seems to just be pretty gnarly for your health in general.
My brother in law died recently. He is the only member of my family I gave a shit about. He worked for a few years at a place where they made light poles. I visited him once. It was a toxic nightmare. He left that job to work for Terminix. He worked there for nearly a decade. He died last year of cancer after a years long battle at 60.
I worked in my twenties at chemical plants, power boilers and nuke plants. I didn’t quit even after I noticed how all these people who were twenty to thirty years older than me were dying and how they were dying. I quit when three other men in my age group two of them very healthy and one who was a alcoholic died within months of each other after being doused with chemicals when they cut into a void while wrecking out a storage tank at a 3M plant I had worked at.
Now thirty years later all of the friends I knew who were boilermakers during that time are gone including one who now that I look back on it was a father figure to me.
“Kid, you’re 18 now. You have to decide. Do you want to breathe toxic fumes the rest of your life or sit in front of a computer for 10 hours a day?”
In a lot of places, you do both.
Engineering definitely lets you you enjoy both options simultaneously. I’ve dealt with liquid nitrogen leaks, a near miss with an icicle falling on me, battery fires, and seen accidental finger sticks with used medical devices. Working with spreadsheets, test reports, and programming scripts in a noisy open concept office is usually the better experience. Usually.
Yeah, I like the exercise of going to the plant floor, the fumes and needing to stick my hands in heavy machinery, not so much
Look, I’m not going to sugar coat this. I have been a machinist for 16 years. I witnessed someone turning into mist via lathe. The entire company closed for a month. I wish I had problems like “Oh shit I pushed bad code to prod!”
Oh my God I’m so sorry. That sounds haunting.
I know. We weren’t able to roll back prod for forty minutes, and we lost 0.002% of our annual uptime.
Oh you meant the pink mist machine?
It has given me ptsd. There was also the time a guy drilled his finger in half.
I recently took a 20% pay cut to move from a factory to a remote desk job. No regrets.
I ended up getting a pay raise, and out of the field by switching gigs. Now I just shitpost, and clatter away ona keyboard from my swivel-throne. It’s great, and it’s remote.
When people say “remote,” is that the new code word for “working from home or wherever the hell I want to work, such as a swimming pool at a resort in Cabo San Lucas”?
sometimes, not always
I’ve found that people use “work from home” more often when they mean actual work. slightly more often. most people I know still use remote interchangeably for work from home.
I wish. My work computer is a 2 monitor PC setup so not a lot of ability to travel. But I can sometimes move to my parents house for a change of scenery.
My work computer is a 2 monitor PC setup so not a lot of ability to travel
¿Huh?
Just throw a laptop and a portable monitor into a backpack. I personally travel with 4.
The company gave me a stationary pc. Where am I supposed to get a laptop from?
Welp, you didnt mention it was a desktop PC. To answer your question, you can ask your employeer to issue you a laptop, or, if a policy allows it, set up the things you need for work on your personal one. Neither is particularly uncommon
I mean, yeah, but things should be better for desk workers too. We’re all being taken advantage of in different ways. I was WAAAAAAAAY happier working in auto shops and occasionally getting injured than I ever have been working in IT. If I could make ends meet doing that I’d go back in a heartbeat. It’s fucked that anyone doing skilled or dangerous work should struggle to own a home and live comfortably.
i love shitposts that are way more well-written than they have any business being haha
So true, every non-desk job is a non-stop nightmare of blood and guts. I’ve worked a physical job for 30 years and saw a guy twist his ankle once and another guy cut his finger and need two stitches. I pray the nightmares will stop
I’m a field scientist and it’s the perfect job. It’s a mix of desk and fieldwork. Sure injuries can happen out in the field, but I’ve never seen anything too gruesome. Just cuts, scrapes, and bumps for the most part.
It’s pretty nice that some days I get to go be in the woods doing my job
they say our time is over
They say our time is through
They say you need no union if your collar isn’t blue
Well that is just another lie the boss is telling you!
For the union makes us strong!
Those people aren’t saying desk jobs are worse or even “just as bad” to make physical laborers feel better; it’s a word of warning to those with so-called “safe” jobs to be cautious of issues many people aren’t aware of.
yep. I’m just tired of people not recognizing the very real dangers of desk jobs and long hours. look at any engineering department and you’ll see fat guys that can’t move, and seemingly healthy people with issues.
yes, we’re not about to cut our fingers off at our desk. but being at your desk for 50+ hours a week has real consequences on your body, that have very real effects on your life outside of work. and you need to know about that and handle it.
I worked in a Mexican restaurant for two months. I burned my finger on the beans pot on my first day, and my hands were always wet from washing dishes, so it didn’t heal until after I quit.
I actually like using excel.
Yesterday one of my colleagues announced he had a headache so was going to have a nap. We all just wished him well and carried on without him.
Compare that to most farm workers who are lucky to have all 4 major limbs.
Today I worked a corporate event. It was a lunch for all the bigwigs celebrating the completion of a freeway… that was completed 10 years ago.
These people just spend all day jerking eachother off while the guys who actually built the road are still out there working.
That’s a constant at any big company, regardless of the type of work the company does as a whole. The higher-ups talk to each other and down to the rank-and-file in nonsense corporate-speak, congratulating each other for accomplishments they had little to do with or even actively impeded. Meanwhile, the people actually doing the work just go about their day, getting things done.
Every once in a while, we all get together and try to decipher what the “leaders” actually meant in their big presentation about the plans for the company in the coming year and it’s going to affect us.
There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing chips fly and that solid block of steel turn into something underneath my tools. You would have to pay me an excessive wage to have me sit in front of a screen instead standing on a lathe or mill.
I mean…that’s where the excessive wages are…so
Dwight you ignorant slut
That’s called fat butt disease
