Dirt-caked fingernails. Clothes sodden with grease and oil. The heavy scent of manure wafting upward from a pair of muddy boots.

When I was a kid, these were the signals to me that someone had worked hard.

Surely a good day's work ended in the need to strip off one's clothes and head directly to the shower when they got home?

By the time I started my own forays into the "grown up" workplace, that vision had shifted a little.

I'd worked in grocery stores, babysat for children, worked the phones for a busy contracting business, but the most illuminating moments for me weren't when I was working my hardest but when I was a simple gopher for the aforementioned contracting business.

I entered some of the hottest places in the county on the hottest days of the year — restaurant kitchens in the middle of the summer.

I shimmied into spider and who-knows-what-else laden (let's face it, I didn't want to think about it) crawlspaces to hand over tools.

I was in stores. I was in homes. I was in camps. I was in offices.

I was everywhere, and I watched.

I saw the fry cooks and the janitors, the dentists and the pizzeria owners. I saw the receptionists and the convenience store clerks, the farmers and the accountants.

They didn't dress the same. They didn't act the same. And they sure as heck didn't work the same.

They didn't walk out of their respective workplaces carrying the same signs of a long day of laboring.

But they all worked.

They all worked hard.

The fry cook stood over a piping hot grill for hours on end, making burger after burger.

The receptionist sat in a cool office with a boss' hot, stinky breath down her neck and a phone full of cranky customers screaming down the line.

The pizzeria owner spent hours juggling vendors, trying to make sure he could feed his customers, and pay his workers, and still manage to take home a few dollars for his own family at the end of the day.

The accountant knew his boss would take care of his paycheck, but he juggled the financial lives of hundreds in his hands.

Blue collar.

White collar.

They don't look the same.

They don't act the same.

Sometimes they don't even smell the same.

But they labor.