It's official, I can say I've "worked in manufacturing," even if it's been barely. I found myself on a shop floor moving things from one bin to another and one said of the room to another, tailing an older gentleman who had been working there for 22 years. 90% of the job I learned in the first hour. I have a solid-enough instinct for staying out of the way from racing forklifts. I made 3 small errors that took less than a minute to rectify.
I was there because i've cornered myself into absolutely needing "a job." A temp agency placed me there. It's a touch more than half of what I'd make in my field. They've already made an issue out of "overtime," essentially keeping it secret what that would precisely entail until you're on the floor. The shift is, technically, 6:30 AM to 3 PM. You get a $2/hr "bonus" if you have "perfect attendance" which can be undermined by showing up 5 minutes late any day. With overtime, they expect you to stay until 5 PM.
What this means is essentially a 13 hour day, 5 days a week, at what is grinding, mind-numbing work. I have to try to force myself to sleep early, which never works, wake up at 5:30ish, get to work early enough to not threaten my "bonus," and then get home 6ish. Invariably thinking about how fucked my life has become. I know, even as my best self, I cannot sustain that. It's not labor intensive. It's not too quick paced. I'm not going to complain about my aching back and hands from walking around and pushing things on wheels.
What struck me most was the people. You could see the deadened resolve of "these are my circumstances." No one was really talking to each other. Very few people even feigned smiling or head-nodding as you walked by. You are made into a machine, and you perform your function at or better than the pace indicated overhead. The gentleman I got temp-hired on with worked there previously for a couple years, then explained how bad it got and why he had to leave. He complained that similar jobs were on offer in or near his home up the road in Brazil for $18-$22 an hour, and he's just biding his time until one of them calls him back.
I'm desperate enough that I think I can shut my brain off for a couple weeks. I also immediately applied to every remotely open, regardless of how poorly rated, addiction counseling company, located anywhere, I could. Certain experiences have a way of clarifying why you’re no longer willing to be picky or high-minded about what impact you might have. Watching souls actively leaving dozens of bodies is one of those experiences.
It also got me thinking about the fervor and entitlement in the voice of the guy who hired on too. It brought me back to Steak N Shake, where the drug-addled children spoke so highly of themselves and how screwed the place would be if they quit. Everyone has this story about their place and vital position in these massive corporations who literally wouldn’t notice if you died 30 seconds after your shift and just outside the parking lot.
It’s with that blind and naive pride that you get people defending their low pay, exploitative overtime hours, and weird gamification for $1,000 drawings if you download the company app and spend too much at the company over-priced mini-mart. It’s one, insanely huge thing, to negotiate with yourself to handle financial business by entertaining a place like that just long enough. It’s entirely another to be born and bred from that culture, baked into it like it’s normal or human to be set on repeat, insofar as we are pattern-seeking animals, but goddamn.
It’s one more instance I get to bear witness to as far as “chronic conditioning” is concerned. You might be fooled into thinking it’s more a Tetris-like zen going through the set of motions related to your very specific lane. But it’s so much darker than that. And, to be sure, I begrudge no one who enjoys their work or provides for themselves or their family. I just find it excruciating to think about how the baseline conception of a conscious human is so far removed, it’s less hard to imagine why we’re always teetering on a meltdown.
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