Happy Phriday, Labor Day
Fifty years ago this year, I started a new job as a tire builder. I was 18 years old. I walked into the factory for the first time on the afternoon shift. The factory was new. It was so new it was nearly empty. There was only eight passenger tire building machines bolted to the concrete. In the coming year there would be over fifty new machines brought in and bolted down. That first night, I walked through what would become the truck tire assembly department. Then it was nothing but a wide open expanse of concrete with bare, construction light bulbs dangling from steel rafters; the permanent lights had yet to be installed. Today, the plant is over 50 acers under roof and (at last count I had) builds 20 thousand passenger tires and 2 thousand truck tires a day. It employs 3000 plus workers. My clock card number was 157. I built steel-belted radial tires for 10 years as I worked my way through college while raising a family. I punched a time clock. I worked every shift you can name. I worked a weekend shift and a split shift too. Even now my hijacked circadian clock wakes me each night at 2 a.m. with my body craving a cigarette and a bologna sandwich. At some point in that 10 years I became resigned to the idea that I might spend the rest of my life as a tire builder--maybe this writing thing will never pay off. Yet that thought did not bothered me. As long as I had my books and time to read them, I could do it. After ten years, I moved into the HR department. I spent the rest of my career working in a factory somewhere. I have factory in my bones, rubber in my blood and time-studies in my brain. My hands are scared with tiny black cuts from the hot rubber-knifes I used building tires. When I was in my early 20s, my finger joints began to pop and squeak when I woke in the mornings. They still do. You cannot use your body to earn a living without permanent residual affects. I have known thousands of factory workers by their first names and I have called them my friends. We have laughed and cried together. We have gotten drunk together in a thousand bars named The Gingham Kitchen, The Mug, The Corner Tavern, The AP Tap, Jerry's Bigger Jigger. Thousands of beer-and-a-shot joints that open in the morning for the midnight shifts in a thousand cities at the end of thousand shifts on a thousand paydays. (A beer buzz at 7 in the morning with fresh cash in your pocket, that ain't a bad thing.) We have sat in thousand plant-wide meetings to hear about raises or no raise, plant expansions or layoffs, customer recognitions or customer complaints, a plant manager fired or a new boss hired. We have learned a thousand new things shoulder to shoulder in a thousand hours of drinking thousands of cups of shitty coffee in a thousand training rooms. Learning things like kanban, lean thinking, SPC, 5S, process flow, takt time, theory of constraints, Juran quality control, new machine set up, enterprise software updates, problem solving techniques, brain storming, et. al, etc. on and on. I know what it takes to rise, rise, rise, and rise, each day with aches and pains and creaking joints and sore muscles and a hangover with the rent due. I know what it feels like to walk a thousand miles across a cold rainy dark parking lot through a thousand security gates down tunnels lined with a thousand bulletin boards into the florescent shine on electric concrete at the beginning of a shift with 8 or 12 hours ahead of you and you have the flu. Some days just showing up is the hardest part of the job. Believe me when I say I know the value of a college education. But I also know the value of those who do things, get things done using their minds and their bodies. The machine operators, the crafts people, the laborers, the trades people, the farm workers. It is still true in this world that things must be made, fixed, built, grown or otherwise produced using the human body so that civilization moves forward, so that we all have a good life. Here is to the American worker. Labor day is in your honor.
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Mike’s Friday Funnies: Crabs
How to cook crack and clean crabs: Step one: use commas. What's it called when a crab is walking to it's part time job? A side hustle. Reggie, from England, said "Once, when I visited America, I saw a crab walking along the pavement. "Sorry. I meant to say sidewalk." "He was Sidewalking along the pavement." A lawyer boarded an airplane in New Orleans with a box of frozen crabs and asked a flight attendant to take care of them for him. She took the box and promised to put it in the crew's refrigerator. He advised her that he was holding her personally responsible for them staying frozen, mentioning in a very haughty manner that he was a lawyer, and proceeded to rant at her about what would happen if she let the crabs thaw out. Needless to say, she was annoyed by his behavior. Shortly before landing in New York, she used the intercom to announce to the entire cabin, "Would the gentleman who gave me the crabs in New Orleans, please raise your hand?" Not one hand went up ... so she took them home and ate them. What do crabs say when they shake hands? Ouch. What do you call a crab that walks in a straight line? Drunk. A guy walks into a seafood store carrying a crab. He asks the owner, "Do you make crab cakes?" The owner says, "Yes, we do." So the guy says, "Good, because it's his birthday."
Book of the Week: Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and how They Feel About What They Do, by Studs Terkel
When I was a young man working in a factory, building tires, the plant manager, named Jim Rippy, gave me this book to read. One of the workers interviewed in this book was an old tire builders. Mr. Rippy wanted to know if this was an accurate description of what a tire builder experiences. I read that section of the book and many other sections as well. I returned the book and told him I thought it was a fair representation of a tire builder.
In the book the man interviewed told of his hands getting the squeaks. When he closed his fists the joints squeaked. I realized that my hands were, at that young age, already starting to squeak.
The book stayed with me and eventually I bought my own copy. Why? I found it interesting how all of these people doing boring, routine, dull jobs somehow derived value from their effort and often developed their own sense of self worth in spite of the conditions they found themself in. It taught me something about the nature of work and the human need for work.
I still like to open it up randomly and read.
Friday Twain is Leaving the Station
What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. Who was it who said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work"? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work--not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great. - "A Humorist's Confession," The New York Times, 11/26/1905
Throat Punch Poetry: Grinding
By S. Lewis
He is grinding his teeth down and he doesn't know why. Too much caffeine? Too much energy? Too much stress? Too much anxiety? I tell him it's an involuntary habit is like a heartbeat versus breathing, blinking, writing or working. But grinding teeth?
Moment of Zen
I am not sure my Beer & Bikes club was a good idea. (Sometimes we ask too much of Spandex.)