I’ve realized my role at the plant is the same as that of an anus. All the waste and garbage goes through me on its way out. It’s not a classy position, but still a vital one. Without me, the pile of trashed scrap would reach the heavens; a mountain of plastic visible from space. The catalogue of my fellow employees grows larger and more complete with each week, and I’m beginning to find a few of the preconceptions I may have made about some of them were either grossly underestimated or just off target.
The One-Upper - I’m sure everyone has met one of these guys. In every story or anecdote you tell, he’s got one that’s just a bit crazier or more staggering. It’s a shame, because aside from the constant upstaging, this guy is probably the most normal person I work with. It’s at a compulsory level with him, it seems, because it just pours out after everything I tell him. “It’s hot in here.” “Oh, you should’ve seen it in here 4 years ago, when you couldn’t leave and they closed all the doors.” Even if I’m not complaining or suggesting hard work, he has to out-do me.
Mikey - I love people watching. But what I enjoy even more than that, is listening to people talk. Mikey has some problems. He’s all idiot, without the savant. I’m not making fun of him, because I realize he does have some mental issues that are beyond his control. But even the things he does understand, he refuses to budge on. Every day, he enters the lounge and turns the air conditioner off. It is 105 degrees in the factory, and people want to come to a nice air conditioned room. Aside from that, he hounds people with questions. Whenever someone enters the room, Mikey literally shouts, “Oh great! You’re here! Now we can sit down and rap a bit.” That is word for word. He took a particular interest in a woman, who would literally yell back at him how much she didn’t want to talk to him. She actually retired 5 years early (last Friday was her last day) for the primary reason of escaping Mikey. Aside from this, Mikey also has a bit of an OCD problem. He washes his hands every time he walks past the bathroom and carries packs of paper towels around with him wherever he goes, so he doesn’t have to touch anything with his skin. When he arrives in the morning, he circles his car 3 times and talks to it. I haven’t been close enough to hear what he’s saying, but I’ve seen him wag his finger or give his car the middle finger a couple of times.
Lurch - He’s slow in speech and speed. He’s tall. He’s got a deep voice. He just sort of lumbers around the warehouse, carting more scrap for me to grind every few minutes. He makes the same joke daily. Whenever I turn the grinder off to swap out the gaylords, he will walk in and tell me that it was “the smartest thing I ever did” and point to the quiet machine. I chuckled the first time out of politeness, but I’ve gotten to the point where I feel more comfortable just staring back blankly. All of his other jokes are equally as tepid. Lurch loathes Mikey. When Mikey asks him to sit and “rap,” Lurch generally responds with a dark, suggestion of suicide, i.e., “Why don’t you go jump off bridge,” or “Kill yourself, Mikey.” It’d all be scarily sad if they hadn’t been doing and saying the same things for the last ten years. And that’s something I’ve come to understand above all others: these people have said the same thing to one another for over 10 years (and some over 20). It’s all routine, right down to the shit talk and story telling.
August 03, 2009, 7:13pm
