When I was 19 years old, my first paying job in the nondestructive testing (NDT) industry was inspecting a weld repair on a water intake pipe at the Seabrook Station nuclear power plant in New Hampshire.
The eight-foot diameter pipe extends about a half-mile into the Atlantic. It was new construction at the time but seeping inside, and about a third of the inspection involved overhead work. Being the new guy on the crew, virtually any dirty job was seen as a rite of passage.