Industrial Fiction: Deserted-island

Snodgrass was back in the factory at 5:45 in the morning. He was very glad it was Friday. He was beat.

He went to the stand-up by the station where the can-opener was installed and gave Paula a bump by text.

She responded “Be right there” and within a minute she, Matthias and Ganzer walked up to the stand-up. Either she was a very good guesser or the information network was keeping track of his location.

She opened without preamble “What team do you play for?”

“I play for the Firm” Snodgrass replied.

“What feeds the wolves?” Paula asked.

“The legs feed the wolves” Snodgrass answered.

“You are a quick study” Paula said.

“One thing that you will learn about me is that I run a tight-loose organization. Most days I will have four or five meetings with you but they will be very short, there will never be more than seven people...usually half that...and the meetings will be where you are working. I will come to you.” Paula said.

“If you are planning on getting any work done in my meetings you will be sorely disappointed.”

“I collect updates on your progress, information about roadblocks you need help blasting through, and resourcing concerns. I give you additional tasks as you clear your plate. We may have a minute or two to talk about something personal but that is after we get through the business. If you need more face-time with me, I go to the gym to work out for an hour every night. We can talk there as long as you can walk on a treadmill.”

“That is not very efficient for you” Snodgrass observed.

“It will be as you learn the other players because I will expect you to NOT NEED ME to get stuff done. I am here as a catalyst, not a prime-mover.”

“You are going to go with Matthias and Ganzer again but to a different station.”

“You did OK yesterday. Try to match that success today.”

“Oh, by-the-way, we are running production tomorrow and you are expected to be here” as she picked up her papers and moved on to her next meeting.

“Come on” Matthias said. “The ladies are dying to meet you.”

Matthias plowed ahead with Snodgrass a half-step behind.

Ganzer started speaking rapidly with a low voice. “You are going to drama-central. That line is 90% women and they are hyper-competitive about men. Some of them are beautiful. Anything you say will be remembered, repeated and used against you at a later date. Your best bet is to play stupid.”

Snodgrass was baffled. What the hell?

Matthias took him to a line which was pushed up against the south-wall of the factory. Approaching it, Snodgrass felt his hair wilt. There was no ventilation and the humidity was stifling. He had to wonder how much hairspray some of the women had used since their hair stayed magazine-cover perfect.

Unlike the previous day when the nearby operators kept the chatter to a minimum while he learned his job, the gobbling and cackling was non-stop. It was like being in a hospital waiting room with ten TVs on ten different channels, all turned up loud.

“This is Cynthia, she will be your trainer today” Mathias said as he turned away and left Snodgrass to his own devices.

Cynthia followed the same routine of having Snodgrass read the job description for ten minutes. Wiser than he was yesterday, he paid particular attention to the notes penciled into the margins.

The job was deceptively simple. One of four different sub-assemblies came into his station. He was supposed to pick out the correct kinds of water seals to use for the particular model, peel them off of “Post-it” note like pads and then apply the seals to the proper locations inside the sub-assemblies.

It was a combination of yesterday’s memory game of remembering which push-pins into which holes with the added challenge of manipulating the seals which were limp, stretchy and incredibly sticky where the adhesive had been applied.

They were not difficult to peel off of the pad but the adhesive extended to within a few millimeters of the die-cut edge and wanted to stick to his gloves and particularly to any other exposed adhesive surface on the same seal.

The worst ones were the ones for the new product. The base material was the thinnest and limpest of the bunch and the adhesive was a super-glue like gel that set when exposed to metal ions like those on metal surfaces...or on the fingertips of the sweaty glove that he had scratched his head with.

Cynthia was not as good of a trainer as Carlson. Part of her frustration was that there was not enough physical room for two people in the station. When Snodgrass botched pulling the seal off of the pad or it got stuck as he inserted into the cavity where it needed to be applied, Snodgrass had to jump out and Cynthia had to try to “rescue” the job before it entered the next station some 42 inches down-line.

His second handicap was his stature and his big hands. He had to reach inside the unit with one hand and somehow slap the floppy seal into position. He could see why this line was almost all women. It was not physically challenging in terms of strength required and tiny hands were a definite advantage.

Even worse was that the adhesive had to be slicked out PERFECTLY with no creases because creases leaked. Snodgrass found that nearly impossible as the seals were so limp and flippy.

Remembering one of the notes, Snodgrass looked around and saw the dish of chalk dust. That helped with the peeling. He wondered why Cynthia hadn’t bothered to tell him about it.

He also got a nudge from Maisie, the older black woman who was in the station just down-line of him. “If you see you are going to have a problem I can help you with some of them as long as you don’t try to slick it all the way down. I gotta better angle than you do and you gotta leave me a little material to work with."

It took a little bit but Snodgrass and Maisie worked out that if he hadn’t screwed up too badly and as long as he left ¼ of the perimeter un-slicked, Maisie could fix them and stay within her cycle times.

Cynthia pretended to not notice.

Slowly, Snodgrass powered his way through the training. Maisie told the other operators that she wanted to stay down-line of Snodgrass when it was time to rotate jobs. They were more than happy to rotate around her. Her job was not one of the preferred jobs.

The banter was ceaseless and as he gained a little bit of proficiency he picked up on the fact that much of it was about “the new meat”, that is, about him. He also heard discussion regarding the improbability of his other body parts being proportional to the size to his hands. He had his suspicions about what “Shop Wife” meant and didn’t like the sound of it.

Things were a little bit better after lunch. The women started addressing him directly and Snodgrass decided to follow Ganzer’s advice. “Sorry, ma-am. It is all I can do to absorb the training Cynthia is trying to give me. I guess I am a little slow.” A fact that Cynthia did not dispute.

That held them off until an hour before the end of the shift. Then two of the more attractive ones really started pushing to get his attention. He could tell by by their body language they were not buying the story that he was “slow” and they certainly didn’t think he was gay. The other women seemed to be fully invested in finding out which of the women Snodgrass preferred. Whichever he picked, he was going to make half of the women angry.

“So you mean, like if I was going to be stranded on a deserted island, who would I want to be stranded with?” Snodgrass asked.

“Exactly!” said Tina the blonde with the magazine-cover hair and the impossibly long legs. Lindsay nodded in agreement. She had chestnut curls and was impossibly voluptuous. Snodgrass suspected surgical intervention.

Without skipping a beat, Snodgrass said “I would take Maisie, if she would have me. Good looks come and go but character sticks around.” 

That got a laugh and the rest of the shift passed without incident.

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