This job’s okay, sorta

My second job at the Motorola plant was to put cell phones in boxes. I took a phone out of a big box full of phones, packed in small cardboard columns, and put them into the box a customer would open. I did this for eight hours a day, sometimes ten hours. Sometimes there was a bit of variation in that a new box of a new kind of phone would come in and we would need to set up the phones to be unloaded. That provided a small break in the monotony.

I don’t remember any of my co-workers names there. I had been transferred from my first job which was to sort scrap. We dug through big boxes of crushed phones, throwing the garbage into one box and the recyclable material into another. That job was fun because there were so few of us there and we worked very little. We worked in a building they were tearing down while we were inside it. Sometimes the outer wall would shake. It had once been an interior wall but they had demolished that half of the building, turning it into the side of the building.

We would play baseball with pieces of circuitry from phones and tubes of circuits. One guy would climb up onto stacked up boxes of scrap and sleep. If the supervisor came buy, and she almost never did, we just said he was in the bathroom. Once she left we’d wake him up and let him know. We would have races on pallet jacks - you could make them go just by shifting your weight and twisting the handle. We got in a little trouble for that one from our supervisor, “if OSHA walked in and saw you doing that… don’t do that please.” She was really nice about it.

We all got transferred to the main building after they shut that facility down for good. The main facility is where I put phones in a box all day and night. I remember there was a guy who was an artist of some kind. I said I couldn’t draw and wished I could. He said I could draw, or could learn, and told me he used to teach a class called fear of drawing 101. I told him I was a communist, we talked about that a little. He was sympathetic but clearly not interested.

I got transferred to the loading dock, which was almost as much fun as sorting scrap. I worked in a crew with two other guys. One guy was missing several fingers and had big tattoos on his calves. The other guy was older and very funny. He later told us he was a recovering crack addict. He had some very fucked up and very funny stories. He was super charming. We used to call him our team leader, to piss him off. He would say “I ain’t the leader of shit, you all ain’t my responsibility!” He talked a lot about his two year old son, called him “my little buddy.” His son would say “how bout that, daddy, how bout that?” I never met that little boy but I felt like I did, as much as I heard about him. We were all temps. Looking back, they ran the place on a skeleton crew of non-agency staff and the vast majority hired through a temp agency. He really wanted to get hired on permanent. “I need health insurance, man, if something happened to my little buddy while we’re uninsured, we’d just be fucked and man I’ve done some fucked up shit that I regret but if something happened to my little buddy I’d get crazy and mean.”

I used to read in the parking lot on breaks. After I got transferred to the main facility it was too long of a walk to my car so I read in the break room. I guess there was a cafeteria, people said the food was good, I just brought a lunch every day and ate in the breakroom by myself and read. I didn’t feel like socializing on breaks, I just wanted to get back to my book. I remember I read a book on the history of economics. I don’t know what else I read, maybe a novel or something.

I worked second shift. I would get home feeling worn out but wired. I’d watch TV for a couple hours to unwind. I lived with my parents, my little brothers would wake me up early a lot. That always pissed me off. I wish now I had been nicer about it, but it was pretty obnoxious.

One time I was driving to work and it was pissing down rain, huge buckets of water coming down so fast that it didn’t look any different if I had the windshield wipers on or off. I dropped my speed to a crawl, trying to keep the taillights of the car ahead of me in view. I saw lighting hit a tree just ahead of me at the side of the road. The bolt of lightning was blue-white and there was big orange fireball where it touched the tree. The thunderclap was the loudest I had ever heard. When I got to work, they had us go sit in a basement at the plant, because there was a tornado. After a little while they sent us to work.

While I worked there UPS went on strike. The woman who drove the FedEx truck was really nice and the UPS strike meant tons of work for her, though I still thought the strike was a good idea. I don’t remember where I got my information about the strike, because this was pre-internet. Maybe I’m projecting stuff backward that I learned later, I’m not sure.

I liked working in the loading dock because of the variation in the work - loading trucks, unloading trucks, labeling packages, wrapping pallets. It was way less monotonous. Mostly I liked my co-workers. Like the scrap-sorting facility, we socialized a lot at work. We laughed a lot most days. A manager commented on it, said “you boys sure laugh a lot, it sounds like you’re not working but I know you are.” That was the difference with the scrap place, we really weren’t working much at all over there. Sometimes I wish I had a job like that still, a job where I could get away with not working at al and where we socialize a lot on the job.

They shut that plant down a few years after I quit.