That’s a good strategy. I worked several factory jobs while I was on break from high school and college. Eight hours of standing on my feet each day.
I would dissect movies in my head that I watched the night before, think about books I was reading or magazine articles I had looked it, ponder that day’s news.
I would also play little games like thinking about what I would do if I had a million dollars or planning that dream vacation, or just figuring out how much I had made that day - “Well that’s five hours, so that comes out to about $30 free and clear after taxes.” (I know, may not sound like a lot, but this was straight out out of high school when I was living with my parents and had no expenses other than gas money for cruising on the weekends - back when gas was $1.25).
But as other people have said, it did provide me some good motivation to study hard when I went back to school.
Re: Boredom Many moons ago I had a long commute, and a broken car radio that I couldn’t afford to fix.
I filled the time by trying to fit song lyrics to other tunes. You’d be surprised at how many of these work. Ferinstance you can sing “America the Beautiful” to the tune of “Supercalifragilistic-expialidocious” (sp?) and “Amazing Grace” actually sounds very nice sung to “Puff the Magic Dragon” . . .
I worked at a job where I had two primary responsibilities:
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Take things out of envelopes and put them into other envelopes.
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Take staples out of things and put other staples into them.
That sounds mind-numbingly boring, but being that the job I had previously was so stressful that it was killing me, I rather welcomed the change. It was like spending every day in a zen meditation garden.
Heh, I had a job at a Heinz warehouse in the summer between third and fourth year at university. My job consisted of opening palettes of baked beans, taking out the boxes, and then stacking them in a different configuration on another palette. Nothing made me study harder when I got back to university.
Why doesn’t anyone ever tell you about this? I can do my job standing on my head but I hate every minute because I have the same attitude I always had to work. I feel it’s just a lead-in to something else that never comes.
One thing I found helpful at the salmon cannery (it was called a cannery even though we only did frozen fish) and the tofu factory was to work as hard and as fast and as perfectly as possible. The faster you work, the faster the time goes. If you’re standing there dragging your ass the time drags too.
One nice thing about the tofu factory job was that I had some sweet breaks because I was one of the few people who had a drivers license. So every day I got to drive the whey tanker to the cattle ranch and pour the whey into the troughs and watch the cows slurp it up. Oh, and use the shovel to scoop out the drowned rats that had fallen overnight. That took an hour at least.
bwaaahahahahahah!!! 
Darn you, that’s what I was going to say. I call it the Seymour Skinner game. “See how many envelopes you can lick in an hour, then try to break that record.”
Today (well yesterday) was fun. I put an eyedropper in a bottle and pressed once and this moved to another lady who rotated it and then the machine tightened it shut all the way. Four and a half hours of this and I can’t figure out why the machine can’t just tighten it all the way from the start?
Then I was put at the end of another line, and it was a mess usually. It was for some kind of medicated shampoo. You would put the cap on and the machine would stamp it shut and half the time, even if you got the cap on right, the machine would hit the bottle so hard, it’d shake the bottle and cause it to fall over 
There’s no way in heck I’ll be able to finsh five weeks of this. I do have new respect for factory workers.
I meant the whole trip and back took an hour, not just the rat scooping. I see that’s ambiguous. At least 50% of the time there were no drowned rats at all. Usually only one. I remember one time there were four, but that was the most.
I have no idea how Security Guards can do it. I would go nuts in the first hour. I’m talking about the type who have a post and don’t leave it until their break.
At least on an assembly line you are busy… I know it’s repetitive but at least you are engaged with some mental/physical task.
I worked in HR/Benefits at a factory. My job was physically easy and enjoyable enough, but in many ways it was just as “mindless” as shooting screws. I think it all depends on management – if creativity is encouraged and new ideas are supported, any job can be satisfying.
But there’s something to be said for assembly line work – at the end of the day, your work is done, and you know what to expect for the next day. There’s less stress. A lot of our facilitators/foremen had been promoted from the floor – more money, fewer physical demands, more benefits – but I heard many of them say there were times they wish they’d stayed on the line, and some of them actually went back to it.
I totally get that, AuntiePam.
I’ve worked in an auto factory for 16 years. I’m now an apprenticing electrician, but 14 of those years were spent on the assembly line. I appreciate the new opportunities, truly, but there certainly are days I miss being on the line. As skilled trades, there’s problem-solving which can be fun and rewarding but also frustrating and stressful, much more bullshitting but also more politicking, and different types of physical challenges instead of the same old repetitive injury types of challenges to deal with and the better pay is great. On average it’s subjectively better but certainly not on the bad days.
Is that a GMP facility? I know guys who do small and kilo-scale GMP (molecules, not devices) and I don’t know how they do it. Everything is so heavily regulated and I’m constantly having to think about how they’ll be able to do things. It’s all the hassles of large-scale synthesis combined with the hassles of massive amounts of regulation and documentation.
Queen Tonya, my dad is an electrician at Ford. He got his apprenticeship after getting out of the Navy so he never worked the line. But the one thing I heard growing up was to avoid working in factories (and the Navy). He also claims to have never worked a day in his life because he loves his job so much.
I recently got promoted from a production environment into an office position. It wasn’t an assembly line, but it did fit into the category of what many would consider a tedious factory job. I did it for a bit over 6 years.
I’d do what some have suggested and make a game out of it - How much can I get done in this shift? Can I finish this order before lunch break? They eventually started posting our efficiency ratings, which made it even easier to track my progress.
I’d read books during breaks, and eventually started working my way through a book on abstract algebra. I’d do all the exercises and proofs. I could read a problem on break, then try to solve it while working on auto-pilot.
And TruCelt, “Amazing Grace” also works with “House of the Rising Sun”.
Are there any non-GMP Pharma facilities in Europe or the USA? It’s a legal requirement, AFAIK! Mind you, it’s also one of those things which are often done wrong, by people who think that “more is better”: I’ve had Pharma customers who required two signatures on any analysis (the actual requirement) and others who required ten, eight of which were from people who weren’t even in the factory or in the country. The second ones had a lot more hassle, but to no gain I could see.
I have done both tedious assembly-line type work and security guarding. Security guarding (of the type I did, anyway), isn’t as bad as you might think:
sure it’s a 12-hour shift without a break, and you don’t get to go anywhere, but on the other hand if it’s a nice shift you are by yourself, with maybe a newspaper a TV and a book or two, in (ideally) a nice heated cabin.
If it works out well, you are being paid to sit around reading.
If it doesn’t work out well, then you’re being paid to stand in the freezing cold.
These sorts of jobs are much more bearable in jobs with socialised medicine: since they don’t tend to pay very much, or carry insurance (often) in the US, there’s the additional burden of working for no money and worrying about lack of insurance. The thought in the UK that you are just in it for the money, not your health, somehow seems easier to bear – it seems more dignified, somehow.
Oh and on some of these jobs, you want to know what the worst thing was? The other staff. On some production-line type jobs, music is banned but they sit and chat all day. Now admittedly I’m not the most sociable person, but listening to someone drone on about their banal life (ie, about how drunk they’re going to get this weekend) or about how black people can’t be trusted to run anything, or how they’re moving to Spain to escape all the immigrants (true story) … that can be far more depressing than the actual work.
On the last such job I worked, there were lots of Poles and Lithuanians working. They were far better: intelligent young people who had come to the UK in search of a job. Maybe it was just an age thing, but they seemed more … human. (sorry, not meaning to be offensive)
pdts
I’ve never worked on an assembly line, but both of my parents currently do. My Mom has only done this briefly as a transitional thing following her divorce, and in three years it has basically destroyed her body. She has to stop now or risk permanent damage.
What’s interesting about this is that my Mom used to work as an engineer at General Motors in the 1980s… and she was so scathingly anti-union as a result of that experience. Now that she works on a line, she has become involved in union work and is basically horrified at the constant labor rights violations that occur in these factories.
My Dad, on the other hand, has worked on a line for at least 15 years now, and the damage to him is irreversible. He used to be very athletic and now he just sort of hobbles.
The interesting thing about the title of this thread is that it presumes that most people who work on assembly lines have a meaningful choice. The usual answer to this question is that they stand it because they have to, to feed their kids, to pay the rent, or whatever.
Yesterday they had me working assembling pills that go into those plastic 30 day containers.
I took pills put them on a pan and then shot four of them at a time into four different slots and it made a 30 day container.
The whole time I kept thinking about “Man I could tamper with these pills” LOL
I guess Tylenol was made different, because they said, it was all automated and there could have been no tampering from the plant.
Since this place makes generic meds, I guess there is ONE reason not to take generics eh? Assembly line workers spitting in your pills, dropping them on the floor LOL
Well off to another mind numbing night. Four more weeks to go <sigh>