Where did this white collar come from?!?

Tonight I was taking a long walk with my wife and something I said made her turn to me and ask "since when did you become white collar?" You have to understand that I was raised partially on the family farm around the most salt-of-the-earth, hard-working, blue collar people in the world; and both my dad and stepfather were trademen and shade-tree mechanics with calloused hands and fantastic work ethics. Don't misunderstand me, from my uncles, my dad and my stepdad I got that same work ethic, a generous nature and a practical view of the world; but at some point a took a turn onto a totally different road.

I dropped out of college to start a family, I had wanted to be an engineer but at some point I realized that it was mostly about sitting behind a desk and doing math (I still haven't figured out a practical use for all that calculus!). I got a job in a factory at a very minimum wage and started getting my hands very, very dirty; but even though I started out doing the dirty work, eventually I was given a production department to run, then a shipping department (vendor management 101) and finally they stuck me with the computers. Even my humble beginning in IT, pulling Cat5, managing a small network and building reports and databases for everything under the sun, meant getting dirty and sweating alot. You'd find me hanging out with the machine operators and floor supervisors that I'd worked with for years, laughing about our maintenance department or the crazy company that bought us out. I still considered myself a regular Joe and viewed most white collar workers with a certain sense of superiority; those twelve years of my life were very good ones, although the pay stunk.

Then I took a big leap and went from jeans and steel-toe shoes to khaki pants and collared shirts working for an Internet bank's mortgage division; I had to clean up my language and shave everyday, and I had to communicate with a much more educated user community. My Access, Excel, Monarch and Crystal experience made me a very effective reporting analyst and my God-given talent with computers made me very popular in a company with a very unresponsive IT department. Eventually I got the chance to become a systems administrator on the company's servicing platform, which turned out to be a great new challenge even though all those reports I built followed me. I had the extreme privilege of working with a veteran manager who had started as a secretary in the mortgage industry and worked her way up; and who worked very hard to dump all of her knowledge into my head (and I still call her regularly for a second opinion).

Providence smiled on me again as the bank began to become one of the early victims of the housing crisis, I was looking to move back to my home state and the state housing authority just happened to need a systems administrator with my skills. It's rare that I get my hands dirty any more, but I feel like the work is more tiring than it ever was working in a 100+ degree factory where I used to sweat my keyboards into early retirement. But I still find myself chafing at my white collar, and I think of the song that says "a better class of losers suits me fine"; but I've also met a lot of great people along the way and every day is a new challenge. But I bet some of my co-workers and more than a few of the managers in IT get a little nervous when the rompin', stompin' good ole' boy gets tired of the bureaucracy and politics and speaks his mind.