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.