Just about all the jobs I had before graduating college consisted of hard labor. 1st, beginning the day after graduating high school, I worked as the driver's helper on a beer truck for a summer. From 6am to 4pm every day, lugging a hand truck loaded with cases of beer into all the beer joints, convenience stores, and grocery stores while the driver (my boss) stood around chatting up the girls who worked at each spot. The next summer, I got a job on a construction site building a Holiday Inn, and my job was 'tying steel', which means laying down steel rebar poles and tying them with wire to little metal tripods that suspended the poles a few inches above the ground. The resulting steel latticework provided an internal structural skeleton for the concrete floors of the hotel. This was seriously hard on the low back, as the whole day was spent bent over and working at ground level with your hands. And finally, the last two summers I was in college, I got lucky and landed a job in a factory that makes the tops of beverage cans. You've probably noticed that the inside of a beverage can is tan in color - that's a preservative coating that gets baked onto the aluminum. Back in the 80's when I worked in that factory, that coating was being baked on right there (they now buy it pre-coated) in giant ovens, and on a summer night it was typically over 120 degrees F inside that factory. Walking outside into high 80's - low 90's for a break felt like the air conditioner had been turned on.
All those jobs sucked, but unlike the work I do now, the mental stress level was rock bottom. I do miss that.