I was going to continue in the same vein tonight – talking about old jobs – but opted instead to practice the alto horn a little bit, and now I don’t feel much like writing.

Tomorrow being rehearsal night, I probably won’t have time to do an entry then, either…so you get two days off!

TWD

Time to dive back into jobs that I’ve had over the years, and I’ll focus on two that I really enjoyed and one that’s been an on-again/off-again thing since the time I was about 15 years old.

Before I get started, I’d like to interject here that I finally figured out what the song is that’s been running through my brain for the last month, when I heard it playing in the background during a scene in Family Guy.  It’s Erich Korngold’s theme from Sea Hawk, and it rocks.  Wonder if there’s a brass band arrangement of it:

So.  Now that that’s out of the way (feel free to play it as you read, but it probably won’t match the narrative), back to the matter of my employment history.

I was a switchboard operator for 4 years in college.  It was a work/study job that I actually started a few weeks before beginning my freshman year, and it was longest I ever worked at one job until I eclipsed that record with BellSouth in 2003.  Maybe I’m just really enamored of phones or something.  I enjoyed the job for several reasons, not least among them being my boss and her assistant, Cheryl Ellis and Phyllis Green, respectively.  Cheryl was probably in her late 30s when I started, and Phyllis was maybe 10-12 years older.  Both of these ladies treated me like an adopted son almost from my first day on the job.  While I haven’t heard from Phyllis in many years, Cheryl and I still trade the occasional email and catch up with each other.  Sweet ladies who had my back on more than one occasion.

It was also a fun time to be involved with phone systems, as they were really just starting to take off.  You may have read stories about how the original computer hackers were hacking phone systems.  This was right around the time that I got involved with things at the switchboard.  AT&T was being broken up (ironically, with the purchase of BellSouth a few years ago, “Ma Bell” is pretty much back to where she was to start with), and the college was expanding its phone systems, tinkering with options, just getting computerized, putting phones into students’ rooms for the first time…in short, it was cutting-edge stuff and a lot of fun.  I had an aptitude for computers and networks and my two moms really did not, so I was able to help them keep up with the technology while they taught me about dealing with people on the phone and handling billing complaints and other interpersonal crap.

I also got to spend one extremely interesting weekend working on the original switchboard, which was housed in the attic of the campus science building, when there was work being done on the new computerized switchboard.  I’d always thought that the days of operators sitting in front of punch-down boards, pulling cables from one section and connecting them to others in order to transfer calls, was something that disappeared before I was born; but that’s exactly the way things worked on the old switchboard.  I’d take incoming calls on a headset, find out who wanted to speak to whom, and physically connect the incoming calls to the port on the switchboard that went to the requested phone.  It was boring in a completely fascinating way – and yes, I made my share of mistakes.

By the end of my sophomore year, the new system was fairly stable and I new it inside and out, so I began to train new operators (I was the first student who worked on the switchboard) for the day shifts, and once they could handle things, I took more night shifts – which allowed me to do my homework, as there were very few incoming calls after the college administration left for the day.  I also used the college’s matriculation file, which we had a copy of for billing purposes, to learn details about girls that I liked – what their parents did for a living, what their social security numbers were, etc.  I didn’t use this information for anything malicious: I’d just start up a conversation with them by saying something like, “If I can guess the last four digits of your home phone number, will you go to the coffeehouse with me tonight?”  You’d be surprised how often that worked.  I guess they liked that I took enough interest in them to, basically, stalk them.

During the summer after my junior year, I was a fake pianist, singer, bus driver, handyman, babysitter and gopher for a rock band homed just outside of Washington, D.C.  My brother Larry got me this gig. He was the regular pianist and manager for a band which had scheduled a D.O.D. tour in the middle east at the same time that they had a scheduled American tour, so the band found a bunch of people to replace themselves for the American tour and I got to play the part of Larry.  The real band’s founder, lead singer, and financier – a man named George King – stayed at home to rehearse the new band, line up dancers, and sing lead vocals.  In addition to me, we had a guy named Mark on drums (he was an excellent set player, by the way), and a guy named Shaun on rhythm guitar.  The three of us, along with 3 dancers, were – theoretically – backup singers.  As far as the singing went, however, it was totally Milli Vanilli.  This is because my real job as a piano player was to run our 4-track tape system, which contained all of the real backup singers along with lead guitar, keyboards, and bass tracks.  Before each song, I’d fire up the tape, Mark and I would get a click-track in our headphones, and then everyone except Mark and George would more or less fake the entire show.

Playing with George King in PA.  That’s me behind the upright piano on the left.

Now I need to point out that it wasn’t completely faked.  Going along with that statement, I’d also admit – to anyone who asked me – that the music they were hearing in the audience was, by and large, not coming from the people they saw on the stage.  I did play the keyboard parts and all of us did actually sing; but we were completely covered up by the recorded tracks.  When a guy asked me after one gig how I made my little Casio keyboard sound so much like a Rhodes, I cheerfully told him that I had a Rhodes setting on the keyboard – but that what he was hearing had been laid down by a kick-ass keyboardist two months earlier, and that that guy was currently on an aircraft carrier in the Dead Sea.  When people asked me what I was doing with the tape recorder, I told them that it was our bass player…and keyboard player…and lead guitar….and backup vocalists.  Nobody seemed to mind.

The only near disaster we had on stage happened during the gig which is pictured in this blog entry.  We were playing at a mall in Pennsylvania, and when I started the track for the first song….nothing came through Mark’s or my headphones.  He and I stared at each other for a few seconds and then I frantically pressed buttons on the 4-track, not having any idea what was wrong.  As it happened, the cassette wasn’t seated firmly enough on the spindles and, when I started banging on the buttons, I managed to jar it enough to make it settle down fully.  Music instantly blazed out of the speakers – about 6 bars into the piece.  I don’t remember if I stopped the thing and rewound or if we just went with it.  I do remember that, after that, I made sure that everything was working correctly before every other show.

When we weren’t playing (I don’t recall how many gigs we did or where they all were – D.C., MD, PA, IL, FL, and other places), I drove the band’s bus, helped George around his house – I recall spending the whole summer trying to make his pool water not be green – and explored Washington, D.C. nearly every day we were in town.  I found a great parking spot outside the Department of Agriculture that I used just about every time I went into the city, and I generally would drive to town, park the car there, and walk around for several hours in the evenings.  Georgetown was a great place for live bands, the mall had something going on just about every day, there were concerts by The President’s Own Marine band every Wednesday night and polo matches near the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday mornings.  I must’ve spent a total of two full weeks wandering around the Smithsonian Institute that summer, and I rode the Metro to every stop at some point or another.  For many years after that summer, I’d go back to D.C. at least once a year – it was sort of a second home for Jenny and me.

One of the dancers, Chris, I think had somewhat of a crush on me – truth be told, I sort of liked her, too, even though she was probably 10 years older than me.  Neither of us ever admitted this to each other, and nothing ever happened between us, though we did have a fairly intense conversation, fueled by a bit too much wine, in a hot tub in Miami one night; and we traded a few letters and phone calls after the band broke up.  The picture above was actually sent to me by Chris in one of those letters.

I should point out that the Chris of that summer is NOT the same Chris who is frequently mentioned in these blog entries.

The 9 O’Clock Brass Quintet held together for about 5 years in the early 1990s, and played quite a few gigs of all kinds.  This one was actually on the back of a flat-bed truck in a July 4th parade.

The last job that I’ll talk about in this entry isn’t really any particular job, but rather a source of sporadic income and memories that I’ve had since I played my first professional gig on a tuba when I was 15 years old.  On that day, I filled in for John Sizemore, a great tubist and the first adult who seemed to realize that I might be good at it, with the Foothills Brass Quintet.  We played a lollipop concert in Greenville for some elementary school classes, and I’ve been hooked on brass quintets ever since.  I played in one with my brother Greg for the last two years of high school, formed one (using some of the same musicians) for four years at college, had a relatively successful one for several years after I moved to Atlanta, played with another (pretty bad) one until about a year ago, and I’m always on the lookout for 4 other brass people who want to get together and play quintet literature – for money or just for fun.

I don’t know what it is about the 5tet that appeals to me so much.  Maybe it’s that I can get opportunities to shine as a soloist without feeling nervous about it.  Maybe it’s because, by virtue of my horn, I can have a bit of control over tempo and style for the group.

Or maybe it’s just because I dig brass quintets.

TWD

I’ll get around to my other jobs eventually, but I want to stick with the 3M thing for a while because after writing about it last night, I started to more accurately recall what it was like to work at that plant, how it often made me feel, and how the 2-3 years that I spent there had a large hand in forming some of the opinions that I have about large corporations – and upper management – today.

Bailey

Let me just say up front that I think 3M is a phenomenal company, for the most part.  It began as a small mining operation in the very early 1900s and very nearly failed at its start because it wasn’t mining what it thought it was mining.  It was saved, however, by doing something quite clever: it came up for a use for the worthless mineral that it was actually mining.  Really.  Once the founders figured out that they were mining the wrong mineral, they figured out what they could do with it (it turned out that the stuff was GREAT for waterproof sandpaper).  That combination of innovation, serendipity and seeing the potential for new products became a trait that 3M has fostered to this day.  You’ve all heard of Post-It Notes, right?  They were invented by a 3M employee who wanted a bookmark for his hymnal that he could stick on a page and later remove – without ripping the page.  As it happened, he was working in a lab at the time and had invented some glue that didn’t stick very well.  He pitched his bookmark idea to some folks at the company, and the next thing you know we’ve got Post-It Notes.

When I was working at the tape plant, employees were constantly asked about their ideas for new products.  Not just R&D employees, but *every* employee.  There were suggestion boxes in the break rooms, and just about every idea was indeed considered – and the person who thought of it was indeed credited for the idea.  While I was there, one of the guys in the front office thought that tape PADS would be preferable to tape ROLLS for some applications – like for sticking shipping notices on outgoing boxes.  Why carry around a roll of tape if you can just have a stack of pieces of tape (much like the ubiquitous Post-Its) in your back pocket, peel one off, and slap it on the box?

His idea was adopted by the company.  Really.  Starting with absolutely no idea of how to actually MAKE pads of tape, the engineers on the site came up with a new machine, made of basically scraps, and began producing clear tape pads.  Later on, they added tan.  Still later, someone got the bright idea to make the pads about 4 inches wide and only have adhesive around the edges – so that invoices could be securely taped to boxes, but could later be removed without ripping them.  And the front office guy who came up with the idea?  He was basically in charge of the project from start to finish.  I can see him in my mind, but I can’t remember his name to save my life.  As far as I know, 3M is still producing these pads.  Maybe you’ve seen one if you’ve ordered something that was shipped to you.

My point is that this company honestly values input from its employees, from the lowest one on the totem pole all the way up to the CEO.  I’ve worked for several very large corporations in my life, and 3M is the only one about which I’ll say that.  It is because of that willingness to see the potential in its employees that I genuinely respect the company and regularly purchase its products.

This is Sparta, a stray recently adopted by Jenny. She’s wearing the bib because she’s just been fixed.

It’s also for that reason that I find it to be such an affront to the senses to know how the employees in my plant were regularly treated by the management of the plant.  They were terrified of any sort of union activity and made it quite clear that hourly employees would be given some say in the running of the plant only as long as no hint of organization came up.  The two 12-hour shifts at the plants, for example, were in place because the employees had asked for them a few years before I arrived on the scene.  Prior to that, the plant had run three 8-hour shifts.  The employees preferred to work longer hours in exchange for what amounted to one 4-day weekend every month.  As a result, productivity at the plant went up.  There was that type of cooperation, with good results, in many respects.

But there was also almost a disregard for the happiness of the employees in many other respects.  One example of that is that shift employees were not allowed to leave the plant grounds from the time a shift started until the time that it ended.  The plant had a security guard and any shift worker who left – say to go to a McDonald’s during his lunch break – was summarily written up.  This was true only for shift workers.  Office employees, contractors, warehouse staff (remember, I was in the warehouse for several months), janitors…anyone who worked an 8-hour day could come and go at will.  It was only the  12-hour employees who were locked inside.  

There was also a weird sort of rule about who could come IN to the plant to see 12-hour employees.  I actually ran afoul of the GM of the plant after I’d been on shift work for several months because he learned that I regularly had pizza delivered during one of my two lunch breaks during shifts.  It never occurred to me that this wouldn’t be allowed because 1}Warehouse and office employees did it all the time, and 2}Other shift workers had hot meals brought in by their wives, girlfriends, kids or neighbors just about every day that they worked.  When the word came down to me that I could no longer order pizza, I was genuinely confused and asked for a face-to-face with the general manager.  When I pointed out the logical disconnect between me not being able to order a pizza while Joe Smith could have a pizza delivered by his girlfriend, the GM gave me some story about how different the two scenarios were – after all, Joe’s girlfriend *knew* Joe.  I asked what would happen if I were a friend of the pizza delivery guy – a smartass question, sure, but a valid one – and the GM got mildly angry and told me that that was just the way things were, and I needed to shut up and do my job and Not.  Order.  Pizza.  Again.

I think I REALLY got on his shit list at that point – not because I (politely) told him that he was a complete prick, but because I hinted that he might not be treating everyone fairly.  I’m sure visions of union unrest were floating in his head at that point, because he completely lost it.  Never before or since that day have I been literally screamed at by a boss, and I honestly thought the guy was going to start swinging.

From that point on, however, we simply had our pizzas sent to Joe Smith’s girlfriend’s house and she delivered them along with Joe’s lunch.

Sparta is crazy about her “Cat-Dancer,” which is basically a wad of cardboard at the end of a long piano wire

Upper management also had a problem with shift employees who were vocal about the fact that they didn’t intend to make a long-term career out of their shift work.  Oddly, I was *not* vocal about this fact (about myself) until quite late in the game (one of the reasons I hated getting extra shifts was that I was lining up job interviews on my days off, and I finally did tell another upper management dude that “I’m looking for a real job.”  He didn’t take kindly to that).  I was not the only college graduate working shifts, however, and some of the others made no secret of the fact that they intended to actually use their degrees at some point.  They weren’t rude or arrogant about this – their goals would just come up in casual conversation in the lunch room – but they were, without exception, called in to their shift supervisors’ office at some point and told that, as long as they were working at the plant, they were working at the plant.  Saying that there were “better” jobs out there was not appreciated.

Holidays did not exist for shift employees, and bad weather rules were in place so that work on the production floor literally did not stop.  Ever.  8-hour employees were given all of the regular holidays, but 12-hour employees were not.  They were paid holiday pay, as (I believe) the law dictated, but if your shift fell on Christmas day,  too bad.  And if, as happened once when I was there, the area was hit with a freak blizzard, your shift didn’t end until the next shift arrived.  Period.  I only had to work one 16-hour day, but folks who had been working there in the years before me had plenty of stories about working 5 or 6 days straight, taking two-hour naps on the floor in between running machines that were, by and large, nothing but rows of razor blades.   Yes, people were paid *very* well for these types of hardships.  I quite honestly hoped that I’d get snowed in while working a 4-day Christmas shift, because it would’ve meant something like 6 times my regular salary when all was said and done; but I’ve gotta ask one simple question: What is so damned important about making tape that the people doing it can’t get a day off on Thanksgiving?  It’s not like it could be shipped out: there were no trucks to pick it up.

And there was one other intangible thing that really got on my nerves when I moved to shift work.  The 8-hour employees who had previous been friendly with me ceased to be.  And it wasn’t just me: shift workers had work (and play) relationships with other shift workers.  8-hour employees hung out with 8-hour employees.  It was sort of an unwritten rule, and I can only think of one 8-hour guy (he was an accountant, I believe) who regularly ate lunch with, stopped in on the production floor to chat wtih, or occasionally went out for a beer with the 12-hour folks.

This hawk has been perching in our tower just about every day for the last few weeks.  I realized that I had my 300MM lens in my car today and decided to try to get a picture.  The perch is about 120 feet up.

Maybe that’s just human nature.  I don’t know.  I know that it bothered me a lot.  I said, “got on my nerves” earlier, but that’s not it.  It bothered me.  It hurt my feelings.  I made me think less of myself.  In fact, it made me think less of the other guys who worked the shifts.

So.  Enough about my time at 3M.  All in all, it was a wash.  I made some really good friends while I was there, and I had some really good times with them while we were working and when we weren’t.  I developed a real respect for the company and many of its policies.  I believed – and still believe – that anyone with a good idea can bring that idea to fruition with the company’s help.   At the same time, however, I developed a really poor opinion of the upper management of big companies and; paradoxically given what I’ve just typed, I came to the conclusion that big companies don’t give a damn about their employees.

Perhaps that’s why I can say today, as a guy who’s been in middle management for the last 15 years or so,  that I’m not in favor of labor unions; but neither am I in favor of management trying to break them.

The pictures today are of my ex-wife’s cats and of a hawk that has decided to live on an antenna tower next to my office.  All were taken today.

TWD

Had a small crisis this morning.  After the cats gave me my wake-up call at 6:15, I stumbled out of bed and went downstairs to feed them their wet food.  This is the happiest time of the day for both of them.  For the 5 minutes that it takes me to put food into two bowls, and for them to devour it, they’re best buds and happy and excited and loving life the way all cats should.

It was therefore a travesty for them, and a major guilt trip for me, when I discovered that I was out of wet food.  I attempted to divert them by pouring a bit more dry food into their bowl, but it didn’t work.  When I went back upstairs, Bo stood at the bottom of the stairs staring at me with an expression that said, quite clearly, “What is the deal, Dad?  You’ve apparently forgotten an extremely large part of our morning ritual.  This can’t really be happening, can it?”

Boo was more direct in her approach.  She spent the next 10 minutes head-butting me (commonly referred to as “bonking” in the cat world), talking non-stop, and occasionally staring at me with an intensity that you’d have to see to believe.

Nothing I could do, so I felt guilty all day and made sure to stop and pick them up some food on my way home from work.

Speaking of work, I spent pretty much the whole day today fighting with the jQuery Datatable plugin.  It’s incredibly maddening, because I can clearly see how much potential the stupid thing has, but the documentation for it is terrible (in many cases, it’s completely wrong), and the whole jQuery sublanguage doesn’t play well with my company-mandated CSS files.  I did finally manage to get header rows to freeze on the page (using javascript), but I know that I can do a better job if I can figure out how to go the datatable route.

A somewhat ironic scene at Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon

Can’t really spend much more time on it tomorrow because I’ve got a project tentatively due on Friday and I haven’t really looked at it yet.  Maybe I’ll be able to knock it out in a few hours and get back to playing around with more interesting code.

That’s the type of thing that I really enjoyed back in the 90s, when software technology was just starting to take off and I was on the bleeding edge of it.  In about 1998, I realized that it was all starting to go too fast and I couldn’t keep up with it anymore.  That’s when I get into hardware.  It also moves fairly rapidly (hardware speed and capacity doubles about every 18 months), but because it’s stuff that I can actually touch and see changing, I have an easier time dealing with it.  Unfortunately, after 10 years on the hardware side, I got shuttled back into software (ten years removed from having to deal with it) and I admit that I struggle to do things that other folks on my team do without even thinking.

Entrance to Salem Cemetery near Pineville, GA

One of the reasons for that might be that I’m really not interested in coding any more.  At least not in coding reports.  Writing applications is one thing, but sucking stuff out of a database and presenting it is just plain boring.  Our team is currently in the process of setting up a new “buddy system,” though.  That could be a good thing or it could be a killer.  Basically, each of us is going to be paired off with someone else on the team and we’ll be expected to learn their code, be able to maintain it, and perhaps learn something new.  I’m at the point where I can probably school some of the kids (I think the oldest person on my team is about 35) in ColdFusion and PHP, but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to learn some Ruby from somebody.  At least with that, I might be able to move back to the applications side of things.

Anyway, thinking about this on my ride home, I decided to try to write a post about some of the jobs that I’ve had.  Going through the list in my head, I was mildly impressed (and depressed) about how all over the place I’ve been in terms of employment.  What follows is a partial listing (meaning: what I can remember).

I was a clown.  Jocko the Clown, to be precise.  This was a summer job at a Holiday Inn near 6 Flags Over Georgia (an amusement park), and I was actually one of three guys who took turns being the hotel’s clown.  None of us had any experience doing this, nor did any of us have any particular aptitude for it (although I knew how to juggle and was pretty good with a hacky-sack).  Basically, we learned how to put on the make-up on our first day (and how to take it off, which was infinitely more difficult), and then we set up a schedule about who would be Jocko on any given day.  Our job was to entertain the kids in the hotel during the day and then show them a movie every night.

On the days when we were not scheduled to be Jocko, we still worked, of course.  In addition to Jocko, the hotel had a mascot named Holiday Hound, which – as you can probably surmise – was a person dressed in a dog suit.  Yeah.  I was a dog.  I could deal with being Jocko, but being Holiday Hound was one of the most tedious experiences of my life.  For starters, the dog suit was incredibly hot.  This was before the days of air-conditioned or breathable costumes, and putting on that stupid dog’s head and paws and feet and (I swear to God I’m not making this up) the green overalls that went over the whole thing was a completely masochistic exercise.  The hound, of course, couldn’t talk – so we were relegated to entertaining guests by means of dancing (at which I am terrible) or acting completely foolish (at which I excel).  The kids all wanted to pull the dog’s tail and not much else, and the adults generally thought it was annoying.  Some of them were pretty cool, however; and my best “brush with greatness” story comes from a day when I was Holiday Hound.  The (then) mega-band Alabama was performing at Six Flags and they were staying at our hotel.  These were all Good Ol’ Southern Boys who liked to laugh and do idiotic things, and they started making jokes about the dog (which was me) and asking me if I was a real dog and yuck yuck yuck.

So I humped the bass player’s leg in the hotel lobby.

He turned bright red and I thought he was going to knock my head off (literally), but the rest of the band absolutely broke up in hysterics and we all ended up laughing about it.  Later that evening, the guy had a beer with me in the hotel lounge before the group left to perform.  I don’t recall his name.  Teddy something, I think.  I guess I could look it up.

On the days when I was neither the clown nor the dog, I was the normal person who did his best to protect the dog and make excuses for the clown (or the dog) when he needed to take a break.  The normal person was also the one who was in charge of the movies.  There were two of them.  The Apple Dumpling Gang and Explorers.  We watched those stupid movies every night, 6 nights a week, for three months.  To this day, I cannot think of either of them without wanting to scream.

I was a fast-food cook.  Between 1983 (when I graduated from high school) and 1987 (when I graduated from college) I worked at McDonald’s, Burger King, Hardees and Wendy’s – sometimes multiple times at the same franchise and sometimes multiple times at different franchises of the same restaurant.  These gigs lasted anywhere from a few days to a few months at a time.  In most cases, I did indeed give the manager a couple of weeks notice before I quit, but I clearly remember quitting one Burger King at 2:00 in the morning – right after I found the manager drunk out of his mind and attempting to take a dump in a urinal.

I was a stock-boy at a bookstore.  I don’t remember exactly how I got that job or how long I kept it – around two years, I think.  Basically, my job was to sit in the back room and put price tags on books in the college store – or to take price tags off of them (a job that required me to use a tiny little iron that melted the glue on them so that the sticker could cold off without ripping the cover) and replace them with higher prices or, more often, different bar codes.  Bar codes were just coming into vogue at the time and the store’s director (who is a great guy and who was still running the show last year) really didn’t have a clue how to use them.  He just liked the fact that you could scan them and a computer did wicked neato things to his inventory database.  Occasionally, I got to rip the covers off of books, which was a great way to relieve stress.  This was done (probably still is) so that the store could just mail the covers back to the publisher (as proof that the books were not sold) and be reimbursed for unsold stock.  It saved postage – and it also helped me build up a pretty decent personal library of coverless books.

I was a bartender. This was an extremely short-lived gig that I had for about three weeks before I moved to Atlanta (after quitting my job as a guy who made tape – more on that later).  I got it mainly because I played darts in a particular bar nearly every night and the owner (a guy that I only knew as “Lumpy”) needed somebody to sling drinks at night.  Let me be very clear: I sucked as a bartender.  I’m the kind of guy who had an index card telling me what to put in, for example, a Rum and Coke (for those of you who aren’t sure, that drink is made with, um, Rum and Coke).  Fortunately for me, most of the people at this bar rarely got more imaginative with their drink orders than, “Coors,” so I did okay.

Before the bar, I worked at 3M as a warehouse assistant, an assistant slitter operator, a slitter operator, and another job that for which I can’t even recall the title.  All told, I was at 3M for just about three years.  Of the jobs listed, the warehouse assistant was by far my favorite job, and I’d do it again today if I could afford to.  My job, in essence, was to use a ride-on pallet jack to take boxes of tape cores out of trucks and arrange them in an upstairs holding area.  Alternately, I’d go to another upstairs area and retrieve huge boxes of resin (which was melted down to make the tape).  If there were no trucks to unload or resin to retrieve, I’d cruise around the tape-production area and pick up pallets of box-sealing tape and load them onto waiting trucks.  Once a day, I’d clean off the dock area with a high-powered air hose.  This job was not only mindless and fun (hey, I was basically riding around on a go-cart all day), but I was very good at it.  After I left it to work on the slitter, the core storage areas became totally disorganized and the two guys who had the job of retrieving the cores that I’d been storing let me know on a regular basis how much they missed my organization.

But the warehouse gig was always a temporary one, and I jumped at the chance to get a permanent position when I was offered one on a slitter, which is the machine that puts tape on cores.  Every roll of tape begins its life as chemicals, which are melted together to make a HUGE roll of tape known as a “jumbo.”  A typical jumbo is about 5 feet wide, has a radius of about two feet, and weighs around 600 pounds.  To convert this massive roll of tape into rolls of box-sealing tape (or cellophane tape or duct tape or magnetic tape or whatever) requires a slitter, which – as the name implies – slits the tape coming off of the jumbo into strips and wraps the strips around tape cores.  There are two kinds of slitters.  One of them is almost entirely automated and is run by a single operator.  Running an automated slitter is a mind-numbingly boring job.  Basically, you watch the jumbo get smaller and you stop the machine before it runs out of tape so that you can splice another jumbo in.  Unless you have a tear-out, which is what happens when a jumbo jumps or when the slitter’s razors get dull, you basically do nothing but watch tape being made.  For 12 hours at a time.

Rose Hill Cemetery, Macon

The other type of slitter is what I was originally trained on, and – while also a dull job – it’s actually sort of relaxing.  On these older, more manual, slitters, you work in a team of either two or three people.  There’s a slitter operator, an assistant operator and a boxer.  The boxer, if there is one on the team, has the worst job in the world.  He or she just takes rolls of tape off of a conveyor and puts them in boxes.  It’s boring, it ruins your back, and you get a lot of paper cuts.  The operator is in charge of running the machine.  He has to keep on eye on the speed of it to make sure that the jumbo doesn’t jump around too much (and the jumbos slit on the older slitters are ALWAYS lopsided – which is why they can’t be run on automated slitters), make sure that the razors in the machine are replaced regularly, perform QC inspections on the tape coming off of the machine, and keep things running smoothly enough to reach a shift quota (known as “making production”), which varies depending on what type and size roll of tape is being made.

The assistant’s job is to “throw the bar” in between “cuts” (that is, to put fresh cores onto the winding bar after the newly-wound tape has been removed from said bar), to make sure that there are always fresh cores in the hopper, to assist in replacing jumbos (and in splicing the new jumbo onto the old one), and to help the boxer if the slitter starts to put out more tape than the boxer can box.  If the tape being made is large rolls (like you’d see in a box-sealing machine, as opposed to a hand-held box sealer), the slitter also IS the boxer.

After I’d been in the position of assistant operator for about 6 months, my operator (an extremely lazy woman named Bessie – I’m not making that up, either) somehow managed to apply for and win long-term disability, and she was “temporarily” moved to a job wherein she sat on a stool all shift and looked at small rolls of tape going past her on a conveyor belt.  At that point, I was “temporarily” assigned as an operator on my slitter, and I was teamed up with a new assistant who was a guy about my age and with whom I got along very well.  Tony wasn’t the brightest knife in the deck, but he was hard working and, once he figured out that I’d figured out that “making production” was nothing but a numbers game, he’d do anything that I asked him to do – including occasionally bypassing safety measures by (along with me) hand-loading the smaller jumbos into the slitter instead of using a hoist or moving our pallets out of the way when the collectors were late in getting them for us.

Bo checks out my room through his very own cat door.

As  I said, making production was nothing but math.  Why I seemed to be the only person in the plant who realized this is still a mystery to me.  Basically, I went to work knowing that I was going to be there for 12 hours and in those 12 hours, my target production was, for example, 120 cuts of 2″x1000′ tape.  Do the math.  That’s 10 cuts an hour….one cut every 6 minutes.  At 1000′ per cut, that’d mean that I had to have the tape coming through the machine at 166 feet/minute.  If I cranked it up to 200 feet/minute, I could do a cut every 5 minutes.  It took 30 seconds to take the bars off and reload them with cores, which put us thirty second ahead on every cut.  Add it all up, that’s 3 minutes saved and hour and 36 minutes saved over the course of a shift.

And 200 feet per minute was SLOW.

Once I was able to convince Tony of all this, it was nothing to tell him at the start of a shift, “We’ll break a record tonight if we run at 220 feet per minute.  You up for it?”  He always was, because if you broke a record, you got some serious bling, if you led your crew (there were four crews that worked rotating shifts) in production at the end of the month, you got more serious bling, and if your crew led all the other crews at the end of the month, you got even MORE serious bling.  Now we’re talking late 80s here, so it doesn’t sound like much, but Tony and I would regularly take home $200 in gift certificates, coffee mugs, jackets, and other goodies – and we did this consistently for the year that I was “temporarily” the slitter operator.  As soon as we’d break a record running at 220 fpm, we’d come in the next night and break our own record by running at 225 fpm.  There was nothing to it.

Eventually, management at the plant figured out that their production targets on the manual slitters were far too low for anybody who was actually willing to do the math, and they changed them.  Tony and I were never overtly blamed for this by the other crews, but everyone knew what had happened and I decided to transfer to the plant’s film division (out of the tape division), where it made film for x-rays and high-quality audio and video tape.

It was a horrible move.  The film division was much more anal about everything and had a horrible seniority policy which said, in a nutshell, that if an employee with seniority wanted to take a day off for any reason, the employee with the least seniority was expected to cover that shift with very little notice.  After I’d been called in to work extra shifts several times – every time on a weekend – because of this rule, I flatly told my supervisor that I wasn’t coming in if I was called on the following weekend.  As expected, I was called in the next Saturday night and I didn’t take the call.  When I next returned to work, I was chewed out in spectacular fashion.  I said to my supervisor, “I told you I wasn’t going to take that shift,” and he responded, “Everybody says that – but nobody actually doesn’t come in!”

So I got my written warning or whatever.  Two days later, after finishing up a three-night shift, I was called in to work a 4th night.  Our night shifts started at 7PM.  I showed up at 5, much to the delight of my supervisor.  He was less delighted when I told him that I was just there to quit.

Which I did.  Effective immediately.

It was May 10th, 1990, and I’ve celebrated every May 10th since then.  My father calls it “3M Liberation Day.”

Well, I’ve written a ton so far and really haven’t scratched the surface of my job history, so I guess I’ll be able to use this same topic tomorrow.  Woohoo!

The photos in this entry, incidentally, were on a disk I found labelled “May 2, 2010.”

I’d planned to write during work today, but actually ended up doing work. It was sort of fun. I’m attempting to use jQuery to build tables with frozen headers. Haven’t done it yet, but I’m getting close.

The weather took a rather amazing turn to cold and rainy today. Two days ago, I had the A/C running in my car (see photo) and today I had the heater on.

Tonight’s rehearsal will be my first on the alto horn in about 10 years. Should be fun.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

I just sneezed about 6 times times in a row.  Not once did I think to myself, “I wish I could afford to have this checked out.”  What I thought was, “Damn.  I’m sneezing a lot.”

Most of my conservative friends would think that my sneezing was my fault.

I’d think that it was bad luck, and that my country should take care of me.

That’s why neocons hate me.

TWD

It’s about 10:30 Sunday night and I just got home from a nice Indian dinner and some coffee with Betsy in middle Georgia.  I’d planned to make it down to Macon in time to walk around a cemetery and take some pictures, but after wasting much of the day watching a movie and then spending an hour or so cleaning out my pigsty of a car,  it was nearly dark by the time I got down there – so I blew it off and went straight past it to Warner Robins.

The car drove well, and I didn’t hear the brakes squealing too much, which is a good thing.  It’s become obvious that I need to have them worked on, but I just can’t afford it until March, when I get my bonus.  Hopefully, that first check in March is going to be a monster and help me get back on track after an extremely expensive couple of months.  It’ll be nice to start taking huge, sucking chest-wound bites out of my debt.  I’ve found myself fantasizing recently over when the old debt ball is really going to start rolling – when I’ve paid off any one particular debt and can start applying double payments to another one, and then triple payments to another one, and yada yada yada.  The goal I set for myself a year ago had me debt free in March of 2013, and – while that stupid car repair bill last year set me back a bit – I can still see a light at the end of the tunnel.

As I said yesterday, I took a drive around north Georgia yesterday afternoon, mainly to get some shooting in.  Along the way, I found a campground near Lake Lanier that I didn’t know existed.  It’s a very pretty place.  Unfortunately, it appears that the park, which was or is a state park, is pretty much run by the Lake Lanier Island Association.  What this means is that it’s horridly overpriced.  For only $36/night, I can set up a tent there.

I’m used to paying….um….NOTHING for primitive camping.  Still, maybe I’ll get a couple of friends to go with me.  I suppose $10 is okay for the chance to get out in the middle of nowhere in a really gorgeous location.

The more I write tonight, the more I realize that I don’t have much to say, so I’m going to just throw in a couple of pictures and end this blathering.  Tomorrow, I think I’ll just go off on something different and see what happens.

TWD

I drove up to north Georgia today and hung around Lake Lanier and drove through the mountains and took pictures and generally enjoyed myself.

I’ll talk more about that tomorrow.  I just don’t feel like doing much of anything tonight.

Have I mentioned that I hate the fact that Mac computers don’t have a backspace key?

Boo attacks my phone

I really do.  Having to post pictures from my iPhone just doesn’t feel right.  It’s supposed to be a beautiful day across most of Georgia tomorrow, so maybe I’ll take a few hours and go find something interesting to look at.  Or maybe not.  Who can say?

I worked from home today, spending most of my time taking some mandatory training and getting it out of the way for the next 6 months.  We’re required to take some of the most moronic courses ever thought up.  It’s not that their concepts are stupid – business ethics, sexual harassment,  etc – but it’s ridiculous that people still have to sit through “training” about it, complete with tests at the end that are made up of incredibly obvious questions.  I’ll admit that, most of the time, I just skip to the test right off the bat and don’t bother with the material.  It’s sort of pointless to spend an hour watching poorly-acted and patently unbelievable video when you can just answer some questions which will typically be phrased something like this:

One of Skip’s employees, Mandy,  tells him that another employee, Steven, regularly steals money from petty cash.  What should Skip do?

1. Alert human resources.
2. Tell Mandy that she shouldn’t squeal on other employees.
3. Confront Steven and blackmail him.
4. Do nothing.  Everybody steals from petty cash.

Today, however, I sat through most of the videos – basically because I don’t like starting new projects on Fridays, and I finished my old ones yesterday.

Had some shepherds pie for lunch and dinner, and spent the last couple of hours watching Ghosts of Mississippi, which is a movie about the retrial of the guy who murdered Medgar Evers in the 1960s.  This is about the third time in the last year that I’ve stumbled across something dealing with Medgar Evers.  Each time, I’ve been somewhat appalled at the bigotry of the middle of the last century.  I understand that prejudice is a fact of life and that everybody’s got some and that, particularly in the south, racism still exists in many ways today; but the over-the-top nature of it during the 1960s just blows me away.  How can/could anybody actually think like that?

I had a brief email conversation with my father about just this subject sometime in the last year, trying to find out how he felt about issues of race when he was in his 20s and 30s, and how his views have changed, if at all.  He told me that New England was pretty isolated from the whole problem.  I can accept that.

Politically, it just makes me more liberal.  Over generations, societal change is effected best by government intervention.  The government made forced integration.  At the time, it caused riots.  Today, nobody thinks anything about it (except very stupid people who tend to be over 50).  Government sued the tobacco industry, shouted about the evils of smoking, and made it illegal for anyone under 17 to buy cigarettes.  When I was in high school, smoking was no big deal.  Most of the kids I know today think it’s disgusting.  In the 50s and 60s, drunk driving was a comical offense (think Otis on the Andy Griffith Show).  After MADD got government involved, it became a crime nearly worthy of the death penalty.

There are plenty of other examples that I can’t think of right now, but my point is still this: if you want big-time changes, you need big-time regulation.  It’s not something that parents pass down to kids.

I also practiced the tuba for about 45 minutes today.  I think it’s the first time in about a week that I’ve played it.  Started out pretty rough, but smoothed out after I warmed up.  Didn’t take the alto horn out of the case.  I’ll blow on it this weekend, probably.

Got a slight case of indigestion this evening and really wanted a glass of milk, but let it go.  No Dairy January is almost over.

TWD