This is great advice THANK YOU... I am very hands-on and would have no problem working in a machine shop, in fact I've considered that many times. I love making things and using machines. When I was doing Senior Design I ended up getting a bad grade because my professor was a retarded @$$hole who thought that time spent on a job correlates to how well it's done; I was one of the few kids in the class who would get all of my prototype parts spot-on on the first try, and the on-campus machinist who ran the shop was probably the coolest person in the whole school. I would spend all day in there chatting it up with him about hot rods and muscle cars, he would even let me bring in car parts to machine on his stuff.
Companies now have done a pretty good job of taking away the "cold call/walk-in" method, like they don't even have a phone number to call and if you walk in asking about a job they just say "Go to our website." I'll still try that though, my confidence in my abilities has gone up quite a bit since I graduated college and realized how useless 80% of my generation is.