I currently work at a bucket, sorry, container plant in Pittston. Calling the product a bucket gets an immediate correction. They are either containers or pails, but never buckets. I spend eight hours a day, shoving stacks of containers and lids into a machine with blades two feet long that slice and dice them into smaller pieces that are used to create more pails. It’s a recycling function. The room is hot and loud, requiring me to wear industrial strength ear muffs over the standard issue ear plugs. Loose regrind spits from the machine and gets into every part of my clothing; shirt, underwear, hat, mouth and the worst, my shoes.
I’ve had a few weeks now to try and find my bearings at work. With the different personalities of the people I work with and a number of their quirks exposed, I’ve taken to trying to catalogue their behaviors. Here is where I’ll go into detail about the more interesting individuals.
The Twins - Both of the twins drive forklifts, and were the first women in the warehouse to meet me. They speed around the warehouse floor at breakneck speeds, occasionally honking their high pitched horns as they whip around a corner into sight. They have a tendency to make fun of one another when the other isn’t within earshot. They laugh at their own terrible jokes and references. Example: I will ask one of them to move the gaylord from the grinding room, to which I normally get a response such as “I’m not gay but I’ll try,” followed by obnoxious chuckling. Gaylords are giant cardboard boxes lined with a bag filled with ground plastic flakes, nearly weighing a ton. Both sisters enjoy NCIS and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, as they bring up scenes and characters from episodes all the time in relation to the topic of conversation.
Mumbles - One of the more difficult aspects of working at the plant is understanding my fellow employees. A lot of the problems come from many of them being foreign (primarily Indian). One person in particular, an English speaking American, Mumbles, is by far the worst. He has a tendency to use fuck between every other word. I know this, because it is often times the only word(s) in the sentence that I can actually understand. He’s also missing a row of teeth, which makes his quick anecdotes spill out faster than he can keep up. Swearing and incoherency is taken to an art form with Mumbles. I’ve managed to communicate with him by smiling and nodding when he comes by, and laughing whenever he laughs. He seems to like me.
July 18, 2009, 5:18pm
