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Trades are always hiring. My phone says I walk like 5 miles a day just working in our factory. I use my brain, body, problem-solving skills, and have real conversations with my coworkers daily about how to go about the work and solve problems, or just pass the time when we’re not as busy. I learn new things constantly and enjoy working with my hands and making my work look beautiful, which can be surprisingly deep in the field of industrial electrical work.
Just know that if anyone’s interested in this kinda thing, make sure you have some thick skin and maybe leave a terminally online brain at home
making my work look beautiful
The plumber who did work in my kitchen made a fantastic job of the under-sink pipework. Everything curved and lined up just so, little screw valves instead of clunky taps, it’s lovely. It’s hidden away behind cleaning products, but I know it’s there and it makes me smile. Thank you to tradespeople who enjoy their work!
Which trade are you in?
I’m gonna guess industrial electrical work
Yes. Specifically industrial control and automation, which is apples to oranges to commercial and industrial building power distribution for example.
I worked for GE as a grunt first building inverters for solar fields and power plants. Then I did field service for them in the American southwest when they shut down the factory and sent all the work to GE Germany and Japan.
Then when all of the re-work we were doing was done, I passed on traveling indefinitely and came back home to Pittsburgh. I got hired opening a new factory for a company that makes machinery used for plastics recycling and worked there for close to a decade as their only electrical technician. That shop holds a deep place in my heart for the connections and friendships I made there. But I saw us getting slow as fuck and everyone quitting and decided to switch jobs this year for a better paycheck and closer commute. Now I work solely in testing and do a bit of design work and drafting.
It would be nice to have that kind of job security
Well it’s either that or you design something like a “Jump To Conclusions” mat
Doing excel for 9 hours straight is far better than breathing toxic gases inside a damp,badly lit coal mines tho. Juste saying…
Yes of course and eating trash is better than eating shit
What I mean is that work conditions have vastly improved compared to the last century (thanks to unions). It may be miserable yes but it’s a far cry from the horrible work that our ancestors were forced to endure starting from a young age.
I get what you mean. Ofc class struggle has brought us many concessions, technology progresses over time and the industrialized countries add more and more abstraction layers to manual work.
My point would be that we do have to view the working conditions relative to what’s possible at the given time. Given the resources humanity has today, fully automated luxury (queer) space communism is within realistic reach!
It’s a similar answer as to world hunger: it’s a systematic distribution - not resource - problem. That being artificially created scarcity thanks to a profit and greed driven economic base (capitalism) and inequitable/inefficient allocation of resources (markets)
I can only agree
Is it tho?
Depends on the trash. Depends on the shit.
Doing excel for 9 hours straight is far better than breathing toxic gases inside a damp,badly lit coal mines tho. Juste saying…
Give it time. Those work conditions are getting gradually worse all over again as the internal contradictions intensify.
At the pearly gates… what did you accomplish in life?
Uh I excelled 9 hours a day for 40 years.
Great, come on in!
I’d love to have a job where I get paid to work with excel the whole day. Not kidding.
It’s pretty dope, especially when you get to work from home. I’m usually in my pajamas snuggled under a blanket. Much comfier than dress pants in a cubicle.
It’s not even the dress pants in cubicle. For 8 years I was working in factories on the production floor. This included heavy industry, night shifts, dust, noise, blinding lights, near freezing temperatures and a real threat of loosing an appendage. Now I’m working from home, sterling at an Excell sheet in my pajamas, under a blanket.
WFH is my goal, already doing the excel, company I’m in is really relaxed, so can’t complain, but WFH would be nice
I never got why people love working from home so much. Home has so many distractions like my PC, my phone, my fridge, etc.
It also helps to just physically seperate my work from my free time. My home is my fortress where no work shall ever be done, a place for resting and wanking.
Also, work was like 90% of my social interaction and the pandemic really did a number on me.
In a cruel twist of fate, I now work almost exclusively from home, a dream for others, a dread for me.
Have you tried walking to and from work every day? It can help you pretend they are different places.
You wake up and do your morning routine, then you walk around the block and start your working day when you reach your home office. Then at the end of the day walk around the block and home to mark the end of your work day.
I waste just as much time on my phone at work that I do at home, but at home I’m able to freely seek out a distraction when I need a break, and devote my attention to it until I’ve got some motivation again, then get back to work. In the office I have to try taking a break covertly when I need one, which doesn’t lower my stress very much, and leads to me taking even longer breaks trying to regain my motivation.
As for separating work and free time, I have no issue stepping away at the end of my shift; I only work for money - I don’t give a shit about the company itself - so, as soon as I’m no longer counting the time toward my paycheck, any and all motivation to continue working immediately evaporates.
A lot of people seem to really need social interaction, which definitely seems to be the biggest reason they might not enjoy long-term work from home. I seem to be the exception to that. During the height of the pandemic even my most extroverted friends eventually started craving social interactions, but I would stock up at Costco and go literal months without ever once leaving my house, and I loved it.
The last block will be “Prompt Writing/Engineering”
I feel incredibly blessed to have a job that allows me to do my work on my own time, and to utilize company resources to educate myself while on the clock. I honestly get excited to go to work nowadays, and it’s great. :)
You have drawn a good lot it seems. Tho no matter how pleasant the job, you still create more value for your boss than you get paid back by them… (value extraction for profit lessss goooo)
Is there is job that isn’t value extraction for profit?
That is the entire point of hiring someone is to make more profit.
Workers cooperatives typically focus on more than pure profit since the values of the workers and owner are aligned.
These can be broad and intangible goals compared to seeing the money numbers go up and down, like instead of getting laid off in economic hardship, the worker/owners receive a pay cut. Or you might hire more people than there’s work so that everyone can leave a bit earlier.
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True, although this can be alliviated by working in a worker-owned cooperative business
not rly, market machinations force co-ops to behave like for-profit capitalist companies regardless. The hell of capitalism is the firm, not the fact that it has a boss. Even if you have great conditions as a worker-owner, your privilege is just built on the backs of non-owner (aka. 2nd class) workers and outsourcing (see Mondragon in Spain for example)
Don’t get me wrong though: co-ops are still virtually always better than “standard” corporations imo. What I mean to say is that the systemic problem of capitalism is not solvable by just creating companies “of a new type”
You’re forgetting the fact that your work has zero value in a vacuum though. If you enjoy your employment and are well remunerated for it, then a cut for the enabler isn’t actually unreasonable. Having said that, the cut taken is usually way too high, but that’s another discussion…
It’s pretty plain for me to see it. I still like my job as well, but I know my company charges clients 3x my hourly wage for an hour of my time.
If you and your co-workers cut out the middle man…
We get sued for breaching the non-compete clause in our contract?
Oh believe me, I’m well aware. Having a healthy work environment doesn’t change the fact that it gets harder and harder every year to pay rent.
That’s why it makes me livid when landbastards talk about “passive income”… it’s just extorting money of working ppl (who actually create value) for the “privilege” of having one’s basic needs met
I somehow managed to avoid excel my entire life, and I’ll be so lost whenever using it is actually going to be required of me
Get on Google sheets or something to stay organized… Learn how to use index match and how to nest formulas (e.g. countifs, sumifs).
It’s incredibly frustrating when someone at work can’t navigate an excel file or a spreadsheet.
I love google sheets. I made some nifty little functions in it. Then I discovered appscript and things got a little weird. I made an automated CRM system. An automailer. An animated dancing badger made by changing the colours of the cells. It gets a bit hazy after that.
It’s incredibly frustrating when someone at work can’t navigate an excel file or a spreadsheet.
Oh, I know the feeling, be it in other areas.
9 hours? Every day? Where? I work 8 hours and obviously only 5 days a week. I thought that’s the norm.
