Capacitors and Transistors

January 5, 2000

CAPACITORS AND TRANSISTORS

Family finances having reached crisis point, I betook myself to the nearest Unemployment Agency office, with lifetime work experience of 1 week as a counselor at a Salvation Army camp. I excelled at fitting assorted pegs into matching holes and was sent immediately to a plant that assembled small electronic components. The personnel director glowed at my test scores but glowered when he got to the education section, threw the papers across the desk and hollered,"You can't work here!" I assured him I had to work somewhere and he agreed to let me try. I became a whiz at inserting thin ceramic disks into a heavy steel block, and twirling fine wires to fit in on either side of each disk, half facing one way, half the other. . We worked in teams of three, two assembling and one at the dip solder pool. ( very hot, molten metal.)

It was very educational. I found out how the miller's daughter felt, faced with a mountain of straw (or wires) that never dwindled. I found out how it is to do work which offers no satisfaction whatsoever except the pay. I found out why unions exist. (The one attempt at unionizing the plant failed.) I found out what a gift education is. At break times I wandered the length of the plant and saw the sequence of operations from the unloading dock with barrels of ceramic powder, past molds and ovens, to the stock rooms of product ready to ship. When an item got ahead of sales, we were moved to different operations, but "the girls" were sure we were moved only to put us on a lower pay rate. When I couldn't stay awake watching a needle on a test screen, I asked to move to a molding press where the chance to lose a hand made a good incentive to stay awake. Besides, on the molding press you could experiment to see if it was faster to put in all the bases, then all the next layer, and all the third, or to put all 3 layers in each hole. You could even break the monotony by filling horizontal rows one time and vertical the next.

I learned that while the shift ended at 11:00 P.M., work ended at 10:30 or 10:45 at the latest. When I tried to keep on working, for something to do, "the girls" gathered around me and started moving in closer and closer until I got the message and shut down the press.

The pay scale was a dollar an hour plus incentive based on production. This varied for each job. There was a time clock at each operation station, and at the end of the week your card showed precisely how long you had been on each job, but the arithmetic totaling the pay was better left to whatever calculators they had then. "The girls" were convinced that every pay check was wrong, and I began to get a chorus each week of "Hey, collitch, figure this out for me." I made sure that my calculation matched each check exactly.

I also learned that industry knows people need to go to the bathroom. We had a 10 minute break every 2 hours. The world of education has not learned this basic fact. Elementary school teachers are expected to work four or five hours without a break, are not legally allowed to leave a class alone, are expected to lead a class to lunch, grab their own lunch, go the bathroom, and pick up the class, in 30 minutes or less.

In the factory, the supper break lasted half an hour. On one of these breaks I tasted a delicious Banana Nut Cake and asked for the recipe. On special nights a "girl" who had quit her job there, sold us Pasties that she timed so as to be piping hot at break time. These were the stew-in-pastry of Welsh or Cornish fame. I have tried several recipes with the same name, but none tasted like hers. I suspect this to be another case where memory cheats, and brings back the warmth of freshly baked food on a cold night in a dismal cement building, and the friendliness of the cook, rather than the actual taste of the food.

My other forays into the world of work included a month as a waitress, less than a month saddle stitching shirt collars, and general factotum in a ceramic supply firm. As soon as the youngest went to school all day I started teaching and I was home. That personnel man was right. Some people don't belong in factories.