'cept they really thing we are daft enough to gain 3 years experience and then take their entry level job. After all if we were clever we'd have got a degree in advanced flower arranging and competed with them.

You might be thinking about your previous experience a bit narrowly, look for IT in related areas, food processing etc. Manufacturing puts a different slant on IT as it's much more support oriented and reactive.
I've see a lot of office type IT people really struggle with it as they think they should have twenty-two and half meetings studying the impact of changing a variable name, whereas us production types, just change the bugger if it doesn't fix the problem we change it back again and try something else.