Going Blue Collar
Going Blue Collar
Joshua Skaggs
On Lessons Learned from a New Job and a Dissatisfaction with Disembodied Life
I have never been very aware of bodies—my own or others. I have mild facial blindness, which means that if I were to meet you for the first time and then leave the room, I would be highly unlikely to recall any details about your face or height or what you were wearing. My case is not nearly as severe as the face-blind writer who can’t recognize her own husband at the grocery store, but I do commiserate with her embarrassment when strangers keep informing her they’ve already met.
I am more attuned to feelings than to bodies, which means that I am more likely to notice your recent anxiety than your recent haircut. If I had to describe you, I would be less likely to use words like “blue-eyed” or “skinny” and more likely to describe your “energy” or “vibe.”
I’m not much better at recognizing my own body. In the past several years I’ve just started to notice the difference between feeling stressed and feeling coffee jitters, or the relationship between anxiety and my workout routine. When I’m feeling depressed, a friend of mine is prone to ask questions like, “How much water have you drank today? How’s your sleep?” Sometimes this line of questioning annoys me, as it seems irrelevant to the towering existential crises I face. Ineffable turmoil such as mine could never be boiled down to something as trite as, say, “I sat down too much this week.”
More often than not, however, my friend’s hunches have proven right. I did need to go for a walk. I did need to eat a salad. My thoughts and feelings weren’t negligible, but I underestimated how much they were tangled up in my body.
For anyone who is up on the latest psychology, this will sound familiar. Understanding the mind body connection is a popular item of discussion these days, at least in certain circles. It’s on trend to have an unfinished copy of The Body Keeps the Score on your bookshelf, and I’m no different.
As cliched as the conversation is, however, I think most of us are slow to give our bodies the credit they’re due. We don’t take our bodies as seriously as our minds—at least, I don’t. Like I said, I’m a body amateur. That’s one of the reasons I started working as a facilities technician. My head needed a respite.
*
Back in August I got a part-time job with a local home repair company. For the longest time I thought my job title was “Unskilled Laborer,” because that’s what my boss called me the day he hired me, but I eventually figured out that my actual job title is “Facilities Technician.”
These days I spend Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays swinging a pickaxe, lifting bags of concrete, filling a dump trailer, digging window wells, painting trim, ripping lumber. At 5 o’clock I stumble into my living room, take off my clothes with a cascade of dirt, and then bow my head under hot shower water. My body is spent.
I’m not used to this kind of exhaustion, though it is probably the way most people felt at the end of most work days since the dawn of time, when Adam was told he would work by the sweat of his brow. Trading a white collar for a blue one grants you access to this world, the physical world of tools and motors and objects, in which your body is inescapable.
*
When I worked as a writer for a non-profit, my cubicle neighbor used to complain that his hands felt soft and weak after several years holding a computer mouse. On a summer day we would look with envy at the window cleaners on the other side of the glass. While we were stuck in fluorescent compartments with our faces pressed to a screen, they were climbing ladders and waving squeegees, glorying in the afternoon sun.
Well, now I’m one of those guys. I think I’ve spent more time outside in the past six months than in the past six years. Even when I’m doing such unglamorous work as heaving a trash can into a dumpster, it honestly feels pretty great.
Like a baby trying solid foods for the first time, everything is new and strange. I have learned how to scrape popcorn ceilings (my least-favorite job so far). I have learned that reciprocating saws use different blades when cutting wood or metal. I have learned that some problems must be approached with millimeter precision, while others can be solved with a hammer blow. I have learned—with no small measure of befuddlement—that every Lowes in town plays the same girl power playlist from the early 2000s. So much Kelly Clarkson.
I have also learned that it is possible to be much more attuned to the physical world than I am. Take my boss, for instance. Irvin is unlikely to spout philosophical musings about the body, but he is very likely to lift his head from a task to announce that my co-worker has arrived—his ears caught the Ford’s engine from a block away while my mind was on other things. He has a mind for machines and knows how to solve mechanical problems.
I bring him a broken weed wacker and watch him work. He holds the interior metal rod in front of his face and spins it slowly. He verbally walks through a diagnostic—not this, not that, maybe this—flips the thing upside down, turns the rod inside the shaft. I watch his curiosity engage. It is the same look I see in artist friends’ eyes when they’re working on a painting or tapping away at a novel. He has what I call “the gesture,” a term I borrow from the Chef’s Table episode with Alain Passard: an artist’s finesse expressed in the hands.
I have learned a lot in my six months as a facilities technician, but I would need another decade at least to approximate Irvin’s intelligence with machines. I am not only an amateur at recognizing faces or noticing my body. I am also an amateur of the physical world—that place of tools and machines and land and concrete.
*
I’m embarrassed to admit that. It’s okay to be an amateur at baseball or poker or online dating, but to be an amateur of the physical world is like being an amateur at life. The physical world, after all, is where we live. How have I been so absent to it?
Well, for starters, I’ve been at a computer too long. White-collar work prioritizes mind over matter. While emails are sent and ideas are shared and coffee is downed, your body just… sits there. You can try to mitigate this all you want with a standing desk or exercise ball or push-ups on the hour, but the fact remains that the sedentary nature of office life is hard on the human body. In fact, studies show that sitting down too much can decrease a person’s lifespan by several years.
Blue-collar work is also hard on the body, albeit in a different way. I am very aware of my body when I do manual labor, usually because it is tired or sore. But when I write my body fades from my awareness. I can tap away at my computer for hours and forget to drink water or stand up. When I did office work, it was almost as if I checked my body into a daycare and picked it up eight hours later when I left work. In blue-collar work, the body is a tool. In white-collar work, it’s a distraction.
For the privileged, the body is the reality we return to on our own terms. The body, though you bribe it with a gym membership and chiropractic visits and expensive smoothies, is superfluous to your ascension. Upward mobility is surprisingly immobile.
But what about those who do not ascend? The poor. The underprivileged. The salt of the earth. Essential workers. Whatever euphemism you choose, there are many, many people in the world who cannot get past their bodies. In fact, these are the people whose bodies became indispensable during COVID. (And yet, still expendable: blue-collar workers died at a higher rate than other demographics.) While the white-collar worker could Zoom into the office, essential workers still needed to lift things, move things, pack things, and, in the case of health care workers, tend to others’ bodies. The world divided into two groups: those who need their bodies, and those who don’t.
*
In my stint as a repairman, the thing I notice most is the thing I feel least able to describe. A big part of it is the feeling of crossing class boundaries. America is not known for its class structure in the way of, say, England or India. But we still have classes, which you will notice if you go up or down a level. They jump into visibility at the borders. I grew up middle class, and I’m still there, as far as I can tell. But the work I do now is construction-adjacent, which crosses the border into the working class.
Yesterday I was repairing a fence with my co-worker while another team was up on the roof tearing down the chimney. They spoke Spanish and smoked cigarettes and didn’t smile much. Sometimes one of them broke into song. Normally, in my role as a writer in a button-down shirt, I would feel a clear sense of our separateness; if I had hired them to work on my house, our interactions would be marked by mutual deference and professional distance. But in my dirty jeans and ripped hoodie, as I carried tools past the workers, we skipped the niceties and exchanged nods as equals engaged in a common task.
By contrast, when the son of the homeowner came outside, a shirtless college-age white guy who had lost power in his bedroom and didn’t know how to flip the breaker back on, I distinctly felt our separation. When he greeted me there was a hesitation about him, a polite timidity in his voice that reminded me of times in the past when I didn’t know what to do with a car mechanic, or a cleaner, or a homeless person.
Again, the nuances of the interactions I’m trying to describe are subtle and hard to put into words. This may be the first time in my life I’ve attempted to talk about class differences, which is unsurprising since it has to do with money and privilege and other topics that make me uncomfortable. But I keep having little interactions like this, in which my usual role is reversed so that I see the world from a different angle, and it feels strange but also—good.
I guess what I’m trying to draw attention to is something obvious: the world looks different in different tiers of society. I see the working class differently than I used to, because I am trying on their uniform and trying my hands at their work. I recommend the experience, if only as an exercise in seeing what you haven’t been able to see.
*
A windstorm just came through our town, and everywhere I go, I see workers like me repairing fences and chain-sawing felled trees. I’m not sure I would have noticed them before. I probably wouldn’t have. I am used to passing construction workers and feeling nothing for them, except the occasional pang of pity when the day is cold. Now I feel a little solidarity, like that feeling when you bike past a fellow biker on the street.
I see my city differently too. There are streets I never knew existed; take a left at the right time and you find yourself in a line of trucks driving past the water treatment plant. Now I know where the dump is, and where to drop off tree limbs for mulch. Scattered throughout this town where I’ve lived for more than 20 years are little shops that sell window panes, or repair lawnmowers, or rent floor scrapers. Most of them are within 10 minutes of my house.
I have been introduced to a different part of my city. I can imagine that people who work blue collar jobs might think differently, speak differently, vote differently. I can imagine why they might not always side with the causes of white-collar folk who spend most of their time in the abstract world of ideas, where bodies become unnaturally fluid.
The modern world wants to be mutable, and it wants us to think of our bodies as plastic. You can pose for a selfie and see yourself with bunny ears and cute, wide eyes. You can put on a VR headset and lose sight of the room in which your body moves. Even if you get off social media and downgrade to a flip phone, you are caught in a cultural trajectory that aims for the unreal. I have heard very intelligent people championing a world in which humanity could finally rise above manual labor, a world that would free us from the frustrating limitations of the body.
In the meantime I work with my hands. The tools I work with are affectionately bequeathed the names of body parts. Hammers have a head and a neck and a cheek. Frames have legs. All day long I am reminded of my body in the names of the tools and parts that come to hand. I work among heads, joints, toenails, eyes, elbows, male and female parts.
*
I know what you’re thinking. “If you love manual labor so much, why don’t you marry it?” Valid question. I’m not sure I have a satisfactory answer yet. I’m pretty sure my days as a facilities technician are numbered. I never planned for this to be my full-time job, and I lack the years of training and experience I would need to make good money at it.
As much as I have praised manual labor in this essay, I am not trying to pit virtuous blue collar workers against villainous white-collar folk. That would be too simple. Clearly, I still appreciate the white-collar world, where I continue to spend most of my time, writing here at my laptop at 10 PM on a Wednesday (I forgot to have dinner, so I still have some lessons to learn about embodiment.)
I don’t know what comes next, or what work I’ll put these hands to. Whatever it is, I hope I remember to take my body with me.
Joshua Skaggs
Writer & Editor
Joshua is a writer of fiction, essays, and a Substack newsletter called Synthesizer. He lives and works among a close community of friends and makers in Colorado Springs, CO.
Photography by Peter Herrmann