By Brant Wellman

Americans, as a group, tend to spurn the pitiful wages, dire living conditions and monotonous labor that allow us to buy cheap dishwashers and handsome, yet affordable lawn furniture. Consequently, the factory workers of America are a vanishing breed.

PrancyHorse.com is delighted to announce a new feature that chronicles the life of The American Factory Worker as he tries to make it through yet another graveyard shift.

Training - Day One
• Excitement for a new job.
• Intimidation of a new place.
• Completely foreign and deafeningly loud.

Spools of aluminum six feet across spin their sheets into huge machines - aluminum presses actually. At least I’ve figured out what things are pretty quickly. Of course I don’t have anything to do with these monsters. My monster is at the other end of the line. That’s where the finished product comes out and there are people bagging them up. That’s my job, a bagger. I get dropped off with one of these baggers and told his name, and that he’s going to be training me. Of course, this is told to me by yelling in my ear, which already has an earplug in it, and all I really catch is that he’s going to be training me. It’ll be 3 days before I get Todd’s name right.

So, I jump right in (get tossed in is more like it) and start pulling off these long, brown baguette bags full of ends and quickly pull an empty bag onto the end of this tube where the ends are forced out. Oh, did I mention I work in a factory that manufactures aluminum cans. Actually, only the ends of the cans, and to be more specific, only the top ends – pop top and all. I bag them up, stack them on a pallet, and watch them get taken away by the forklift.

Quickly is the plan, but not really the outcome. I watch Todd do it and I’m amazed at the fluidity and coordination he shows as he lifts the full bag off the tray with one hand and pulls an empty bag on with the other. All of this happens in one complete motion. Then he folds the bag closed and swings it onto a stack of other full bags on a pallet. Then he turns and repeats the process two more times to empty the 3 trays on the auto-bagger (that’s what my monster is called). He gets about a 20 second break, during which he yells something in my ear about how to properly stack the pallet, but by then the 3 bags are again full. I jump in again and give it another shot. Removing the full bag is no problem, but figuring out how to get the empty one on is. Fortunately, Todd is very cool and backs me up (unlike some of the other training stories I’ve heard). For every one bag I stack, Todd stacks three. I’ve got a long way to go.

Yup, quite a job I’ve got here on the End Line, or as some of the old timers around here say, The End of
the Line.

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