workingfortheman.com

Each day, I cut slots in the heads of screws. That was the extent of it.

The year was 1979. I'd just finished a term of community college, a week of summer had passed, a week of sleeping in and watching The Price is Right on TV. My mother and father, bless their hearts, imagined I needed something more fulfilling. A job, they insisted. It took but one look in the classifieds of a local paper to find it: 'Small machine shop needs operator; no experience necessary.' I was qualified.

The low cement block building was located just on the outskirts of an industrial park. A clean-cut man called Dale, dressed in white short sleeves and a dark tie, led me into the larger of two offices. The interview was over in minutes: "You realize this job offers only minimum wage," he said. "Are you okay with that? When can you start? How about tomorrow? Come in for training at 8:30." That was my first conversation with the owner/manager. I never thought to ask what my job would be. Or wonder why it was so easy to get. A job was a job.

The guy I replaced did the training. His last day, he said. After two weeks at the company, he was moving on to a job that paid twenty-five cents an hour more. The training took all of fifteen minutes. I was set to go with my first bucket of screws.

On the shop floor stood three cutting machines, each assigned an operator. The first cut six-foot cylindrical rods into three-inch lengths. The second, a lathe, shaped the lengths into screws with heads and threading. The third, which was mine, looked like a drill press but fixed with a pull-blade. My task was to stand in front of this machine, take slotless screws one at a time from one bucket, place them in a vice grip, squirt a milky- white lubricant all over the head and keep squirting as I drew the saw-blade slowly toward me. After cutting, I'd remove the slotted screw, remove any excess shavings and drop it into another bucket. One screw, two screws, one hundred screws, one thousand two hundred and forty-seven screws, on and on it went. Once I got the hang of it, each screw took about twenty seconds with no further application of intellect beyond a simple reflex action. In-buckets emptied, out-buckets filled. The job defined monotony.

And noise.

The engines rumbled below the screech of steel against steel, and a portable radio blared soft rock. Who turned it on each morning? Who's idea was it? Muffled, distorted, anything but soft, Barry Manilow and Elton John did nothing to relieve the grind. By the end of a day my feet hurt, my back ached and my ears rang.

Every moment, I asked myself: how long 'til coffee, how long 'til lunch, 'til another coffee, 'til quitting time, 'til quitting altogether? The minute hand on my watch slowed -- two minutes forward, one back, one minute forward, two back. Tocking and ticking. By the time respite came, I felt squeezed and dry, empty with relief. But I knew the luxury of coffee or lunch would push time forward at record speeds.

In the lunchroom, we had nothing to say and were too tired to say it. The other operators looked older than me and were probably not between terms at college. We sipped our coffees and stared at a calendar depicting a smiling, bikini-clad woman stroking some oblong piece of industrial machinery painted fire-truck red. She represented the year; there was no Miss August to look forward to. With two or three grunts and an incomplete daydream, it was time to hook ourselves back up to the machines.

Eventually, I found out some things. Neither of my co-workers had been there longer than a month. They too had answered the same ad, which I found out ran weekly. Like me, neither had ever talked to Dale other than on the day they were hired. And I learned, by the way, we were making screws for the Boeing corporation, screws to be used on 747s. This new information made me think of the occasional screws I'd cut roughly and just let go. I also thought, if the owner/manager didn't care, why should I? Let the plane's engine or tailpiece drop off, I thought. Then I felt angry at myself. How could I think such thoughts?

I began to realize what the problem with this job was. Briefly, lack of attention by management to those things that should concern staff. Sure, it was tedious work. Most low-skill jobs are not so different. But there was much that could have been done to make the shop a more desirable place to come each day. If I had had the wherewithal to compose a memo to the boss, it might have looked like this:

To: Dale
From: machine operator #3: slot cutter
Re: working conditions