workingfortheman.com

I worked at a place that made business forms. Billions and billions of business forms. My co-workers were the nicest people I have ever worked with anywhere and the job paid pretty well, but management was insane.

Each shift had several hundred workers, and everyone had to punch the clock. You couldn't punch in earlier than 5 minutes before your shift started, and if you punched in even a second late, you were docked 15 minutes pay. So several hundred people had to line up and furiously start punching in at 5 minutes till. At the end of the shift, everyone had to punch out on their own time -- you were not allowed to line up before end of shift. We also had to punch in and out for lunch, which took 10 minutes off everyone's lunch hour.

On Dec.24 the year I was there, we didn't get to leave early, but management gave everyone a frozen turkey. They brought them around first thing in the morning, so we all had a thawing turkey on the floor next to our desk for 9 hours.

The manager hated me from the day I started. If I was doing A, he'd yell at me for not doing B. If I was doing B, he'd yell at me for not doing A.

One day I cut my finger badly on an Exacto blade. I left a trail of blood all the way back to First Aid. When my manager saw the blood, he wanted to know who had been hurt. When he was told it was me, he said, "Tell her to clean it up".

One time he yelled at me because the ink on a yellow form was green instead of blue. Even though he had worked there like 25 years, I had to explain that the yellow paper made the blue ink look green. It really pissed him off.

I found another job after about 6 months, and when I told the manager I was leaving, he begged me to stay. For the last two weeks I was there, he pleaded every day. Then he told several of the wonderful people I worked with that I was leaving because I didn't like them.

The proof reader was an ancient old biddy who'd been there forever. If I corrected an obvious misspelling on a customer's form request (like correcting "nmae" to "name"), she'd make me change it back to the wrong spelling.

The manager would not let me call the customer to verify the spelling. So customers would get millions of forms with stupid misspellings, and if they complained they were told that it was what they'd specified.

In her quest for riches and personal fulfillment, Elaine has at various times been covered, literally, in blood, in raw sewage, and in drilling mud. She currently sits bathed in a soft green light, immobile except for small movements of her right hand.

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