A few weeks ago I had construction workers at my place. They needed to work on the heating system in the basement, which was a two-day job involving three guys. As they had to walk in and out of my place and wanted to keep the door unlocked, I worked from the ground floor during that time. This gave me some interesting insights about men in blue collar jobs working together. As you can imagine, this is quite a contrast to the typical soy-addled modern office workplace.

It is worth pointing out that I was sitting quite close to those workers, as they were just one flight of stairs down. Thus, I could hear them when they spoke to each other. My biggest surprise was that they did not talk a lot during their work. At most, I occasionally heard someone ask for a specific tool and a few times someone asked for assistance about holding up some piece so that they could bolt it onto the wall. Otherwise, their communication must have either been large non-verbal or perhaps they were so used to working with each other that they had a very effective separation of tasks in place. Instead of talking, they had some music on, which revealed some pretty good taste, if I may say so, with plenty of rock classics and probably not a singe track that was released after the year 2000.

The conduct of those men just doing their job was in stark contrast to how mixed-sex or, worse, all-female teams work. I had the doubtful pleasure of doing an internship in Public Relations a long time ago. This was overall a pretty horrible experience. The rank-and-file had shared offices with four or five desks, arranged as a wide rectangle. It looked like an oversized dinner table with unfortunate dimensions. The work was not particularly interesting and often downright tedious. It was also not a lot of work, but in order to fill the time, there was essentially a continuous conversation from morning to evening that was only interrupted by our lunch break. You can bet that they kept talking about the same bullcrap during lunch, too, but I hung out with the other interns.

There was a certain art to the brain-dead conversations happening in that office, which is surely replicated in offices all over the Western world. As soon as there was a lull for more than perhaps half a minute, someone made a situational remark, which prompted the others to chime in, and round and round this went. Sometimes, one of the women went off a long tangent about her life or her love life (or lack thereof) and when nobody thought it was appropriate to ask any questions, there was another lull, but not for long. I should add that this was before Facebook was popular in normie circles. Today, those people just spend the entire day on social media, doing a bit of work throughout the day.

When those blue collar guys were done, they left, knowing that thanks to their work there is now a functional heating system in someone’s house. In contrast, in a typical bullshit job, nothing really happens if you do not show up for a day or two. In fact, I know of companies where the managers are so little involved that they do not even notice if you do not show up every once in a while, or if you spend basically the entire day browsing the Internet. You could not pull this off in a blue-collar job. Just the thought of some dude just putting his tools down and spending three hours on his phone is ridiculous.

I do not want to glamorize those blue-collar jobs, though. While it is positive that there was some camaraderie among the aforementioned guys, it is also quite obvious that those jobs will eventually grind you down. At least one of them smoked, of course not in the house but so often that you smelled him before you saw him. They also had the habit of sitting together at the end of the day, having a beer, which was apparently non-negotiable for them, and optionally smoking a cigarette. Habitual alcohol use and smoking are probably less damaging to your health than working in a shared office, and some of the people there were also habitual drinkers.