Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

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"I'd finished college, got my degree and had a highly paid job in social work"

Is that the famous British humor, or do they actually get paid pretty well on that side of the pond?

The popular theme of denigration of labor and blue collar work in general was carefully followed to the letter in the story, but, the author hid some social rebellion in there, describing the feeling of brotherhood and family the workers feel for each other. I worked some labor type jobs as a school kid back when that would actually pay your tuition without taking out loans (aka I'm old) and I also did some time in the reserves and shared adversity leads to brotherhood. You put up with insanity because 1) you actually can do it and 2) your brothers need you. To this day no one has ever had my back and vice versa quite like this one grocery store night shift manager or this one sergeant I was assigned to in the army. Never, in all my white collar experience since. Given the working conditions I don't think making a life of it would be wise, but its an experience worth having.

There's a side dish of most people are extremely soft and aspire to be soft, yet, most people really can also be old school tough.

Also a lesson about anxiety, telling the kid they're going to drop the face would probably create great anxiety and terror for every second from when he heard about it until after the drop, assuming the kid had any idea what they were planning.

It was an enjoyable story and thx for posting.

do social workers actually get paid pretty well on that side of the pond?

The childhood incident is mentioned as being in the 60s, so he'd have graduated in the 70s. At that time, it would have been solid middle class work, and as a graduate he might have gone in a few pay grades up from the bottom. Almost certainly more than the miners.

The strength of miner solidarity would be shown in the strikes of the 70s and 80s. The final strike went on for a whole year and included battles with the police. That was essentially the last stand of the old UK labour movement; since then it has become increasingly difficult to have a legal strike and union recruitment has collapsed.

>> "I'd finished college, got my degree and had a highly paid job in social work"

>Is that the famous British humor, or do they actually get paid pretty well on that side of the pond?

Depends on your perspective. I suspect a social worker's salary in the mid '80s looked pretty good from the perspective of somebody who grew up in a UK mining town (the failed '80s miners' strike and mass redundancies brought some pretty horrible poverty). Social workers are not well paid compared to people who do important work such as frontend web development[1]. Sometimes their managers do pretty well (probably not compared to what they could make in the private sector). In the context of HN I think pretty much everybody is unimaginably poor.

[1] That was the famous British humour

"The popular theme of denigration of labor and blue collar work in general was carefully followed to the letter in the story,"

You know, I am grateful to those who labor hard on my behalf while I work at a desk, doing a job many of them would hate quite thoroughly... but let's distinguish between "hard labor" and "work that will kill you". Lots of people do hard labor in jobs that do not have an "statistically expected number of fingers lost per decade" meaningfully above zero. I've seen a lot of the show Dirty Jobs, and the vast majority of them still have 10 fingers.

Indeed, the brotherhood and sense of camaraderie is what a lot of people miss today, and may not even realize it. I suppose some people get that thru participatting in sports, I never did.

>> To this day no one has ever had my back and vice versa quite like this one grocery store night shift manager or this one sergeant I was assigned to in the army.

Conversely, no one has ever deliberately and methodically screwed me over the way my old sergeant did. That guy was diabolical. Crazy, mean, stupid, pick two, if you're lucky. If you're not then you get all three.

Can confirm, had a nutball bipolar sergeant. On his bad days, he wanted to fight me and then try to bust me down for "disrespect of a superior non-commissioned officer." On his good days, he would whine about how no one respected him or liked him.

I got meritoriously promoted solely to get away from him. The master sergeant congratulated him for "mentoring" me to be such a good Marine. Motherfucker.

Thankfully, he's now EAS'd and in Alaska with the bears, where he belongs.

Agreed, social work is just another kind of welfare, that just tries to give people dignity.

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