People who get their hands dirty at work, what do you do?

Wash them??
- Hurr durr!

Soil scientist. I spent 10 years stomping through the bush and digging pits when I got there.
Now I sit behind a desk.
- That's a good picture, great beard. And it's exactly how I imagined someone in your profession.
  
  Best I can grow is a Syndey Crosby playoff beard, but you're not far off for most of my colleagues
- How can I reduce my poly count IRL to look more like a Dire Straights video like you do?

Shipwright welder. I crawl all throughout the bowels of Navy and civilian ships with my gear in tow. I build new areas, cut out old areas, and perform repairs on hulls and pipes.
- I love welding. One of my favourite things to do in my previous job. I'm highly skilled at oxy-acetylene welding steel pipes in really tight and difficult places but my favourite one was TiG welding stainless steel with automatic and ventilated mask while listening to podcasts. Really meditative just being in your own bubble staring at the bright spot of molten metal.
  
  I'm shit at welding for someone who's generally handy in just about every other area. If you want two pieces of metal that barely stick together, with wires sticking out all across the seam, then I'm your guy!
- Do you get covered from head to toe with grease and grime? Does it pay well? I have a friend who's about ready to wrap up his underwater welding classes, and supposedly he'll make some big bucks after he graduates.
- So.. what's your hand care routine?

I'll go first.
Self-employed general contractor / plumber
- Do you happen to be in the Toronto area?? I'm looking for a plumber. Lol
  
  Sorry, I'm across the Atlantic
- Thank you for your service
  
  o7

My boss just had me change two coworkers' passwords so they wouldn't be able to log back in.
I keep washing and washing, but the blood won't come off.

Flooring and Flooring Accesories
- Ah, the ol' Hank Hill of flooring.

Tallship sailor/rigger

Farmer
- Awesome. What do you farm?

I used to be a programmer, but I got sick of the whole corporate scene. Now I build and maintain houses - and my hands are dirty a good amount of the time!
- Damn that's a crazy transition. How do you like it?
  
  Well, it's been about twenty years and I haven't gone back to the cubicle farm!

I don't have a dirty job anymore, but the dirtiest job I've had by far was industrial carpenter. I'd go to work with clean jeans and a clean white shirt, and every day I'd come home with jeans that were black from the knees up, and a shirt that was black from the chest down.
I had to wear white shirts because nothing else would come clean. Only white with a lot of bleach would give any appearance of being laundered after a day at work on that job.
I still have a T-shirt from that job, some-odd 20 years later, and it has Hilti C100 industrial epoxy stains all over it, just as hard as the day the shirt was stained. That's my "shit's about to get real" work around the house shirt.
- Working up in the rafters for concrete tilt-up buildings that had already been in service for decades. There's so much nasty-ass grime up there, and years worth of dust and crud.

I work in disability support so I may use various creams while massaging, I get messy while helping people with washing and toileting, and I feed people which can get messy. I also help people with their yards, cleaning their house, washing their pets, whatever they need.

Software engineer. Sometimes I spill coffee, sometimes it's chocolate or chips crumbs.
It's honest, hard work, but someone has to do it.
- As a software dev, I have spilt coffee on myself a number of times. People just don't understand what a hard working environment it is. 😞

I load and run two large fiber lasers cutting sheets of metal up to 1 1/4 inch thick.
- Same. Well, except for thickness. I’m only running a 4kw.

Facility maintenance. We grease motors, change belts, tighten bolts. One of the fuel pumps on our generator has a leak, so that's a fun bit of dirty hands.
My approach to maintenance also involves a lot of cleaning, because I believe clean equipment runs better over time. So cleaning off fan blades, insides of electrical cabinets, sumps, etc. We also fix sinks and toilets.

Diesel mechanic, the black never washes off!!

I work for an ISP in the southeast USA as a field technician and it's dirty work sometimes. Fixing rodent damage to fiber connection boxes for businesses, placing temporary cables when underground lines get cut, working in dusty equipment closets, etc.
It's not bad or hard work most days.

Hands themselves stay clean, but through my gloves/gown, I'm regularly elbow-deep into blood, guts, and poop.
Surgical technologist. It gets pretty nasty.
Pay is kinda shit though, so I'm trying to switch over to nursing.
- Damn, I wouldn't expect the words "surgical" and "shit pay" to go together, especially when a basic surgery gets billed at $40,000+. From what you described your day at work to involve, you deserve all the money! Especially since you're helping people.
  
  We're ultimately 'just a tech'. We make enough to pay the bills, but not enough to make things like the check engine light not-terrifying.
  It's a good foot-in-the-door job, especially if your path of entry is like mine (enlisted USAF, they just told me "You're going to be a surgical tech!" and I was like "Cool! ...what the fuck is a surgical tech?" and they covered all my training for it).
  I generally discourage people from actually paying to go through a surgical tech school, cuz if you can afford that, then you can afford to go to nursing school, and nurses make about twice what we do.
  Super cool experience, but not a good long-term career choice.

Window manufacturing Our 2-part industrial sealing silicone gets everywhere; hands, clothes, hair, whatever. Never comes out of clothes and you gotta scrub hard to get it off skin.

I'm a mechanical engineer for a small manufacturing plant and I run their maintenance department. Its more hands on than most engineering jobs though.

I work in tech now, so I’m a lazy schlub. However, I’m also a college dropout out (English major) who had a ton of actual jobs in the past. Warehouse loading delivery trucks, worked in a cabinet shop, food service, etc. i
I think college grads who go into tech should have to work a normal job for at least a year before getting their tech job and making six figures right out of college.
Otherwise you end up with these entitled shitbags who complain that their company provided duck confit at lunch doesn’t have crispy enough skin (an actual thing that actually happened when i was at a big FANG company. Fucking unbelievable)
So even though I’m a techbro shitlord, i have respect for the people who work jobs.
- Are you me? I’m also a lazy tech schlub now who was formerly a paint store warehouse worker, home renovation worker, etc.
  Fully agree that everyone going into tech should spend real time working hard labor and retail. I genuinely feel that my non-tech experiences made me a better person and a better tech schlub.
  I remember tech coworkers complaining that the wall filled with free snacks and candy didn’t have the right kind of snacks and candy, and having to hold myself back from going full Everett True.
  
  Man i feel that complaining about the free snacks 100%.
  Covid was so hard for some of these kids because they had to fend for themselves during the work day while working from home. Constant complaints.
  You and i would get along great i bet :D

I unload pallets of computer gear. That's not the main part of my job, but it's something that happens from time to time.

Nice try FBI
- Not today CIA
  
  Get fucked, NSA
  
  Can't fool me, AFP!

I do occasional vehicle maintenance, like replacing brakes, starters, alternators, water pumps, radiators, etc.
Last one I did the other week was replace an old rotted leaky fuel line. Fun fun..

I generally wash they with warm water and soap after I'm done or taking a break. I usually take one of those little dish soap bottles from the hotel when I travel to keep in the truck, cuts right through the grease and grime pretty well even if all you have is a jug of water on hand.

I work as an assembler in a sporting goods store. I assemble bicycles, indoor and outdoor furniture, bbqs, snowblowers, lawnmowers walk behind and rideon), log splitters.

Caretaker for my father. Lots of poop.
Also still paying my dues to the electrical union. That was a dirty AF job. Miss it a bunch, tho.

Proctologists need not reply.

It's not really "dirty" in the same sense but I'm a massage therapist. Don't think it gets more literally hands-on as far as a job goes lol. I primarily do deep tissue work, I REALLY enjoy injury-focused work, so it can be a bit tiring but it's generally pretty satisfying.

Masterbate.

Woodworker. Hands are always dirty after sharpening blades.

My primary job is that of a software engineer, but I also run a small farm business. Out in the dirt, greasing equipment, repairing equipment, etc. all make me long for the Lava soap I remember as a kid.

elementary school custodian. i love my schedule and the hours of alone time i get to listen to books and podcasts! a living wage and paid holidays are nice too.

I process meat. My hands are rarely dirty but sometimes there seepage through my overalls.
- Seepage is such a dirty word.
  Ass in not the nice kind of dirty

Machinist here. But not just any machinist. I work almost exclusively with graphite. I'm sure you can imagine what a mess that makes. We do have a powerful dust collector that runs all day, but it doesn't catch everything. We get covered in the dust every day. The company does have a locker room and showers for us though, so it's not too bad. We still leave nice and clean.
- What kind of things need to be machined out of graphite?
  
  Sorry for the delay. Apparently this app doesn't tell me when people reply.
  Most of what I make ends up in space. We use pyrolytic graphite, which we actually make ourselves on site, which can stand up to some pretty extreme temperatures with very little expansion or contraction. There are other applications as well, mostly involving any situation where conductivity is important. Some hospital imaging machines use it instead of aluminum in high temperature scenarios. It's very good at what it does, but its use is fairly limited due to its absolutely insane price tag.
  
  Charts.

I do janitorial work. I wear gloves though, so I'm not really getting dirty? I've done auto assembly work and some bullshit dealing with produce crates being sorted for cleaning that always left my hands black and shit after my shift in the past, though.
I've only ever worked 2 jobs that were not manual labor. I did network IT shit right out of highschool for about 2 years, and I also worked as a relay operator twice. Even as an ISP installer, it was mostly bolting things into things and running cable.

I setup and run events. Nothing particularly messy, but very sweaty. On setup days I can do a half marathon just by moving equipment to where it needs to go.

Wash them

Project Technician working in development of machines

I work in a factory supervising and working in a department of a company that is making accessories for yachts and oddly enough the military. Luxury and military equipment is definitely an odd combination.
I don't want to be too specific as there aren't many companies that do this, but some of our orders are 2-4 items, that are a very small part of a yacht and they sell for my whole salary and then some.... It's gross.

Cleaning CD's, tapes, cameras, computers, cartridges, all the stuff you'd expect from a typical Blockbuster store.

Loading trailers, hands generally stay clean unless my gloves are almost worn out

Asbestos remediation. I work on roofs, basements, boiler rooms,fireplaces, lofts, house walls etc removing asbestos in every shape and form + other materials. Using crowbars, sledgehammers, i saw through steel and crush steel with the sledgehammer etc while wearing masks, I also enter oil tanks to clean them. I have done more shitty stuff with another branch of the firm that deals with more shitty stuff + old barn lofts etc on a regular basis too 😆 all of this work involves heavy lifting and carrying heavy stuff around, I have become really strong from it. If you want to get strong and get payed at the same time, I will recommend it. It's tough as hell, and only unique people work with it.

I debug the worst spaghetti code you have seen. Does that count as getting my hands dirty?
No...?
Ok, never mind...

I trim trees and operate a wood chipper-shredder. Routinely carrying huge logs and branches hereabouts and there, greasing and fuelling machinery, and brandishing dirty chainsaws.
But I prefer to wear riggers gloves, so my hands actually stay pretty clean.

I fulfill various contracts put out for my industry. They pay very well but involve great risk and can be taxing on the soul. I just keep telling myself these were bad guys, and if I didn't get to them, someone else would've eventually. And I draw the line at women and children.

Used to clean toilets, vacuum, mop and buff floors, clean windows, build bicycles. Loved it all.

switch to my feet