At one point in my life, I had decided to go into the factory industry. Guaranteed hours and wage, and my wife could get on with me. Our stint wasn’t long in this field, due to my inability to control the power stapler while boat seats were coming down the line just a dab too fast. The following passages are a short account of our experiences there…
My first day was going unexpectedly well. “Well” used loosely, as a first day in any profession is awkward and overwhelming to some degree in my experience. Anyway, it was going …well, until the smell. The over-enunciating and obscenely horrifying stench was masked only by the short bursts of flatulence snorting from my body like a plug-in air freshener. Even this sweetened the plaguing aroma if only in 30-second intervals that thankfully lasted until the next break after lunch. The smell was a mixture of a broken sewer line and the rotting head of an epileptic chicken with one eye. Apparently that does matter. I noticed the foul smell from my brief jaunt in a fast food chicken shack in my mid-teens. Needless to say, the smell was alarming at best. To the best of my knowledge, neither human feces nor chicken carcasses were any kind of ingredient to the boat seats we produced. We did not re-animate dead poultry, nor were we distributors, manufacturers, or producers of human bowel remains. Throughout the remainder of the day, the smell faded a little, but it was always there to some small degree. It was in the walls and in the shadows, laughing at me and researching my every single move…
I had concluded to a certain point that from working in this factory, I could build my own boat for free. I would steal a new part every day, and assemble them via online instructions in my garage after work. What I hadn’t concluded yet was how I would engineer a fishing vessel entirely out of various versions of boat seats, since that was the line that I worked on.
This place was the ultimate social sanctuary for the outcasts of hygiene. Ones who have not bathed all month are hired on to work at the boat seat factory. With little to no regard to sanitation, they order you to cover your freshly stapled finger with an adhesive bandage and suggest that you wipe off the blood before sending it on down the line to be packaged and shipped. A very germ-conscious person by nature, I was aggressively trying to set aside the cushion, only to have the supervisor inform me that it would be “’aight,” as she couldn’t handle the sight of blood. Please keep in mind that there were no infectious disease tests prior to acceptance onto this workforce. Speaking of more requirements for hire, I’m not sure how strict the company themselves are about injuries on the job, but I do know that in the past week, the four days worked have resulted in three accident reports, filed by myself. The authorities we answer to each day were stunned by the thought of filling out a report for a mere staple through the thumb…Maybe the jugular would have jolted them into action. I guess no one reports these things, and I feel it’s because reporting an accident requires you to take a drug screen, which for most of the employees here, would force the uncontrollable blatancy of crystal meth consumption to a head. How they afford the addiction on $8.00 an hour is well beyond my capacity of budgeting.
Unfocused Media 