I’ll intellectually/emotionally/physically hard as answers. For me its either 12 hours straight “punching tubes” on a very large scotch marine firetube boiler at the beginning of my career or Easter around a decade ago when I was working with troubled teens and had to engage in 5 separate protective holds in one 16 hour double shift. The former was all physical and the latter was a combination of emotional and physical.
18 hours on a solar power plant in ~120° F heat replacing burnt up reactors and busbars in the inverters, covered in glycol which is like an antifreeze that is real sticky and somehow smells / tastes sweet (but is still gross af) so all the bugs are attracted to you and crawl all over.
Working in any discipline of power can be brutal in my experience. Good on ya.
Yeah that was 11 years ago and I did the field service portion of that job for like a year, I was fresh out of trade school and working as a grunt for GE as a 22 year old. Until GE decided they were gonna move the business to Germany and Japan and shut down the whole factory.
It had its perks, I got a $75 per meal allowance and could put beer on it and shit. I let someone take over my room for the year back home and had basically no living expenses, just stayed in nice hotels in vegas and some rink-a-dink ones in the middle of the desert. It let me pay off all my loans in a year (which were only like $10k from a 9 month trade school thing)
Anyway I stuck with doin heavy industry electrical work for a while. Now I have a much cushier job doing testing, QA, a bit of design work when applicable, and field service for some absolutely massive electrical systems for steel mills. These things push 6-10k amps thru busbar systems we fabricate from scratch, and are all custom. I do work a lot of OT still but I have a way better work / life balance now