Ditched a cushy IT desk job to scrape barnacles off boats in San Diego for $18 an hour, best decision I ever made lol

Got sick of staring at spreadsheets all day, so I took a harbor maintenance gig scraping hulls and hauling harbor debris for dirt pay but now I get to watch sunsets over the bay after swinging a scraper for 8 hours, has anyone else traded a boring office paycheck for a weird physical job?

3 comments

3 Comments

nguyen.blake13d ago

Buddy of mine quit his accounting gig to work on a landscaping crew. He spends all day pushing a mower and trimming hedges in the sun, but he says his brain finally shut up for the first time in years. He's got tan lines now, not a 401k, but the guy actually laughs on a Tuesday afternoon.

shanef3413d ago

Idk maybe it's just me but I feel like nobody talks about how these jobs change your relationship with time. Like when you're scraping barnacles you're not watching the clock or counting down to 5pm because the work has a natural end point when the hull is clean or the tide comes in. That's a totally different way of moving through a day compared to forcing yourself to stay focused until some arbitrary number on a screen says you're done. Kinda makes you wonder if we designed office work around machines instead of human brains.

adams.uma13d ago

Actually it's interesting you bring up the barnacles thing. Most barnacle scraping happens below the waterline during dry docking or with special tools on a rope, not by hand while the boat is floating. The tide coming in thing is more like a hard deadline that forces you to stop even if you're not done. The natural end point with barnacles is kind of an illusion because those things grow back in like two weeks. So you're never really finished, just done enough until next time. But your bigger point about task based vs time based work totally stands. My brother switched from IT to being a carpenter's apprentice and he says the same thing about his brain finally being quiet.