I’d say high rise iron workers seem the coolest. Think back to that black and white picture everyone has seen of the two guys sitting on a beam hundreds of feet up eating lunch.
Maybe just plain ol carpenter. Like part of “cool” is unaffected or aloof. A dude or chick who builds their own home and the furniture inside? That’s just cool. A lot of the stuff listed here actually takes a decent amount of nerdiness or at least passion. While the jobs are awesome, idk that they’re the coolest.
naval carpentry, it’s something that differs a lot based in the country, and it’s usually passed down from father to son
I build spacecraft and I think that’s pretty cool.
Sounds pretty cool
The coolest.
Not gonna be cool to anyone but me probably.
I made seperator tapes and cable filler for wires. Was extrusion, slitting and spooling all at once.
Its all plasic, but the spooling end of the line looked like textiles. Got to carry a giant ass air “gun” to doff with. That gun was much fun.
Thought it was cool af. Got to do beast mode everyday; there were so many moving parts happening all at once, I never got bored. Leaned to swap products “on the fly”. Doing a change over while the machine was still running always gave me good feely feels.
Everyone who could run those lines, well, mind you, were absolute gods to me. Took over a year to train anyone new, and so many didnt last. tough work, super dopamine hitting.
Plumbers
Source: movies
I’ve been told fork lift drivers fuck
Almost exclusively by fork lift drivers but they seem really convincing
You’re mishearing. They fork.
Forklift operator here, it’s all true.
They do
Deep sea welding is pretty badass
I remember watching a documentary about someone who was welding under the ocean, and simultaneously inside of a empty undersea pipeline that they had to swim a ways down to reach the problem area. That’s too damn extreme for me. I would sign up to be a doordash driver who only delivers to the worst Karens before I put on a single flipper. :D. Crazy hardcore.
And the accidents… Those documentaries are in a category of their own. If there’s a massive pressure difference between two sides of a wall, all sorts of horrible things can happen. Pure nightmare fuel.
Delta V is not your friend.
In one documentary it was called Δp, for pressure. Either way, bad stuff.
That was probably me getting v and p mixed up.
Are those the ones that spend long lengths of time at extremely high pressure and need to essentially live in a pressure vessel for the duration of their work?
Saturation divers. Something I didn’t realize, they haul the pressure vessel to the surface at the end of every shift, they don’t live at the bottom, but they’re under pressure.
But their voices are so funny!
That’s just one place with great pressure differences. It could also be water on two sides of a wall in a dry dock. Those accidents are equally disturbing.
Not to mention the things drifting around you in the darkness that you can’t see but can probably feel.
Get your tentacles off me or I’ll weld them together! :D
Yikes 😱
Yeah that’s a spooky one. I know a lady working on getting into that now.
So many traditional blue collar jobs have connotations associated with them that make the workers irredeemably uncool.
But, machinists. I just love machining.
Yeah, machinists don’t judge when you start talking about being real into cnc
😉
Traditional blacksmith by far
honestly, yeah
Fair enough
Firefighters are pretty cool.
I disagree; it seems like they’d often be quite warm.
Raise the bar. Smoke jumper
That is undeniably a very cool kind of firefighter, but firefighting is a team sport and I think they’re all cool.
I’m not sure I’d consider them blue collar. Idk maybe, they do use pretty wild tools for demo sometimes.
It’s definitely blue collar. Firefighters do a lot more than spray hoses, it’s a ton of manual labor and heavy equipment even when fires aren’t burning.
Thats fair
Anything with a chainsaw
Shit is sick
I think glass makers are pretty cool. Casually risk 3rd degree burns every day.
Hell yeah, I’ve been wanting to sign up for a glass blowing class. I think it would be so cool to have some self-blown glass on display.
Cool product after too.
Hard to beat those pictures
Id give honorable mention to linemen. Casually handling thousands of volts from the top of a bucket truck while traffic whizzes past is pretty badass. Plus responding to emergencies like hurricanes, tornadoes etc. Its also usually a union job.
Im just a wireman myself, I like to keep my shocks under 277V
We had a lineman up here get attacked by a cougar. Fought off the cat with a 4-inch pocketknife, got himself out of the bush and to a highway before getting a ride to the hospital.
Absolute badass.
I knew someone who did this kind of work. They don’t wait until the weather improves. They climb poles in 70mph winds with sideways blowing hail and lightning if that’s what needs to happen. That’s crazy hardcore!
Oh yeah. Waaay more guts than ive got. They make good money and by God they earn it
Linemen also have a cool song about them
Years ago I ran a pub quiz and one of the categories was “Name the song from this description of the lyrics”:
A low-level government employee abuses his access to national infrastructure to secretly spy on a woman he is obsessed with. He acknowledges that he has a unhealthy obsession and that he really should back off, but quickly managed to convince himself to carry on, assuring the audience that he is still spying on her.
I always thought he was an electrical worker and it was a love song to a power plant.
Always cracks me up when Ron Swanson sings this while stealing cable for April and Andy 🤣
I felt cool crushing garbage at a landfill. Gross as hell but garbage crusher feels like riding a boat on the ocean
Do you count movie crews as ‘blue collar?’
F1 pit crews?
NASA mechanics?
Sure
Film crew.
Because you’re getting paid specifically to see famous people naked.
Are we using the US version of blue collar? If so that usually means folks doing manual/maintenance labour that are not a part of the middle class.
I think the definition is anyone who does manual labor that doesn’t require a college degree.
A movie electrician can easily earn a six figure salary. Upper middle class.
