I've worked fast food, I've worked retail (during the launch of the Wii, even, which was an insane time), I've detailed cars, I've worked in a call center.

That's just what I had to do to avoid being buried under student debt.

I think a lot of people working in offices never had this experience. If they worked at all during high school or university it was cushy office jobs wherever their parents worked.

This doesn't generally apply to immigrants, though. That's a whole other thing.

Dirty Jobs may show some some clocking in and out of only one job and then going home to relax but as a television show that is highly selective of what it decides to show it is not a representative window into how the mass amount of people on this planet live (just like HN is not such a window either).

Simply reading the local news tells me more about the economic hardships of the common worker than a reality tv and internet forums ever could. And those hardships are harsh in many cases.