I need my own palliative tonight. I am a technical writer, and went to a Society of Technical Writers meeting where "vision" was discussed. Although some of the people that attend are quite fascinating to me, and although I almost always enjoy the nights when there is a guest lecturer, I found tonight's meeting as profoundly depressing as if I had watched some black-and-white Bergman film.
It was too sharp a confirmation that Technical Writing is not the field I most want to be in. Most days I enjoy my job a fair amount, but in the future I will have to stay away from the whole idea of vision as it relates to vocation.
Okay, I really need to get some perspective. I've done much worse. I've worked in some factories, some complete hell-holes, that make my present work seem like pound cake.
At one shop I worked in, it seemed the very air was toxic. The workers there were geographically removed from any decent job prospects, so they felt tied to their work and the miserable routine. I'm not sure if I even picture the place correctly--if the physical aspects of it were as grim as the mental or if it only seems that way now looking back.
No--it comes back to me--it was as grim physically as mentally. Manufactured fibers floated through the air and so coated a person that at the end of a shift workers would blast themselves with air compressor hoses. I had the additional rare luck of being allergic to the fibers, and so I managed to stay awake on the ride home by scratching my entire body. I also worked second shift, so by the time I went home there was no daylight left.
It was assumed by the foreman that you needed the work badly. He once came up to me while I was sweeping my area prior to the final Go Home bell-- I did all clean-up prior to the final Go Home bell, because that only made sense. He explained to me that, "If you really want to get hired here, you're going to have to save clean-up until after the bell rings." In other words, sweeping is volunteer work.
The smallest things seem huge in hell-hole shops. Bells become sacred--both to management and to the workers. Pace also becomes sacred, but only to management.
But I heard my foreman say these things to me about sweeping and bells, and the words didn't process well. I had been temporarily laid off at my prior shop job (a lesser torment on a parallel with the higher levels of Dante's purgatory) and was marking time at this place while waiting to be called back. I had taken a pay cut, which placed me at minimum wage, but the foreman was not privy to this information. To be hired full-time at this lower hell-hole would still be a pay cut from where I would soon return.
I usually don't have it in me to be mean, and I didn't care enough about the words coming out of that man's mouth to have a discernible reaction. I think I just stared at him. Some rare level of absurdity had been reached that made rational or even vengeful answers less enjoyable than staring.
The foreman seemed to love his rank in the hell-hole, and from knowing him I came up with the lines, "Kings on thrones, however small the kingdom. That's what we are, that's what we want."
There was one person there I remember with fondness. He drove the forklift, and seemed completely impervious to the toxic environment. I loved him dearly for that. The feeling may have been somewhat mutual--at least, he always used to ask me when I went out for lunch break: Are you going to come back? I had never said anything about not coming back, but he sensed it. I loved that he asked me that question.
On my final day there, I was working a hot press. Sheets of some kind of soft fiber board that make up the trunk liner of the car you drive were sprayed with water and then placed into the damn hot press and molded into rigidity. Cracks in the finished product had to be squirted with Krazy Glue, which has an exquisitely pungent smell when applied to hot fiber board. My forearms had been burned slightly, but in order to keep pace I did not, could not, concern myself with slight burns or the care needed to avoid them. And I was having an allergy attack due to the dust mites who must have been having full-fledged orgies within those fibers, but a dust mask had to be worn, so imagine a Kleenex fastened to the face with a rubber band.
The night was only half over, and when I saw my foreman, I explained my problems. I don't think I used the exact words "This press has become my cross to bear," but the sentiment was undoubtedly obvious by my facial expression and the dust mask, which I imagine I had pushed up to the top of my head in order to talk and was now wearing as a small white hat.
Maybe some profound level of absurdity had been reached for him by my role at the press, and the complaint I was lodging, though I find it hard to believe that my foreman had a capacity for appreciating the absurd. And yet he responded no less forcefully--he stared at me and said nothing. And then walked away.
That sapped any perseverance and jolly-good productivity I had left. I purposefully took the next floppy piece of dust-mite-partying fibers, and set it on the press. I took off my hands-free Kleenex/silly white hat, and placed it on top of the piece, and pushed the double-buttons--a safety precaution, lest you should in a fit of desperation try to mold your head into the shape of a trunk liner. The press ran its damn hot cycle, which pressed the dust mask into a now nicely formed automobile part. Check your car, you might have it; I'll buy it from you. I took it off the press, placed it 7 or 8 down in the stack, and waited for the sacred Lunch Bell.
When it rang, I headed outside, got in my car, drove away, and just kept on driving. I have only one regret. I wish I could have been there to see the face of the forklift driver when he realized that today, I wasn't coming back.
