Day Twenty

Another opportunity to work overtime passed yet again with little regret. I sought not to extend my work week with its daily routine of boredom's nothing to do and exhaustion's back straining labors. I opted instead to rest. For my Monday through Friday gig is a dull and painful one. At any point in a given work day when I'm not twiddling my thumbs you will find me stretching my back and rubbing at the soreness along my spine. This I endeavor to do while shifting from foot to foot in an effort to still the throbbing in my ankles and knees. I am truth be told only a few degrees shy of hobbling and groaning. The reason for this is a simple one. I believe my work boots are the culprit. They are cheap and offer scant support. And then there is age. I feel it like I've never felt it before via constant aches both shooting and throbbing that do not go away when I punch the clock at the end of my work day. Even now my body is a riot of sore spot protest. I feel in need of a twenty-four hour massage.

But enough of my boo hoo lament. Mine is not to reason why. This is the work before me until such time as a new opportunity presents itself. Then perhaps I will be able to work smarter rather than harder. Meanwhile until such time I am a grunt, one who labors by the strength of his back.

As painful and debilitating as these labors are they do have the power to speed up the clock. Thus my days alternate between labor's physical struggles and the psychological strains of boredom from having no tasks in which to engage. One might look upon my days as one of the levels in Dante's Inferno. For If I had such start and stutter labors for all of eternity I would indeed go mad, and suffer too.

But my my job like life itself is only temporary. The is no call for hoopla and ardent protests. Before I know it I will have moved on to a new position, perhaps even one that interests me. I can always hope.

And that's the way it is on day twenty.

Day Thirteen

They are not piece workers per se, but each machine operator, be it in Production or Inserts, has daily quotas that are unwavering and must be met. Those who don't meet or exceed the numbers get culled from the herd and shown the door. Thus there is no lollygagging among the machine operators on either side of the production floor. All is go go go. As a result there hovers around each worker a grimness from the struggle of keeping up. This is especially true among the employees of Inserts whose pace borders manic by the unrelenting gallup of the licketysplit machines.

There is a five foot wide yellow tiled pathway with forty-five degree angled turns through out the production floor of the plant. It is called "the yellow brick road" and it is constantly traversed by production workers manning carts ladened with virgin or processed plastic cards. Warehouse employees too traverse this lane while lugging pallet jack borne loads of cardboard boxes filled with the eight and a half by eleven inch paper rife with enticements that accompany in the envelope each credit-card.

Amid this coming and going my day is spent with a walky-talky. I use it in the course of my duties of keeping stocked the labels and printed matter that keeps each production worker ever fortified and producing. A down machine is a loss of profits. This blunt fact was mentioned to me more than once during my initial gander at the plant on the day of my job interview. I was told then that I would be kept ever hopping with things to do. Such has not been the case however. There is in fact little for me to do. Thus it is with gratitude that I respond to any machine operator's beck and call. For it gives me something to do and it speeds up the clock that otherwise seems to tick as if it were keeping time while submerged in molasses.

Day Six

Stop the presses. the 359 day plan is kaput. Work today was bereft of labor and I found myself once again task-less and bored beyond endurance. I eked out three dull hours feigning business and then called it a day. I left work too with a certain clarity: I wont be at my job come Sunday. It will be a day of rest and renewal.

I must admit that the end of my workman's quest to labor for 359 days brought lightness to my spirit. I felt suddenly airy when the notion took hold that I would endeavor instead to work five days a week with an occasional Saturday for shits and giggles. It was a resolution made with the understanding that if there was a way for me to fill a weekend day with work killing hours then I would return to my original intentions of working seven days a week.

Day Four

As some old disco queen warbled back in the tail end of the 70s, what a difference a day makes. There is suddenly work to do. Unfortunately it is bull work and I am feeling my age as a result. We have a big and important client undertaken audit coming up and I have been commissioned to help rearrange the staging area for boxes and supplies. Thus for two days running I have been working with my back and the literal sweat of my brow. I was quite the perspiring mess at the end of work yesterday. Today bodes darkly for more of the same.

But am I complaining? Yes. I suppose I am. In the larger picture however I have a job and soon my bank account will reflect that. I will be able to put away my credit card, that evil bit of plastic that has been my sole source of money for several weeks running. My coffers will soon be in the black and I will be able to undertake some needed self care. In the mean while it is as any 12 Step adherent could tell you one day at a time.

Now let us turn our attention to the plant itself, a modern day cinder block constructed machine shop some 150 by 100 yards in length and width. The facility is divided in half by a centralized walk way. The side I work on is called Production. The other is referred to as Insertions and the chief function of that realm is the filling of envelopes with paperwork and accompanying plastic card which are then sealed inside an envelope. The insertion machines do the great majority of the work. It is the operators main function to feed and monitor the machines and sort the finished work into appropriate bins.

Production is primarily focused on the manufacturing of cards, for instance our company is now under contract with Macy's to produce 13,000,000 credit cards by early October. That is the main reason why the plant is running three shifts a day, seven days a week. As to how I figure in all this, my major function is to act as a liaison between the production machinists and the warehouse crew. I also have been charged with inspecting/monitoring each production side machine three times a day to see if it has the exact number of ink cartridges that have been assigned to it. I've yet to find any machine or machinist errant in that regard.

Through out all this the machines on both sides of the divide create a din and clatter, each machine with its own rhythm and syncopated sounds. I can't help but think of the overall noise as a dada inspired symphony.

Day One

First off: this was my fifth day of work, not my first. But it was however the initial day in my plan to work for a full year while only taking six days off; it was a plan that manifested a couple days back after completing my first week of work. But why six, you ask. Let's just say I happened to like the looks of 359. It seemed like a nice number, a prime I believe, and numerically speaking a good stand in for a worthy goal, and with it we had a remainder, six. Now to hit mark that mark, 359. It is challenge I can assure you on many fronts and one exceedingly large fact.

The position I've taken is in equal parts tedious and dull. I spend the great portion of my day looking at boxes, as if for hidden meaning, or else I walk around with a clipboard looking engaged and searching. I am neither. I am bored. My chief function is to three times a day check to make sure that the 28 machines and machinists have the exact number of printer cartridges assigned to them. The numbers range from two to five. And I have not yet had a machinist who had the wrong number of cartridges. I am seen I believe as a mild nuisance with a task that seems quite frankly silly. But as I've told more than one perplexed machinist, it's a paycheck. That at least they understood.

I'm going to have to have a powwow with myself because I just may have blown my 359 goal on my very first day. I say that because I only worked half a day today. I got so bored I couldn't take it any more. Perhaps it's merely a case of semantics. Does a half a day count as a day? I am going to consider it as such. But I'm also going to do my best to work full eight hour days from now on. I've got a hankering for time and a half pay, and that won't happen if I'm working half days. So full days it is. Now if there was only something to do for eight hours a day.