Been doing a little writing lately. Normally, I’m not too big on sharing anything I write outside of blog posts about being drunk / yelling at children, but I guess there is a first for everything. Anyways, here is this scattered essay type thing about working in a factory.
Junk
I’ve been sitting in my car in the expansive parking lot of a well manicured industrial park for the past 30 minutes, staring blankly at the enormous, nearly featureless aluminum structure in front of me. A large concrete sign next to the building reads Applied Products inc. I check my directions for the third time, to make sure that I’m at the right place. To my disappointment, I still am.
I’ve only just graduated college last month and have some vague plans to take my useless liberal arts degree and work overseas. But for now I’ve decided to stay at home for the summer and hang out with old friends. Unfortunately, I need a job to hold me over during this time. For better or for worse, my uncle was able to get me a temp job working in a factory for his company. I really don’t know what the job entails, nor do I know what the company actually does. Even the name Applied Products inc offers no hints. In fact, I can’t imagine a vaguer name. It might as well just be called Shit People Use inc. The only thing that I am certain about when it comes to this job, is that I will most definitely hate it.
I decide that I have a few more minutes to stall and I crank up my Ipod, blaring the song Anchorage by Surfer Blood. It’s a sprawling indie rock anthem that seems to be about going your own way and doing only what you actually want to be doing in life. By the time the song finishes I’m pretty sure Surfer Blood would not work at Applied Products inc. I’m also pretty sure that no one inside Applied Products inc. listens to Surfer Blood.
Once in the building, I find my way to the temp office. Inside the office I join 20 or so first generation Mexican immigrants who seem surprised and mildly annoyed to see me. It quickly occurs to me why. I’m in fact, taking their jobs. Now, in addition to being less than enthusiastic about being an Applied Products employee, I’m also feeling self conscious and guilty. Great.
The temp coordinator hands me a blue mesh vest, ear plugs and some sort of ID card. The universal holy trinity of shitty jobs. Next, she quickly rattles off instructions to the room in Spanish. Then pulls me aside and tells me the same thing in English. I was a Spanish minor in college, and could understand her the first time around, however, I realize that I’m currently in no position to brag about my academic credentials, so I resist the urge to say anything, and just nod along.
As it turns out, my uncles company is some sort of large scale printing press. But not the type that makes books, or even magazines. No, Applied Products prints, manufactures and ships out junk mail, and my job is to do the grunt work in the bindery.
The work floor of the bindery is massive, noisy and over lit. What seems like a city of miserable people work here, their souls slowly being crushed by the boredom and deafening noise. There are at least 20 different types of machines, folding, cutting, printing, and stapling various types of mail. All of which will inevitably end up in the trash as soon as its final destination is reached.
I start to think about how much junk mail sucks. It’s a product that makes everyone at the very least, slightly annoyed, and that’s when you’re at home and can simply throw it away as soon as you want. I can only imagine how god awful it must be to make the stuff all day. At this moment, I consider just making a run for the door before I too transform into a factory zombie. I could simply tell my uncle and parents that I couldn’t find the place. It’d be no big deal. After all I hadn’t been assigned a work station yet and I hadn’t even put on my vest. I’m pretty sure nothing is official until I put on the vest.
But before I can make my escape, I’m guided off to a machine that is folding up then spitting out Macys newspaper inserts. My job here will be to wait till I have enough inserts to form a 6 inch stack, make sure that all the sides of the stack line up neatly, then place them in a large cardboard box in sort of a spiral pattern. I continue to do this until the box is full, at which point the machinist comes over, helps me tape it up and brings over a new box. That’s it. For 8 hours.
Within 20 minutes I’m bored out of my mind. I’m pretty sure that this is one of the easier stations. I’m ok with this though. The last thing I want is to be simultaneously bored and stressed. I’m not in any way offended to be considered a remedial paper stacker. If there is one thing I’ve always been, it’s very aware of my limitations.
The machinist at this station is a hot headed but lazy young Hispanic guy named Cesar. He sort of reminds me of a young Mexican Joe Pesci. He’ll come over to my side of the machine to chat a lot. Usually just complaining about work, his wife, or how he should’ve gone to school to be a mechanic. All of these themes are often incorporated into one or two sentences, “Man, if I had own garage, my girl wouldn’t be bitching about money all the time, but when do I have the time to go to school working at this fucking place, y’know? Don’t get married man.” I always just nod in agreement. I don’t think Cesar actually wants my input. He’ll continue to talk like this for a while until the unsupervised machine inevitably jams up, at which point Cesar always absolutely loses it, instantly transforming into a whirlwind of bilingual profanity. He slams his fist against the machine, rips out paper from the inside, launches it across the factory floor, and disassembles the machine with such a rage that I’m sure he’s just going to break it more. It’s as close as the factory floor can get to a Jerry Springer show type implosion. This fit usually lasts 5-10 minutes until he can find the source of the jam and reload the paper into the machine. He then works his way back over to me and continues his venting.
Paper jams are a polarizing occurrence. On the one hand they are obviously hated by the machinist, because it’s the one time he actually has to do something. I on the other hand, while admittedly scared of the 5’4 120ish pound Cesar during his paper related meltdowns, still always hope for one, because during these moments, I get a 5-10 minute break from stacking shit.
This entire week I’ve been working at a station making Sea World pamphlets. I’ve never had any desire to go to Sea World, but seeing the smiling tanned faces of the families in the pamphlets as I stand in a noisy factory making future garbage, I can’t help but wish I was there with them. I find myself actually longing to be splashed by a giant aquatic mammal. If nothing else, this is a very effective pamphlet.
As for the station itself, it’s horrible. Easily the worst in the entire bindery, and that’s saying a lot because the standards for horrible at Applied Products are set pretty high. This machine is somewhat similar to the Macys station. Pamphlets are spit out and I stack them and stick them in a box. The difference is that to be stacked evenly, the pamphlets have to be placed in a vice and squished down, then you have to take this gluey industrial tape stuff and tape each bundle of pamphlets together before boxing them. The glue on this tape is incredibly messy and is quickly all over your hands making it increasingly difficult to do any type of task requiring even marginal dexterity. It also smells like cancer. I’m pretty sure that it’s the type of glue that killed George Costanza’s fiancée in Seinfeld. In addition to the glue, I for the life of me, can’t manage to make a tight uniform bundle of pamphlets. Mine are always loose and have one or two sticking out. I want to go back to the entry level station. I suck at this job and it’s made even more embarrassing by the fact that the young quiet Mexican girl I share the station with is infinitely better than me at it. She nimbly rips the tape without getting glue everywhere and in one motion makes a perfect tight bundle. She’s a pro and I’m not ready for the big leagues.
What makes the station truly awful though is the speed at which the machine shoots out the pamphlets. It’s way too fast for me to possibly keep up. One wrong move and there is a back up of 100 or so pamphlets spilling off the table. The whole thing is similar to that I Love Lucy episode with the chocolate machine. The only difference is that, unlike with Lucy, my situation is far from being funny or cute, just stressful and pathetic.
One day I notice a mouse that has some how been squished to death in part of the gears of the vice I’m using. I have no idea how long the tiny carcass has been there, nor do I actually want to know. I don’t even tell anyone of my discovery, as I can’t imagine anyone I’m working with will be as shocked and appalled as I am. So instead I just try to pretend I didn’t see it.
When working in a factory you start to truly hate anyone higher up in the company who comes down to check on things. Seriously, they, their clipboards and their business casual attire can all go to hell. As I stand their all day working my ass off in close proximity to a mouse pancake, I think about how superior they must feel to all of us in the bindery, and about how easy their day is in comparison to ours. Why don’t they have to go home sweaty and smelling of industrial strength glue? I figure most communist revolutions must have been started in a bindery. I want to tell them that I’m college educated and am going to actually do something interesting with myself, while their whole lives will be spent crunching numbers regarding coupon booklets, but I doubt they’ll believe me. I officially hate the man.
Lately I’ve been working in the back of the bindery with these two older ladies named Marta and Rosa. This is definitely the best station in the building. First off, it’s quiet enough to where I can take out my ear plugs and actually hold normal conversations. Secondly, the work is at a much more leisurely pace than anywhere else. Marta and Rosa fill these small boxes with corresponding mail and is all I have to do is tape them up (with regular duct tape), put a sticker on the box and stack the boxes at the end of our mini assembly line. Plus, I love Marta and Rosa and they love me. They are chatty and love the fact that I speak Spanish. We spend the day talking about Mexican food, other employees, my study abroad to Guatemala and their children, who are all as they proudly note, away at college right now. Both Marta and Rosa work 12 hour shifts at Applied Products to help their sons (they each have one) pay for their education. I always feel sorry for them when I go home because they still have 4 more hours of work after I leave, but in many ways they seem more than content to live vicariously through their kids. It really is heartwarming. I also love these two because they mandate that we take tons of breaks. “David, less go get some water. Cuz I’ze really thirsty right now”. Yes Marta, I’ze thirsty tambien.
There were actually a couple of other white kids that were hired as temps around the time that I started. By now though, all of them have been let go except for me. This is a bit shocking. But I shouldn’t let humility stand in my way. I’m cream of the crop god dammit. If only my college professors could see me now.
Lately I have had to work at the cutting station. Here giant slabs of paper are lined up on to a machine where a big blade then comes down, and instantly slices through them. (It’s sort of like one of those infomercials for ‘Chef Tony’s’ miracle blade; the one that slices the pineapple in midair.) I then take the foot and a half thick stack and very carefully lay it down on a pallet. This job is physically demanding. Each stack of paper is probably heavier than a second grader. Also, after the first cut, the paper is left in four foot long strips, so when you pick up the giant stack it dips in the middle under the weight. This makes it really difficult to hold and stack. What also makes this station hard for me is that I lack what I would call ‘grown man strength’. It’s not that I’m terribly unathletic, but what strength I have isn’t all that functional. I’m not the guy anyone is going to come to to open a pickle jar, or to help get that last lug nut off their tire in the event of a flat. Plus, by the end of an order the stack of papers on the pallet is pretty high, which is problematic given my height of 5’6’’. Often I have to get on my toes with arms out stretched to get that last layer of paper on top. I have nightmares about dropping a load of paper while doing this, or worse, knocking over the whole stack, leaving a sea of partially cut Market Day catalogs scattered about the floor with a bunch of angry Mexican guys staring at me. That would be even more emasculating than the blue vest.
The cutting area is a boys club. No ladies work here, probably due to all the heavy lifting. This is disappointing because the ladies are the only ones that ever actually talk to me. The guy that runs this machine is pretty nice though. The only thing he’s ever said to me was “You speak Spanish right?”, to which I replied “Si yo puedo hablar espanol”. He just smiled and kept working. He does occasionally buy me a Fanta from the vending machine for whatever reason. I’m ok with it.
The cutting station is definitely the most lonely. After a couple days with no human interaction your brain starts to run out of things to think about. It’s almost physically painful, like your head is consuming itself. I resort to trying to list all of the state capitals and nick names in my head. I’m pretty good at this except I can never remember the capitals of New Hampshire and Rhode Island. When at my worst I try to make lists, like I’m playing a lame ass solo version of Scattegories. I’ll do things like list as many Bands/Artists as I can that begin with the letter ‘B’, or try and name at least 5 players on every NBA team. I realize that this is borderline autistic behavior, but it’s all I have.
Although the cutting station is mind numbingly boring, one plus is that after a week there you can actually feel some sort of change in your upper body strength. I guess you only get grown ass man strength through hard physical labor. That being said, I don’t think this is a tradeoff I’ll be willing to make once my time at Applied Products comes to an end.
As I leave for break this one other young male temp always talks to me. He seems completely confused by my situation. “Y’know man, if you have all your papers you could like apply to drive a forklift or somethin’. That’s like 12 an hour man.”I try to explain to him that I only really need this job for a couple months and that I honestly wouldn’t trust myself on a forklift, but it still never makes much sense to him why I’m working at a factory if I went to college. His confusion seems more and more justified with each passing day.
My hours at the bindery have started to be cut drastically due to a lack of contracts coming in. I now only work like 2-3 days a week, which is fine by me. I didn’t really need 40 hours anyway. Lately, when I do work it’s back at the Macy’s catalog station. This time I work with a little flamboyantly gay guy named Julio. He flirts with me tirelessly. I never thought I’d have to fend off come-ons from anyone at Applied Products, more or less a male machinist. He says things to me like “I think it’s hot when white guys speak Spanish”. Is all I can think to say in return is “Yeah…um it’s useful”. He also repeatedly asks me if I have a girlfriend. I say yes, but this is a lie and I think he knows it. I can’t figure out why he thinks I might be gay. Maybe it’s because I’m doing a job typically reserved for old Hispanic women.
I work maybe two half weeks along side Julio before, demand has slowed down to the point where no more temps are needed. I’ve made it. I’m free. But now what the hell do I do? During my time in the bindery I really made no efforts to look into my next real step in life. My exuberance is short lived and quickly squelched by concern.
