An interview with a Farrier

What do you do for a living?

I’m a Farrier. iStock_000003250477XSmall.jpg

How would you describe what you do?

A Farrier is someone that put shoes on horses and corrects faults in the foot.

What does your work entail?

Well, my job entails me showing up at someone’s house, or them coming to my shop to get shoes put on their horse, or trim their horse’s foot, whichever the case may be. You can set your own hours because you work for yourself. It’s probably about 50 or 60 hours a week because when you get home you’re not done, you’ve got to answer calls that come in from clients later on.

How did you get started?

Well, how I got started in this is I was cleaning tile floor down in Little Rock and I couldn’t find anyone down there that’d come and shoe my old ex-wives horse.

From the leg down a Farrier probably knows more about a horse’s anatomy than a Veterinarian.

I was tired of working at night so I went to shoeing school. And I’ve been shoeing off and on for the last 17 years.

What do you like about what you do?

Continue Reading …

Posted in Physical Work, Self Employed, Jobs you may not have heard of   Posted: December 3rd, 2007   Add comment




Interview with a Marine Helicopter Pilot

What do you do for a living?

I fly 53-echoes in the Marines, they’re a helicopter.

How would you describe what you do?

You go to work, fly for a while, do a lot of paperwork bullshit and then you go home.

What does your work entail?

The last three years I’ve been in training and I’m just now complete with that, so up till now it’s been studying a whole lot. You have to study and get ready for briefs and while I’ve been in flight school that’s what you do basically; get ready, study systems, emergency procedures, aerodynamics, and stuff like that and then you go brief with an instructor. Kind of a one-on-one with someone that’s typically about 5 years older than you that’s been to Iraq a couple of times. Then you go fly for a few hours, land, de-brief and go home and that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. While I was in flight school down at Pensacola I was probably working maybe 15 hours a week of actual real work and it wasn’t even real work. We didn’t have any kind of job except for flying, that was it. I was with the Navy and I trained with the Air Force too. Now I’m back with the Marines. In the Marines you have a ground job too and my job is operations, I write the schedule. The first month I was there it was about 14 hours a day, 5 days a week so it sucked.

it gets boring flying(jets) when you never see the ground, you’re not going to get shot at, you’re not going to drop that many bombs anymore so…I wanted to fly helicopters, and that’s why I got into helicopters

And it was all paperwork and there was 270 people in the squadron, like half a billion dollars worth of aircraft, writing the schedule for that kind of gets stressful.  When I get out(of training) and get to what we call the “fleet” the “fleet range force” I’ll check in and I’ll get some job. I don’t know what kind of job it will be but probably a few hours a day on a ground job, a few hours a day flying, and a few hours working out or something. It’s not a typical 9 to 5 job. Continue Reading …

Posted in Public Service, Physical Work   Posted: November 28th, 2007   1 comment




An interview with a Firefighter

What do you do for a living? I’m a firefighter

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How would you describe what you do?

As a firefighter I do everything from fight grass fires, house fires, rubbish fires, car fires, anything that can catch on fire we’d be called for it. We go to medical calls, any time ambulances are called out we go to it. We do everything from heart attacks to small injuries to car wrecks. Anything an ambulance would be called for we help out with. 

When you see that little kid come up to see the fire trucks and he looks at us like you’d think he saw Superman, it’s rewarding to see those kids faces…

  Everybody here is an emergency medical technician so we go with ambulances on those calls. We also do swift water rescues, we’ve got all kinds of swift water equipment for like cars that are swept off low-water bridges and stuff like that. Pretty much if anything happens where someone needs to get rescued we’re the ones who get called. Continue Reading …

Posted in Public Service, Physical Work, Hourly pay   Posted: November 26th, 2007   1 comment