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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.”