Ask Lemmy

I've done all kinds of random jobs but like to tell anyone who will listen that my time as a cleaner was possibly the best of them all.

I worked in a building that was entirely dedicated to operating and adminning a traffic tunnel, so there were normal office rooms but also cool control rooms full of flashing lights and interesting displays and friendly people who were only too happy to infodump about it all.

The top floor was entirely given over to a conference room featuring a massive scale model of our tunnel but also the surrounding road system, complete with tiny toy cars. That room also had a hot drinks machine that was entirely free to employees so most of my breaks were spent up there with a book drinking hot chocolate.

Yeah, cleaning toilets and buffing floors is not exactly going to keep your mind occupied, but that just means it's free to wander to more interesting places. No stress, nothing to take home at the end of the day.

If you can get by on the generally lower pay and get to clean somewhere interesting there are a lot of unexpected perks, tbh.

Trades. Learn a trade. Electrician?

If you're outgoing at all, waiting tables is the shit. I support a family of five working 32hrs a week. I meet interesting people, including celebrities. My coworkers are some of the kindest and funniest people you'll ever meet. And I easily get 15K steps in every working day at a minimum. Free food and sometimes drinks, of course as a perk. And your job is to make people happy, to make their lives better in an immediate and appreciable way, so it's very fulfilling work.

But it's not for someone with thin skin.

How old are you? I am assuming you are more interested in the trades?

If you like to travel go work for an airline. You could work as an aircraft mechanic if you are willing to go to trade school or work in one of a few different jobs around logistics or baggage handling. None of these jobs are customer facing, are often Union and you get to fly the world for free. Just make sure you get on with an international carrier or switch to one as soon as possible.

I've been watching a guy on youtube be a linesmen. Seems like a good job if you like electricity and a little danger in your life.

Something really boring-sounding at a corporation, like auditing the document reviews, or matching invoices with purchase orders, or filing regulatory paperwork.

If you can get factory work somewhere with a union, the pay is high, stress is minimal, and the overtime is optional. I was an engineer at a place with a unionized shop. They went on strike, so the company recruited the office to work production until they could get real scabs in. Zero stress for two weeks.

The point is to find some place with a union. If you go somewhere without a union, the pay is shit, management will treat you like shit, and you're expendable. Plus, mandatory overtime.

Stagehand work is tons of fun, honestly! If you're American or Canadian and live somewhere with a decent music/stage production scene there's probably an IATSE local in your area you can do gigs with as overhire.

If you don't mind the hours, working on a garbage truck can be really good from what I hear. But oldy very dangerous too. My cousins husband was a garbageman, then he fell off the truck (I forget how) and was seriously hurt permanently. But until then he really loved what he did.

Geotechnical jobs.

I live in a major US metro area, and finding time a damn soils engineer was a nightmare. There are very few around and it can take months to get on their calendar because they’re spread so damn thin.

Those people who go up alongside skyscrapers and wash the windows.

Anything you do with an statistics degree.

I work as an environmental engineer that does inspections of industrial, government, and military facilities. Every inspection I get to tour a different place and learn how it works and how things are made. I've gotten to see some amazing places like

-NASA rocket testing sites -shuttered nuclear weapons production processes, -the factory that makes all the flavoring for Dr pepper/potpourri/cherry/fake almond (it's made starting with paint thinner, yikes) -refineries -military bases

It's fascinating to both see how the world actually works, and how stuff is made, the benefits to society/vs costs to society and environment, and every place has its own site-specific culture. I find so many people take for granted how our whole society is so dependent on a few resources, industries, and expert people working together.

I get to use soft skills to interview people and figure out if they are being honest or hiding something, use my engineering and scientific skills to assess sites, and have a mix of inside/outside work.

My work also does some good - helping develop cases to bring to enforcement. My cases have resulted in changes that improve living conditions for people near these sites, the workers at them, or the environment.

Environmental engineering doesn't pay as much as other disciplines like a senior software engineer or something. But it's a good income and the work isn't as subject to boom/bust cycles as other sectors because it's driven by regulations more than profits.

According to my Instagram reels lately, working in a mine in Australia

Waste industry any part of it. From dealing with smokestacks to garbage to agricultural to feces.

• Employment for life
• Get to make a difference, less pollution is a good thing.
• Salaries are high
• Get to work with the crazy but nice mother fuckers
• Always the badass of your friend group

Every work day I get up and go to my job. The world is that much cleaner because I did that. I get to work with my buddies. The work is mentally challenging and involves light exercise. If they fire me I will have a new job in under 6 working days (no exaggeration). And when I come home I can wait until my wife eats the first bite of dinner before I tell her about the frozen shitberg that my client was dealing with today.

Most service jobs, if the worker isn't a total cunt (and even if they are, it's usually because they've had to serve such cunts and are not immune to cuntiness themselves).

CAD drafting.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of shitty CAD jobs out there, but there are also plenty of great CAD jobs as well. I got my AS in Drafting for manufacturing, but manufacturing paid pretty low when I started looking. So I applied for civil CAD jobs instead. Started out at $26/hr, which was a little under double what I was making at the time.

The great thing about CAD work is that there's lots of room for upwards momentum. I applied for a designer position 8 months in, which bumped my pay to $30/hr. You can work your way up as a designer, or into project management. My company also offers continued learning, so if I get the bug to go into engineering (unlikely, math & physics is my sticking point) then I can, for free.

I was pretty active for a while in the CAD subreddit, and I was almost afraid to graduate because there were a few people in there who were so negative about CAD as a carreer. Turns out they don't look for good jobs, don't ask for pay raises or continue to learn. My experience in CAD has been nothing but fulfilling and exciting. I design substations, I'm learning a lot, my drawings literally build/extend America's power grid, so I feel like my job matters and is important. I find ways to increase my knowledge and pay, and there's tons of upwards momentum if I take it.

For reference, I was an animal hospital receptionist before I made the switch.