I used to assemble CD and Cassette cases. Put the tray in the case, pull the corner up to lock it in, put it on the belt. We would rotate who ran the shrink-wrap machine so that was sort of a break.
Originally it was two to a table. Much chin-wagging ensued. Educated folk doing knock-about or summer work suburban metalheads and drifters who think roadkill is a viable source of meat. Kind of interesting, actually. Of course an efficiency expert came in and the company put a stop to that.
I didn’t last very long on the 2.0 version but I did hook up with a very nice woman who had knowledge…
I graduated to driving a truck for supplies, shipping, then I got fired. But that’s ok because I was going back to school anyway and got a much netter job. Loved the driving part.
Having the radio going did help get through the day. Plus I’d look forward to whatever book I was reading at the time.
I spent two weeks working at a potato chip and snack cracker factory in North Carolina. I was doing data entry (this was 1990) but I’d go to lunch with the chip line workers. One woman’s job was to watch a stream of potato chips go by and pick out the green ones. I tried it for 5 minutes and the chips just became a blur and I got a headache from trying to concentrate on a constantly moving stream. I asked her how she did it 8 hours a day, 5 days a week She said that her job before this one was working at a chicken slaughter house, she was responsible for slicing the dead chickens open and pulling out their innards. Compared to that job, the potato chip one was a breeze.
Yeah Illlinois had no law regarding breaks, so you’re at their mercy
The only thing that is close is:
This law doesn’t apply to unions, hotel attendents (who for some reason get by law two 15 minute breaks plus a 30 minute lunch) and some other exceptions like salaried employees, certain security guards and those monitoring infirmed people
I guess I’m lucky… While I did once have a job that involved standing all day and operating machinery, it was anything but boring, since the machinery in question was amusement park rides.
Although once I got some seniority at it (which in this case mostly means “come back for a second summer”), I tried to get assigned to the train as often as possible, since you got to sit down for that one.
One summer I made a million working in one of those factory jobs. Seriously. My job was litterally making the "" buttons in a Pitney Bowes postage meter factory. It was about as mind-numbing as you can get. You couldn’t hear anything because of all the injection molding machines and it smelled like burning plastic.
Every once and awhile they would cycle people into the back room to scrape the bits of plastic off the parts. It was still tedious, but at least there was usually someone else there to bullshit with and it was quiet enough to talk.
Really I feel very badly for people who are stuck in those jobs.
I used to get overtime in another department on Sundays. It was watching a machine for 12 hours. My regular job was interesting but this was so boring. I used to bring in a crytogram and a pencil and work on them when no one was around. I also mentally did a ‘cha ching’ every hour and added up another 40 dollars. It worked to mentally remember how much money they were paying me to stand there. By 7 I was pretty happy with almost 5 bills in my pocket.
I worked similar jobs through college and it’s not all bad.
At least you can start work knowing you’ll be able to solve all the problems that will come your way today, and when you go home you know there is no work ongoing for tomorrow i.e. little to no stress
I’m sure if assembly line work paid the same as lawyer, say, some people might prefer the former to the latter.
The ‘So loud I can’t think’ stage passes fairly quickly. After a few days/weeks you just tune it out completely.
As for the boredom… Being new to the job, you are paying attention to everything, and are thus painfully aware of every passing second. After a few days/weeks on the job, it becomes so automatic, you shift your body to autopilot, while one of three things occurs…
You simply blank. Brain shuts off. Time passes, not completely unnoticed, but at least in the background clutter of your mind, and you pretty much devolve into a stimulus/response automaton.
You daydream. Think about old movies, songs, books you’ve read, design a video game in your head, come up with plots for books, old girlfriends, anything and everything really.
You stay painfully aware of the time passing, and are bored out of your mind.
3 sucks, but 1 and 2 are frequent and long enough to make it not a big deal.
End of the day, you may be physically tired, but there won’t be any mental exhaustion, which is a plus if you have creative hobbies.
Did the old Plastics Factory and Stampings bit in high school and shortly thereafter. The boredom was intolerable and mind killing. Swore I would never do that shit again. Grab 10 plastic pots as they roll out of the press. Throw any bad ones to the side. Put in box in stacks of 10. Repeat all day. The worst was 3 days of hell sitting on a fucking bar stool (no place to rest hands or back) watching butter tubs come off a line and picking out the occasional bad one.
I almost think that should be Prisoner work, but they’d probably call it ‘Cruel and Unusual Punishment’.
Did four years of Security work and some of that was as bad. For example, doing armed security in the cell phone store. On my feet almost the whole day, no real breaks but a brief lunch. Fuck all to do but wander in circles all day. Was so bad that I’d try to work my way through the day in five minute increments, concentrating on the short term because if I thought about having six hours left of my day, I’d have to make a Call of Cthulhu-esque Sanity Check. Guarding the convention center overnight, alone. Hell, I brought a bunch of books and that wasn’t helping me much. I about freaked out when I thought I hit the half-way point and could take my lunch, only to realize I’d actually only been there about 2.5 hours.
And OH HELL YES, you can end up mentally exhausted from the sheer mind numbing boredom and desperate effort to fend off the crazy.
Definitely wear supportive shoes, and possibly a support belt that will help you keep your lower back from going screwy. Also, if you’re standing in just one spot, get yourself three or four yoga mats, stack them up, then fold them in half. Stand on those and you’ll save yourself a helluva lot of fatigue in your legs and back. That’s what I do, and it helps immensely.
When she was a teenager, my Mom worked for half a day in the turkey processing plant where my Grandma worked for years. Her job was to reach up into the body cavities of freshly-killed turkeys and yank out their innards, then twirl each one’s esophagus around her finger and pull that out, too, as the turkeys ran overhead, attached to a wire.
She said her fingernails immediately started hurting, and the other women said, “Oh, it’s not so bad once all your nails fall off!” The blood dripping all over everywhere was disgusting, even to a farm girl like my Mom. She bailed at lunch time and never went back, and I can’t say I blame her.
I think the only thing you can do is to make jobs like that into a game. How fast you can get it done, how perfectly, how can you beat your previous day’s record?
I am head of IT for a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility (body parts, not drugs). It spooked me out when I started working there shortly before Christmas. Not only is it a factory, it is a heavily secure one. There are cameras everywhere and restricted areas and procedures manuals as thick as the entire set of the Encyclopedia Britannica combined. The production floor is dimly lit the same shade of mid-twilight 24 hours a day. I was extremely nervous about even coming into work for the first few weeks because what they make is actually very critical to real people awaiting surgery in hospitals all over the world sometimes same day and systems issues are not something to laugh about even later.
I have a big office that I can retreat to but I like to walk around on the production floor a lot. It is like an episode of Dirty Jobs. You can’t see it at first glance but many of the people there have been there for a very long time and they have a culture built around it. Despite all the regulations, they can listen to whatever music they want whether it is heavy metal or gangsta rap as long as the people in their general vicinity don’t pummel them for it but that is for them to work out among themselves in each group. They can’t just surf the web on their shop floor computers but the later shifts at least can stream things like Pandora or even video broadcasts as long as they keep the production lines moving. It is technically against policy but I won’t ever say anything. They also have a confidential computer room to use on breaks to do whatever they want like check Facebook or personal e-mail and those are not monitored.
It does seem a little like prison even for me but people are adaptable creatures and can find positives as well as negatives in anything. Sometimes I think I am their bitch because I have to make sure they are happy and their job goes as smoothly as possible so that they don’t have to worry about much except to call me and their managers and let us handle any problems that come up. That tradeoff for a pretty well-paying job with some security and little real responsibility is one that many people are glad to take.
Basically you zone out and perform like a flesh and blood robot. Usually when we have an intake of new temps , we take in more than we need, in the expectation that some will have left us within two hours , some wont be back the next day and others are people that we probably suggest should look into other career options.
Regardless of the apparent simplicity of the job, its not suitable for everyone. Some people can’t handle the speed on the vampire lines, others have personal issues with co-workers and we do get the odd bitter person thats sorta forced to take the job.
If your not gonna make it , your gonna know in the first week.
The only thing that kept me alive during the mind numbing job of activating phones for Voicestream was flirting with half the staff in between calls. I have yet another mind numbing job now, I sit here all night watching computer screens.
I met people in factory jobs who had no concept that you should expect satisfaction from your work. They knew only one thing—work is always something terribly unpleasant .
They spoke fondly of the “good” jobs they had had in the past, because the pay was above minimum wage and they didn’t have sore muscles at the end of the day. They didn’t even bother explaining what they did at those jobs–just that it was physically easy and paid more than minimum.—“yeah that was a great job. And the boss was easy…sometimes at break, he let you take an extra minute so you didn’t have to run back to your station after the bell rang,–you got 31 minutes for lunch”.
Over the years, I’ve worked in production environments, usually starting out on the line before moving up. I agree, it can become mindnumbing.
The things that I would recommend are good shoes, ear protection (even low level noise like that can cause later problems) and, given the liklihood that you are wearing some sort of gloves, good moisturizer for your hands.
Some of the most boring jobs became somewhat of a bonus for me, as it gave me a mindless thing to do while I composed music I did some of my best songwriting when I was grading McNuggets for ten hour stretches. If you have a creative bent for anything, keep a pad of paper and pencil handy in your locker for breaktimes.
I worked in a small speaker factory. They really make excellent speakers, you probably have some in your computer or television or car.
The best thing about that job was that you worked really closely with your coworkers and you changed positions down the line every couple of hours. You never really got bored of doing the same thing because shortly you would be doing something else, and the coworkers were huge gossips and had extremely varied personal lives. I know not everyone is like me, but I am perfectly content to talk about Susan’s daughter who is shacked up with some no account loser for a couple of hours, then talk to the aspiring cartoonist, then talk to the party loving gay guy about his recent conquests. We also had music piped in and I would sing along and dance as much as I was able while still doing my job.
In your situation where you don’t have music or conversation or different tasks to do, I would probably buy a voice recorder and “write”. You can plan the next paragraph for an hour, and then record it. If you don’t have friends at lunch, use your lunch hour to write down what you recorded, and outline the next section.
When I’ve had “You Are Not Paid To Think” jobs, I’ve always discovered I needed to sleep a lot less. Once I’d learned the work, I was doing it asleep on my feet with my eyes open, so no mental tiredness, and it wasn’t physically very demanding (mostly I had to remember to change position and stretch whenever possible), so I didn’t end up physically tired either.
I happen to prefer jobs where I’m expected to think a lot, but once I’d gotten the job down pat, these meant more leisure time than the thinking jobs, both from less hours at the job itself and from needing to sleep less.
