How about sweeping floors for General Mills? Is that "real work" because it's physical labor?
I've also been on film sets. I had to help somebody acquire a Russian accent. I'd get there at 8 am to find that the actress I was coaching had been in make up and on the set by 6 am. I stayed until 5, when they announced that they'd be working until 10 pm. Again. The set was the sub-basement of 60-year-old hotel that was going to be imploded in a few weeks. Damp, dirty, poorly lit, and perfect for that episode.
When she wasn't on the set she was still working. Memorizing lines. Working on accent. Standing in front of a mirror trying to get things right for herself. Outside working with a trainer because while she was lithe she wasn't a karate expert except in front of the camera.
Or arguing with the script editor about things like "Two episodes ago I had a husband, and now, a month later, I've never been married." She gets her new lines an hour later and has to have them memorized, with affect, 45 minutes later.
She was exhausted after having put in 4 16 hour days. And resentful that as she left the set they'd hand her the rewritten script for the next day--and she'd have to have part of it learned by 6 a.m., 8 hours later. 45 minutes home, 45 minutes back, she'd get maybe 6 hours sleep. And she really missed her daughter and was having trouble keeping her. Her ex-husband, a state governor, was fighting back.
(In the end the show lasted only a couple of seasons, she kept custody of her daughter, her ex-husband was either voted out of office or indicted; she dyed her hair, had a boob job and became a major character in a very popular show. Resistance can be futile if you work hard at overcoming and are exposed to chances you can leverage into opportunities. But preparation also takes a lot of hard work.)
I also knew a "non-worker" manager. He put in long hours setting up a chain of franchises. He'd drag himself to church every Saturday, having hit the sack at sundown and waking up at noon to make up for the sleep he'd missed during the week. He looked like hell. He was 25.
Not all hard work is labor intensive. It can still be "real work."
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