noise."Worldbuilding IX: Various jobs · 11:24pm Oct 17th, 2017
Let's talk a bit about some pony occupations, shall we?
One of the things I've noticed in a lot of ponyfics is a general lack of tradesponies. Typically, stories tend to feature the Mane 6 and farmers, as if there aren't any other jobs to be had in Ponyville.
Now, y'all know that I tend to do my research, and while I won't say I'm an expert on ponies or the show in general, or 1870s technology, it's possible that I know a little bit more than your average bear.
Today at work the manager and I were having an actual intelligent conversation . . . and one where it turned out that we both agreed. And it was sort of political. Yeah, it was a weird day.
But I got to thinking . . . one of the things he was talking about was that his daughter just graduated from college and is getting a job in California, and his son is thinking about going to college but he isn't sure how he's going to afford it. And we got talking about education and the trades and stuff like that, and about how things were different for his grandfather than they were now.
I've blogged here and there about how I think the education system in rural Equestria works, so there's no need to tread over that ground again.
What I haven't really covered in a blog post is what kind of hands hooves on jobs ponies might have.
Sure, there have been a few mentions here and there, either in stories or in the associated blog post.
Well, I decided that right now I'm going to give you a list of presumable pony occupations. Right after a brief words from our sponsors!
Source
This will make sense when you get to the end.
Before we begin, we're making a few assumptions. We're assuming 1870s levels of tech, and we're assuming that Ponyville is largely self-sufficient. Obviously, you can shift around the tech era as needed, but know that some of these jobs either disappeared or were swallowed up by megacorps as civilization advanced. These are mostly based on actual human occupations, and--again, depending on your headcanon--might not be necessary jobs in Equestria.
And I'm also going to say that this isn't an exhaustive list, by any means. I've got a bunch of stuff that I could use to research and could probably come up with a second and third list just using the books I've got around.
Cooper: A cooper makes barrels and crates. For barrels, especially, there was an art to it, because depending on what the barrel was to be used for, it had to be waterproof without lining the inside with sealant (since at the time, a lot of sealants would be things like pitch, and most people don't like pitch in their beer).
Tinker: A tinker is one who makes things out of tin, or repairs things made out of tin. Back in the day, a lot of tinkers were travelling repairmen, who would go from house to house and town to town repairing things like kitchen utensils. The simplest way to think of them compared to blacksmiths is a blacksmith typically works hot iron, whereas a tinker generally works cold metal. Sometimes people differentiate between tinkers being repairmen and tinsmiths being creators, other times tinker applies to all.
Blacksmith: Most of the tools and ironwork in town would be made by a blacksmith. If horseshoes aren't imported from an industrial production center, the blacksmith would probably be the one forming them, although not the one putting them on.
Farrier: A farrier fits horseshoes. If ponies use nailed-on horseshoes, a farrier in town is a must.
Cobbler: If ponies don't use nailed-on horseshoes, than they'd have a cobbler, which is someone who makes shoes, and presumably could also make hoof boots.
Thatcher: A thatcher installs thatched roofs. Most of the houses we see in Ponyville tend to have them, and while they're actually surprisingly low maintenance when installed correctly, they do occasionally need work, and of course just like a conventional roof, they wear out eventually and have to be replaced. Not to mention Ponyville has lots of monster attacks.
I personally tend to think that most blue-collar (for lack of a better term) ponies in Ponyville are earth ponies, but a thatcher is one obvious exception. An earth pony (or unicorn) would have to invest in ladders and scaffolding; a pegasus just needs her four hooves, and maybe a cloud for temporary storage.
Gong Farmer: People love their euphemisms. A gong farmer empties outhouses, privies, septic tanks, and so forth. In some cities (such as London), they were required to work at night. While Ponyville proper does appear to have plumbing, it's unlikely that the outlying farms do. I believe we've seen an outhouse at Sweet Apple Acres, and of course there was the one in Dodge Junction.
Miller: All those bags of flour that Pinkie Pie bakes with (and dumps over her head) have to come from somewhere. While I can't say for sure how it works in Equestria, on Earth you've got to grind grain to get flour, and that requires a mill of some sort. Historically, mills were often powered by water or wind; it's possible that the windmill we've seen in Ponyville is . . . well, a windmill. (Seriously, that's what wind mill means.) Flour mills were also historically called grist mills.
Glass Blower: Things that don't go in crates and barrels go in bottles and jars. This one might be a bit of a stretch for Ponyville; it would really depend on how much the town produces that needs to go in bottles or jars and how far they've industrialized the process (Mason jars were in commercial production by 1860 or so, and replaced earlier designs).
Cheesemaker: Even pasteurized and refrigerated, milk doesn't keep forever. Even if the ponies have magically irradiated box milk, we know that they make butter, so why not cheese? Especially since we don't really know from canon what the Apple family does with all the milk that the cows must produce. They can't drink all of it.
Wheelwright and Cartwright: We commonly see wooden-wheeled carts around Ponyville. Those would be built by a cartwright (the body of the cart) and a wheelwright (the wheels). Of course, it could be the same pony; there's no rule that you can't do both. I would personally assume that there is a small shop in town that builds wagons and wheels to customer specifications.
Basketmaking: For all the times where a barrel or crate is too heavy, and a jar or bottle is too small, the basketmaker has the answer. Odds are she'd also tend to her own reed field, since she's got to grow the reeds to make the baskets. Besides the rather obvious picnic baskets, things like laundry baskets, bee skeps, birdcages, fisherman's creels, various fish traps, and furniture was all made out of wicker. Also I should say right now that probably there was some specialization in wickerwork, and one pony might not do all the things.
Magitech mechanic: This one isn't historical as far as I know, but it stands to reason that if there is any sort of magitech in Ponyville, it could break or malfunction, and need repair. If there are power crystals of some sort, they might need to be recharged or replaced; spells might need to be renewed, etc.
Well, there you go. About a dozen different occupations to add variety to Ponyville.
Oh yeah, and that advertisement? I didn't sell out to Big Corn, if that's what you're thinking.
I happened to be test driving a car and I noticed a Golden Harvest sign alongside a cornfield. 'Cause that's a variety of corn, you see, and lots of farmers put signs showing what kind of corn they're growing (I assume that they're contractually obligated to).
And I laughed at it, and thought about how it should be a carrot field and not a cornfield (or else we've been wrong all along about what, exactly, Carrot Top grows on her farm). Then it hit me like a bolt out of the blue: I'm always trying to come up with clever names for ponies, and seed names would be a good one for farming ponies.
i really like your list but i do have something for you to think about.
in the Ponyville spa we see them getting there hooves filed and or trimmed if you would,so would there still be a need for a full Farrier or would the spa pony's do that also???
not sure on the dates but up till the mid 1900es up to around 1950 or about it was still the black smith that did most if not all of the farrier work.
Not true, there is also Mailpony, Spa owners and a few restaurant/café/bar in town
But yes, I do see your point. Considering that ponies seem to use fire to heat their house (at least in Ponyville), I would had lumberjack to that list and most likely a carpenter. Although both job could be part time occupation for farm worker our such. And I'd expect that a lot of ponies do know how to build thing by themselves to run the farms.
And either the Cooper, the Tinker or the blacksmith must be doing the pipes for the plumbing work, or there is a pony who specialise in making the pipe. a plumber do know how to install those, but you need to forge them first.
A litle bemol with the cheesemaker, the farmer migth be doing it themselves. As far as I know, doing your own preserves was a common thing back then.
We also have to consider the fact that Equestria have an organised factory at the very least, meaning that ponies could be at the very least at the early stage of industrialisation, so a few of the job described above may be endangered by big corp. Filthy Rich's bit have to come from somewhere don't they?
4700925
It would depend on how many ponies wear horseshoes. From what I know, a barefoot filing and a filing for horseshoes isn't the same thing, so the farrier probably does the filing on the ponies that wear shoes, and the spa ponies do everyone else.
I would guess that that varied somewhat by area, and it might have become common for blacksmiths to take up more farrier work as their other types of work fell by the wayside with industrialization. EDIT: But I don't know for sure.
Something like this popped up in a recent D&D session with my friends and we found out many things to do with wagons was done by the Wayneright. My brain jumped to so that is what Bruce Wayne's family did at one point. I wonder what they would think of his horseless carriages he has?
4700926
Wood Salesman Pony is canon (The Perfect Pear), and we've seen multiple carpenter ponies. I was actually going for some obscure jobs on this list, which is in no way exhaustive.
Agreed to both. Around here, a lot of people split extra wood and sell it on the side of the road.
Besides iron pipe, they could be using clay/ceramic or even wood for most of it (and probably other types I don't know off the top of my head). I would assume that pipe is most likely mass produced.
Yeah, there certainly could be small cheeses made by various farmers (or other ponies who had a milk cow and wanted to preserve it). We don't see any evidence in canon that the Apples do that, so it's probably somepony else.
Yeah, the weather factory is canon, and the train implies some level of industrialized steelmaking. I personally think that they're in the early stages of industrialization, so a lot of stuff is still make the old-fashioned way.
4700934
A lot of names came from occupations (pretty much anything ending with -smith or -wright, to just name two).
I always wondered what my grandpa thought about the advances of modern technology. If he ever thought back to being a kid and then what the world looked like now.
4700931
the only pony's i can think of would be big mack applejack and long hall one of the pony's the pull the train out to i think dodge junction.
and you are right i always kept my horses / pony's bare footed and did the trimming my self just keep the angle at or close to 52 dirges for the most part.
i only ever kept shews on my stallion when i was showing him or heave trail rides, as his feet wore like steel he did not need much to stay sound.
In my neck of the woods if the farmers have signs of what corn they're growing it's because it's a test crop for a major company.
We've actually seen a woodcutter in the show, which was a common 19th century profession. Patent medicine salesmen... or flim-flam men, too.
If there are blacksmiths, there would likely be charcoal burners or colliers to provide them with fuel.
4700939
I think that as a general rule, many earth ponies would wear shoes, for unicorns it would depend on their job and condition of their hooves, and pegasi probably wouldn't unless they were typically ground-bound. But genetics would factor in to it (good hooves vs. bad hooves) as well as their job, and even ponies who sometimes wore them for traction might not wear them year-round.
4700952
That's a possibility, too. I've never asked why particular farms have signs (and some don't). Sometimes it's obvious, like every few rows there's a new sign, but other times it's just one sign by the field.
4700976
That's true (that's why I didn't include a woodcutter, because one was already canon).
This is by no means a complete list, but a few that I thought of off the top of my head.
Agreed. My guess is that most ponies burn wood.
Of course, it's also possible that they have magic forges, or have a dragon do it.
4700990
Everything is better with dragons!
Coppiced Willow started for basketwork and other woven structures, and is now being trialed for Gigawatt class power stations to replace coal.
Somehow I think even AJ would balk at handling ten thousand acres or so, harvesting 30 acres a day? Or was it Hectares.
Makes me want to use simple reflectors and magical crystals that are solar energy charged.
Local library has an intresting item on display, a Lant Cart. turns out urine wasnt just used for leather, but treatment of wool as well.
The fields of Flax would be for linen fabric, and linseed oil lubrication and fuel?
4700970
Randall Munroe and Tom Leher? Yes please.
I notice he forgot to mention Theatre. I guess I picked a good thing to major in.
4700992
Verily, this is so.
4700993
As they say, what goes around comes around.
And, according to Cody's Lab, you can make gunpowder out of it, too.
Besides the linen fabric, you can of course eat flax. And there is a comics canon pony called Flax. Linseed for lubrication, fuel, waterproofing, etc.
What's left over can either be composted, or else sold to put on fancy salads in Canterlot and Manehattan.
4700984 Same here, and it's because they're testing out new strains or types. It's neat because around here, each company sort of claims an area so you can tell where you are based on what the signs say.
Considering how many scrolls Twilight goes through, perhaps the windmill is powering a Paper mill. Until the industrial revolution, all paper was made by hand.
4700935
Well, they have magic as a wildcard, so indeed wood pipe could be a thing. Otherwise, it would probably not be durable and efficient enough compared to other material.
Golden Harvest is a second-tier corn or maize-class growers' class. It's been a while since I cared all that much about the various breeds of maize, well, breeding, but yeah, Golden Harvest was one of the middle breeds.
Yeah I'm pretty sure that's because your average collegiate suburbanite brony lives in a bubble and isn't aware of guys like us that toil in the background to hold up the pillars of society.
Potter: When barrels, crates, jars, bottles, and baskets don't do the job, there's ceramic jars. In the olden times, if you needed to store a good amount of liquid, and a barrel wouldn't cut it, you'd have a big clay jar. Not to mention chinaware and teapots.
Honey Dipper: Slang for Gong Farmer, or nightsoilman, or whatever. The shit-taker. It sounds like a perfect pony name though, right?
Riveter: It could be what you think it is (and indeed they must have riveters or Manehatten and steam trains wouldn't be possible) - or - it could've also been used to describe someone who repaired pottery and china. Yeah, way back when that shit was expensive, so if you broke a plate, there was literally a person who'd rivet the broken pieces back together. It's often forgotten that it was a thing. I remember reading a story in school once about a man who bought a brand new clay jar and it split down the middle and the repair guy said he could glue it back together with this newfangled glue and it would ring like a bell afterwards, but the dude was like 'no, I want rivets' and the other dude riveted it, and it didn't ring like a bell. Idk.
In my search for the name of the guy who repairs pottery, I found a list of specific positions in pottery-making. One of them is called a Horser. Apparently, a Horser is the guy who 'shapes roof pantiles.' Now I'm not certain if that'd only be the guy shaping the raw clay into tiles, or if someone might do nothing all day but make and bake roof tiles. But it's kinda funny.
But I'll bet Ponyville has no horsers, unless they export to Canterlot.
I found this list useful.
4701005
I don't think they do it around here, although I'm not entirely sure. I do know that one of our customers at the shop sells seed (and amazingly has the last name Sprout). Maybe I'll ask him next time I see him.
4701023
That's possible. Although I do wonder if in Equestria it's just the leaf of some tree or something. Sometimes Equestria is as punny as Xanth, so a paper birch might actually produce paper leaves.
4701033
You know, you'd think that, but we humans used wood water pipes, buried underground, up into the early 1900s, and maybe longer in some places. And to the best of my knowledge, humans never used magic to strengthen them. Steel straps, yes.
4701038
Thus implying that Golden Harvest is a second-tier pony.
pre00.deviantart.net/51db/th/pre/f/2015/017/4/9/carrot_top___kejzfox_by_crunchnugget-d8e6uil.png
4701041
That's what I was thinking, too, but I didn't want to outright say it.
Plus, a lot of writers are younger and might not have had a chance to get any real experience at life.
I've already got Night Soil in a story; Honey Dipper might be a good choice for the next story where I need an outhouse-emptying pony.
Huh, that's one I'd never heard of, in any form. I wonder how they did it? That's something worth looking up. And I also wonder if metal riveters got their name from pottery riveters?
.
In my big, thick obsolete tool catalog, I came across something called a horse (and of course now I can't remember what) that amused me.
Ooh, that is useful.
I noticed one occupation that isn't on the list: Donkey puncher.
4701141
One of the local nicknames for a nightsoil man was the Turd burglar. In the great mockumentry Kenny it was used as a derogatory term for plumbers in general.
Personally I go a bit more modern, which does mean some of these go away or change. Interestingly, I don't think farriers/cobblers would go away like they have in our world. Horseshoes need to be fitted, unlike human shoes. So although horseshoes might be mass produced, they would need to be modified on site. Although it does stand to reason that ponyville is a bit more self sufficient (the train station isn't really industrial and agricultural base) so not everything would go. But a more modern setting does add jobs as well. Electrician analogs, heavier construction crews, mechanics, machinists, things like that.
It's entirely possible there would be a sort of ag-services store in Ponyville. One which employs a few ponies who are specialised in certain tasks. I could see one pony with a mechanical talent who does nothing but work on fixing combines (horse-powered combines, of course).
In one of my fics, I have a town full of ponies who are named after strains of wheat. Winter Wheat, Red Durum, and Einkorn are three such examples.
4701141
I'm an asshole like that.
I'd honestly never heard them called 'riveter' before, but I've long known about the occupation. Hell, there might be another name for the profession, but fucked if I can find it. I don't know a lot about the methods, but I think one of the simpler forms was simply drilling holes and using wire... imagine your Caravan's ziptied front bumper. But I think the nicer way is to make a T shape on either side of the break, and use a piece of metal shaped like a serif 'I' to hold them together.
Oh that's a neat name!
"Hey, what do you do for a living?"
"I'm a donkey puncher."
"u wot m8?"
I bet I know why they're called that, too. I mean, come on. You know it was an uphill battle keeping those mechanical monstrosities working all day. Also, model-T-powered donkey.
Well, to make it easy... Everything you see in the show that wasn't born, hatched, or grown from seed, was built by somepony. That means there's also somepony who fixes that thing when it wears out or breaks.
The hydroelectric dam near Ponyville? The strange Tesla-coil things on it? The ponies' stoves, showers, lights, and glass windows? All mean skilled ponies at work.
You see a shovel? That means there's a mine producing iron ore, a smelter to purify it, the technology to turn iron into steel, and skilled workers to shape the steel.
Gotta see where stuff comes from, is all... Nothing just happens.
I'm not really sure about how largely we can assume this. There's no direct contradiction - the show never shows freight trains of goods moving to and from the Ponyville station - but we do know that they're in a fairly central location in Equestria, within sight of Canterlot (putting it at <100km*), and they do have trains as well as pegasi for quickly transporting stuff over long distances.
*unless the world is flat but let's assume it isn't
The professions that directly service ponies or their houses (eg. farrier, thatcher) must clearly be local, but some other specialized manufacturers (eg. blacksmith, glassblower, weaver, cartwright, papermaker,
tannerwait no) could also be selling their goods to many villages. I guess it depends on how well economies of scale work when everything is handmade, and how big these villages are.One thing I doubt they have is a local mining or refining industry - mining towns would be a lot dirtier and have more air pollution, I suspect. Also, mining is always concentrated in the regions where the ore is, so even mostly self-sufficient towns would likely import at least iron, if not the finished tools.
Oh I think you can find a fair few more than that (and there are thatchers still, though their jobs are becoming more specialized, and insurance companies wont necessarily insure them anymore unless its a licensed professional)
In a D&D campaign, we had a running joke about a dwarven wainwright: "Goodwrench McFirestone, Wainwright to the Stars"
In a couple of stories I wrote, the Goldens grow carrots and wheat. (But that's because I had Golden Harvest married to an earth pony wheat farmer, and not Written Script.)
I don't often write stories involving laborers, but I've mentioned jobs like lumberjack, miner, and office worker. There would be courier work of various kinds, including delivering telegrams. Jobs related to the railroad, even if pony-pulled trains are going away.
We've seen traveling traders (the Apples do this), and I imagine the only way to get crops not grown in Ponyville is somepony with a cart coming in from another city. And traveling entertainers, like Trixie and that puppeteer who kind of looks related to Snips. (Vaudeville!)
In general, though, you don't see tradesponies not because the writers are middle class college kids, but because that's not the kind of story most people want to write. You need to be writing the deepest slice of a slice of life story, and be focusing it around OCs or background ponies, to have a story like Silver Spanner's. Writing an adventure or romance story? Going into details like that would be a distraction from the plot.
As for naming new ponies, I recommended looking up colors of paint.
4701134
Huh. Interesting.
They would still need a pipe maker though.
It occurred to me when I was cleaning the chimney that they might have a occupation for such, though in this case it would have to be the long-handled brush kind (not the awesome one i had with the rope and nail attached to the brush that I just had to put in and pull out)
4701380
Some ancient places had clay pipes
4701228 Ditto on this. See the essay on the common #2 yellow pencil from the immortal Milton Friedman:
Everything that is made, is made from other things (excepting unicorn cheating). Clocks are made from carved wood and metal gears and bearings and springs and paint. The woodcarver needs tools to do her trade, the metal for the gears has to be mined/smelted/transported from somewhere, the bearings require much machine work to be precise, the paint is made up of hundreds of things including linseed oil from flax seeds and ad infinitum.
This is related to one of my pet peeves - namely tool handles that are obviously for human hands. Hammers, shovels, etc. Now I realize that for show purposes tools must be recognized but surely handles designed for mouths and hooves are possible.
Unfortunately, their "where did you hear about Burpee" question doesn't seem to have an option for "on a site dedicated to stories about horses".
4701151
Over here, that term tends to have different connotations.
4701187
Yeah; either way, until you get to a WWII setting, there's still a lot of the older trades and such, especially in a rural setting like Ponyville. I don't exactly live way out in the sticks, but I know of people around me who didn't have electric lights until the 50s, my former high school librarian was born in a horse-drawn carriage, etc.
In the OPP 'verse, Shoeshine gets pre-made shoes from somewhere (I don't think it's specified) and then modifies them to fit her customers. Since that's a wear item and probably fairly easy to mass-produce, I would imagine that that's something that is factory-made and then custom fitted.
I would assume that they have some kind of freight house . . . it doesn't make sense to invent trains to move ponies and not think of other bulk cargos you could carry with them. Like trees, for example.
Yeah, until you get into the era of robots and suchlike, you tend to need lots of people (or ponies) for the factories and so on. I'm sure it's been studied how jobs shifted and changed over the years, but I'm just thinking that from a railroad point of view, trains used to have a crew of five and were fairly short; now they have a crew of two and are really long.
4701338
Well, yeah, besides the literally dozens of others I could name just from the research book I happen to have next to my desk at the moment, the Wikipedia article lists 167 articles on obsolete jobs and that's not a very exhaustive list. TheRedBrony gave me this list.
I was just thinking of a few that would almost certainly be commonplace in a town like Ponyville that are rarely seen in stories (besides my own).
4701197
A lot of that work would likely be done on the farm by the ponies who use the equipment, but of course sometimes they get in over their heads and have to take it to someone else, so Apple Honey has a farm equipment repair shop/farm supply store.
And if I were smart, that would have occurred to me quite some time back. Well, it sort of did; I mean, obviously a lot of the Apples are named after varieties of apples, and I think in one story I was smart enough to name a pony after a strain of asparagus, but for the most part I've just been bumbling along, never realizing that someone will send me an entire catalog full of pony names for free.
4701211
I'm an asshole like that.
So, I could claim that repairing my Caravan like that is a time honored tradition.
(Hell, it's not like I came up with that idea on my own; I worked on somebody's car that was fixed that way.)
You've got to figure that there's at least one donkey who is offended by that name.
It's also a great potential title for a trolly fic of some sort. Probably one that might make people think it's a clopfic.
Oh yeah, it had to be. I was watching a while back a video where Jay Leno was showing off some of his cars, and he had one with a 22L inline 6. The valves were oiled by a drip pipe that dribbled oil into a little cup, that would then wick down into the valve, hopefully. Lots of ways that system could go wrong, and you'd constantly be wiping oil off of things.
There's got to be some pony who habitually gets engines working right by a well-placed buck to some part of the engine.
4701228
Yeah, but people don't think about that. And especially in our modern age where most of those things were actually made by an uncaring machine instead of some craftsman. . . .
Although I would say in Equestria you couldn't rule things out like glass plants or shovel trees.
4701256
Well, I think it's safe to say that even though we've never seen a freight train, they probably have them. I can't imagine ponies being so dumb that they invent a railroad that hauls passengers and no pony ever thought, "hey, if I wanted to get apples to market faster, I could just put them in a train." But you're right, we don't know this.
Canon says it's round (well, Pinkie Pie said, so take that with a grain of salt).
My guess is that it's a mix of things. In the OPP-verse, there are tools and horseshoes and stuff like that that are imported to Ponyville, both bulk goods like screws and fence hardware, and custom machines like cultivators. Even in our world, there were things that were mass produced before trains made transport easy; they would have gone on barges or I suppose by wagon. Stuff like glass jars for canning, as one example.
So I don't think that everything is handmade, because in some cases you're going to get a superior product by buying one from a factory. I doubt even a highly skilled glassblower could consistently make glass canning jars that would accept screw-on lids. On the other hand, looking at the way pony houses are constructed, they probably make windows on site. They might import plate glass, or they might have a glassblower in town who makes broad sheet or some other type of flat glass.
Given how gems appear in the show, it's possible that a pony with the right talent could just dig a hole and get out ingots of pig iron or even pure steel. It's also possible that they could somehow magically refine the metal, or that they could 'grow' it in a rock farm. So we can't say for sure.
However, until there's canon evidence to the contrary, I would assume that they do in fact mine it the traditional way, and probably refine it the traditional way. I think it's possible that they could have dragons as part of the refining process, perhaps in exchange for gems or gold: "I'll give you a bucket of diamond in exchange for a ton of high-carbon steel."
Gong farmers?
Oh, you mean gardeners. 
4701364
True fact: I used to work at a Firestone, and and then a GM dealership.
See, you're wrong there. Golden Harvest and Written Script are clearly a thing.
vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/d/de/Golden_Harvest_and_Written_Script_right_S03E11.png
Oh yeah, there are tons of both physical jobs and also obsolete office jobs, like elevator operator, or calculator. I actually enjoy using some of the more obscure ones in stories. I think it gives the setting a better feel.
But is that because most people don't think that people would want to read a story about a tradespony and would rather read Twilight + Anon shipfic 10,000, or because they just don't know that those are jobs? I've heard that people like my mechanic blogs, and that's mostly me ranting on about a normal day at the shop.
What's wrong with an adventure story featuring Wall Repair Pony?
And anyways, even if it's not a main plot point, adding in the background characters that make the town go, even if it's just in passing mention, adds more to the setting, IMHO.
Besides the normal paint catalogs, there's the ever popular AI generated list of paint colors. I'm waiting for the story starring Rose Hork or even better Bylfgoam Glosd.