Solkanar512 posted:

So anyone else here a "straddler"? That is, someone who grew up blue-collar and ended up in the white collar world with all the WASPy pretension that comes with it? I've been meaning to read Lubrano's "Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams" (decent review here) but in the meantime I'd love to hear from others who've been through similar experiences. The concept of being "bicultural" is something I hadn't considered before, but it really hits home.

For me personally I was raised by a unionized public city employee and a homemaker/house keeper and was the first in my family to attend college. I was lucky as hell to get into an insanely good school with financial support and ended up at a massive manufacturing/aerospace firm in a very mixed blue and white collar environment. The culture is very much a mixture of government/military bureaucracy, old school "I'm a captain of industry" business types and new school consultant business types. It's a very odd culture to be sure, I can go into more details if folks are curious. I do data analysis which is very white collar work but the data is about the stuff the blue collar folks are working on, so I work with them a great deal.