Thank Fucking God---warning! LONG post.
Holy Shit.
If your boss ever comes to you and says that he/she/it has an idea for you to have some extra time off for the holidays, and all that it really entails is 'just a few' 10 hour days, seriously consider jamming a fork into your neck or figuring out how to generate wormholes with your mind before you answer.
Why?
Because on paper, eight hours of overtime looks easy like the pie. Mathmeticians and philosophers will nod sagely at the proposed plan, occasionally taking out a slide rule or Aristotle's tomes to determine the fine points, and then say "Looks good to me" before fucking off to the pub, leaving you to deal with the 'plan'. (This is not a plan whipped up by Hannibal, and he will not say, when all is said and done, that he loves it when a plan comes together. This is a plan designed in hell, with mid-level government cheeseheads for the sounding board.)
Oh sure, at first, I was all for it. I mean, new guy, tryin' to look good, tryin' to impress everyone. Extra money's good, few extra days off even better! Shit yeah, I said. Ten hours? Let's do twelve. I can do this shit standing on my fucking head. Bring it on, cockmonkeys, and we'll see who's left standing. Me EvilMister! Me Destroy All!
That was me for the entire first week. I ruled that goddamn place. With my newfound health and physical propserity growing in leaps and bounds, I busted my hump like it was the only hump left that needed breaking. I turned into some kind of idiot savant (like the ones on TV, you know? The ones who can model your head in Cheese-Inna-Tube after looking at you for two seconds, or who can, shit, I dunno, recite the Star Spangled Banner in anagrams). I beat all previous records for bag sealing. This might not sound like much, but I did over eight hundred bags in ten hours, and at the end of it, my fingers had swollen to the size of sausages.
And then people started calling in sick. Or rather, 'sick'. Like, sorry boss, but I drank an entire liquour store and I think I'm dying sick or I got to do some Xmas shopping, boss, achew!
Fuck 'em, I said. I am EvilMister. There is not the job I cannot do (unless I get fired from it) or the torture invented that can stop me! Lo and tremble, puny mortals! A man with an ego the size of Illinois walks among you!
Now, now I gotta slow it down for a moment, and clue you in to some things that were happening around this time.
Fast forward to day before yesterday.
I am cranky. I mean, really cranky. And whiney, too. I haven't been sleeping properly, and when I do close my eyes, I start hearing ChronicSmoker's voice. I've been eating a lot of chocolate at work (the clients send good chocolates, by the way, the expensive kind) and drinking about a gallon of pepsi a day. I am wired for sound, and I can hear the molecules in the air grinding against one another. I am a cunt hair away from killing ChronicSmoker because the more irritated we all become, the more he seems to need to push our buttons (I'm sure it's his meds). The machine hasn't been working all that well; things have become so gummed up that I have had to learn how to calculate the necessary variance in the scale system to account for the wildly fluctuating difference in actual vs. measured weights, and apply this calculation every fifth bag. Then I discovered that I had to pause every tenth bag to allow the demons inside the machine to take a quick breather.
All the while, the conveyors are squeaking, groaning and rattling, the air is buzzing, and I am complaining to myself. Why? Because I know north from northwest, is why, and I knew that, at four o'clock, there were still two batches worth of bags out there, and the next day was wash day. The actual conversation with myself started at three thirty. It went something like this...
... I swear to fucking God, I am taking this piece of shit machine apart at four thirty. How can that not be a good idea? It's a great idea. This fucking machine, oh man, do I hate it, why won't they let me clean it. Jesus. I hate ChronicSmoker. These fuckers wouldn't even be this close to the end without me, they better hire me. If they ask me to do one more bag, I'm gonna lose it, I'll start to cry or something, I know it, and then I'll have to kill everyone. No. I won't do another bag. I'll tell the boss I'm dismantling my machine at four thirty and he can go to Hell for all I care. I'm the greatest thing that's happened here, and they're making me crazy. I'm gonna ask for eleven dollars an hour and if they don't give it to me they can go fuck themselves, I don't need this shit ...
This is cyclical, repeating itself in three minute intervals.
So, at ten after four, the hopper runs dry and I hurry up the stairs quickly to double-check that the machine is, in fact, done.
Only to see RodgerDodger, my foreman, hanging another tote.
"What are you doing?" I wail. I literally wail. I sound like a four year old girl who can't have a pony for her birthday, except I am easily two hundred and thirty pounds.
"Hanging another tote. Why. What's wrong?"
"I wanna take the machine apart."
"Can't. Boss wants us to finish all the batches by five thirty."
"Oh, mmmmmmmmaaaaaaannnnnnnnnn. Really?"
"Well, whatever you don't finish, we will. Come on, man, you can do it. You're awesome!"
I know I'm awesome. But I'm still seriously considering whether or not to throw a tantrum on the floor, or if maybe I should bust out a quivering lip. I decide that since I am, in fact, awesome as well as cool, I won't do either. What I will do is exactly what is expected of me, but so fast that they won't even realize I'm done until I'm on my way home. Which is what I did. But not before pointing out to RodgerDodger that I wasn't, under any circumstances, doing anything else. Surprisingly, he didn't tell me to go fuck myself.
Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you about what happens to the air circulation system when we don't clean for two weeks, and in specific what can occur when cloth filters get coated in three inches of surimi and then struck with a pressure.
In short, motherfuckers, thank fucking God I didn't have to go to work this morning. You would have heard about the grisly murders all the way to Beijing. I'd be known as Red Santa...
If your boss ever comes to you and says that he/she/it has an idea for you to have some extra time off for the holidays, and all that it really entails is 'just a few' 10 hour days, seriously consider jamming a fork into your neck or figuring out how to generate wormholes with your mind before you answer.
Why?
Because on paper, eight hours of overtime looks easy like the pie. Mathmeticians and philosophers will nod sagely at the proposed plan, occasionally taking out a slide rule or Aristotle's tomes to determine the fine points, and then say "Looks good to me" before fucking off to the pub, leaving you to deal with the 'plan'. (This is not a plan whipped up by Hannibal, and he will not say, when all is said and done, that he loves it when a plan comes together. This is a plan designed in hell, with mid-level government cheeseheads for the sounding board.)
Oh sure, at first, I was all for it. I mean, new guy, tryin' to look good, tryin' to impress everyone. Extra money's good, few extra days off even better! Shit yeah, I said. Ten hours? Let's do twelve. I can do this shit standing on my fucking head. Bring it on, cockmonkeys, and we'll see who's left standing. Me EvilMister! Me Destroy All!
That was me for the entire first week. I ruled that goddamn place. With my newfound health and physical propserity growing in leaps and bounds, I busted my hump like it was the only hump left that needed breaking. I turned into some kind of idiot savant (like the ones on TV, you know? The ones who can model your head in Cheese-Inna-Tube after looking at you for two seconds, or who can, shit, I dunno, recite the Star Spangled Banner in anagrams). I beat all previous records for bag sealing. This might not sound like much, but I did over eight hundred bags in ten hours, and at the end of it, my fingers had swollen to the size of sausages.
And then people started calling in sick. Or rather, 'sick'. Like, sorry boss, but I drank an entire liquour store and I think I'm dying sick or I got to do some Xmas shopping, boss, achew!
Fuck 'em, I said. I am EvilMister. There is not the job I cannot do (unless I get fired from it) or the torture invented that can stop me! Lo and tremble, puny mortals! A man with an ego the size of Illinois walks among you!
Now, now I gotta slow it down for a moment, and clue you in to some things that were happening around this time.
- ChronicSmoker admits to everyone who looks at him that he a) is on medication, b) has another personality inside of him and c) 'belongs there'. He frequently lets everyone know that his mental health doctor can't find out why his (Chronic's) eyes are permanently dilated. He also likes to tickle people, and I had to threaten him with the whole 'bloody stump' schtick before he got the message to leave me alone. He has since moved on to other people, and it's goddamned hilarious when it ain't me. Also, and this is most important, so pay attention, when I get tired and frustrated, ChronicSmoker sounds just like Beeker from the Muppet Show at a space of ten feet and beyond. Yeah, that's right. I'm filling and sealing bags, he's down the other end, throwing them as best he can, and every single fucking time he opens his mouth it sounds like he's shouting "MEEP! MEEP! MEE-MEEEEP! Meeep MEEEEP Meeep Junior!" It got to the point where I started working three times as hard with the sincere hope that he'd pass out from the exertion. I pointed this fact out to JuniorHumper, and he has started shouting MEEP MEEP MEEEEP everytime ChronicSmoker starts bleating into the ether, while I mutter quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) that if the fucking retard doesn't shut his piehole, I will for sure shove him in the giant mixer and make ChronicSmoker goo. Seriously. If (and I'm hoping the boss will tell him to go to hell), if ChronicSmoker is picked back up after the New Year, I will either be guilty of manslaughter and thrown in jail or knocking on your doorstep, lookin' to lay low for a few days. Get that cot ready.
- We decided to forego cleaning the machines in an effort to maintain maximum production. Again, this made sense like 1+1=2. (Never mind that it wound up being something like 1+Buick=roadkill). We had to fill nineteen trucks in two weeks. There was me to do the bulk of this work, 'cuz everyone else had other duties, and we were down at least two people per day for a week. I may not have mentioned it, but our prime packaging product is Surimi, and it has a lot in common with sand. If there is a crack, it will lodge there, which is why I'm glad I wear coveralls. Unlike sand, though, this cockfucking shit doesn't simply wash away with water. Noooooo, it has phosphates in it, which draws moisture from the air, and sugars, which takes that freshly drawn water and turns into cement. This is bad enough during regular hours. It becomes compounded when the bosses decide to pressure wash the floors above the machine without first determining whether or not there are, ummm, holes in it through which water can fall, firstly all around the exterior and finally right into the machine's various storage areas. This happened several times, in secret. More than once I had to literally chip and hack my way through a dense iceberg-like pile of gooey white shit to free hyrdraulics or augers, sometimes taking as much as half a day to do so. It was around this time I started prevailing upon my employers to let me clean the machine properly, as the mess was beginning to affect my productivity. I was told to 'sort it out', which translated into 'fuck off, you peon, and fill bags so I can get richer'. This endless blizzard of crud fouled up the works so badly that the metal detector, which is a part of the entire unit, became glued open, so that every time I filled a bag, half a kilo would fall into an overflow bin that normally takes two weeks to fill. The conveyor belts, allegedly sped up to beat Speed Racer X's ass, started to moan and wobble as the actual rotor system almost doubled in size. The floors began to look like the concrete outside Granvill Skytrain station, because the crud sticks to the bottom of your feet until it hits something wet, then falls off, then dries out, then becomes part of the floor.
- I get caught by Quality Control scraping an inch and half thick plating of sugared phospates from the bottom of my boots with a knife that typically comes in contact with product. After a five minute conversation that should have last two seconds, I realize this is a bad idea, and that it is now my responsibility to clean the knife. Later, I pry a piece of wood from a broken skid and begin to use this as my boot scraper, and I start intentionally leaving massive piles of crap everywhere I can.
- I witness ChronicSmoker, toothless, sucking on chocolates and decide that if he touches me again, I will kill him with a grapefuit spoon.
- My finger gets a little nick in it that becomes so infected that it starts to look like an eye and it takes sheer, agonizing pain for me to realize maybe I should disinfect it.
- I learn that my foreman RodgerDodger is oddly ... twisted. I will never be the same after watching him liberally apply lubricant to some bracing plates that hold the end of the auger in position, with his middle finger no less. He tells me that 'Too much is not enough", and to this day, I can't do the same chore without feeling depressingly perverted.
- I can now effectively mimic the accents of all three QC guys (two Iranians and a guy from some UK country) and the mixer (also Iranian) with such skill that they all laugh their asses off.
- For those of you who read the conversation about 'pud', I know understand the whole of it. One of the Express Retards, a guy I'll call GI Jane (not real army, but cadets, and if you wanna push his buttons, point out to him that cadets isn't the army, and he goes apeshit.) came to fill in for a day. Scullerymaid had already witnessed GI Jane 'pulling his pud' and I just naturally assumed that it was, you know, .... gentlemanly ... adjustment ... because of the coveralls. This is not, I repeat, not the case. I saw him do it. He ... he ... reached ... out and um ... grabbed hold one handed and gave the General a firm, healthy yank. Then he did it again. GI Jane, once a permanent fixture at my new job, also spent some time explaining to me that he proposed to his girlfriend, which didn't seem too strange until I also learned that he'd never seen her before the other day. Then I found out he got her pregnant sometime during the first two days.
Fast forward to day before yesterday.
I am cranky. I mean, really cranky. And whiney, too. I haven't been sleeping properly, and when I do close my eyes, I start hearing ChronicSmoker's voice. I've been eating a lot of chocolate at work (the clients send good chocolates, by the way, the expensive kind) and drinking about a gallon of pepsi a day. I am wired for sound, and I can hear the molecules in the air grinding against one another. I am a cunt hair away from killing ChronicSmoker because the more irritated we all become, the more he seems to need to push our buttons (I'm sure it's his meds). The machine hasn't been working all that well; things have become so gummed up that I have had to learn how to calculate the necessary variance in the scale system to account for the wildly fluctuating difference in actual vs. measured weights, and apply this calculation every fifth bag. Then I discovered that I had to pause every tenth bag to allow the demons inside the machine to take a quick breather.
All the while, the conveyors are squeaking, groaning and rattling, the air is buzzing, and I am complaining to myself. Why? Because I know north from northwest, is why, and I knew that, at four o'clock, there were still two batches worth of bags out there, and the next day was wash day. The actual conversation with myself started at three thirty. It went something like this...
... I swear to fucking God, I am taking this piece of shit machine apart at four thirty. How can that not be a good idea? It's a great idea. This fucking machine, oh man, do I hate it, why won't they let me clean it. Jesus. I hate ChronicSmoker. These fuckers wouldn't even be this close to the end without me, they better hire me. If they ask me to do one more bag, I'm gonna lose it, I'll start to cry or something, I know it, and then I'll have to kill everyone. No. I won't do another bag. I'll tell the boss I'm dismantling my machine at four thirty and he can go to Hell for all I care. I'm the greatest thing that's happened here, and they're making me crazy. I'm gonna ask for eleven dollars an hour and if they don't give it to me they can go fuck themselves, I don't need this shit ...
This is cyclical, repeating itself in three minute intervals.
So, at ten after four, the hopper runs dry and I hurry up the stairs quickly to double-check that the machine is, in fact, done.
Only to see RodgerDodger, my foreman, hanging another tote.
"What are you doing?" I wail. I literally wail. I sound like a four year old girl who can't have a pony for her birthday, except I am easily two hundred and thirty pounds.
"Hanging another tote. Why. What's wrong?"
"I wanna take the machine apart."
"Can't. Boss wants us to finish all the batches by five thirty."
"Oh, mmmmmmmmaaaaaaannnnnnnnnn. Really?"
"Well, whatever you don't finish, we will. Come on, man, you can do it. You're awesome!"
I know I'm awesome. But I'm still seriously considering whether or not to throw a tantrum on the floor, or if maybe I should bust out a quivering lip. I decide that since I am, in fact, awesome as well as cool, I won't do either. What I will do is exactly what is expected of me, but so fast that they won't even realize I'm done until I'm on my way home. Which is what I did. But not before pointing out to RodgerDodger that I wasn't, under any circumstances, doing anything else. Surprisingly, he didn't tell me to go fuck myself.
Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you about what happens to the air circulation system when we don't clean for two weeks, and in specific what can occur when cloth filters get coated in three inches of surimi and then struck with a pressure.
In short, motherfuckers, thank fucking God I didn't have to go to work this morning. You would have heard about the grisly murders all the way to Beijing. I'd be known as Red Santa...
posted by Unknown @ 4:34 PM
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