First Shift (2)

I went through the gate with dozens of others. We walked down the long asphalted driveway past the great oppressive brick buildings. Groups peeled off to enter the doors nearest their time clocks; just another workday. I didn’t recognize anybody, and walked in silence, falling back into reacting to the remembered surroundings.

I knew what door to enter, I knew how to find my time clock, I knew what part of the wire rack to search for my time card. Cards for new hires were always several cards to a slot, in the upper lefthand corner. I paged through them, and took the card with my name inked in. (Next cycle, my name would be included in the typed cards.) I knew to punch in at once, eight minutes before the shift began. The company wouldn’t pay for minutes before the shift began, but it would dock you for punching in even a minute after the hour. Along with others, but alone, I waited for midnight, wondering how long it would take me to re-accustom myself to the peculiarities of the factory: what it looked like, sounded like, smelled like, felt like. I stood there metaphorically on the brink, and then at midnight, I walked down to the three lehrs assigned to me for the shift. For the next eight hours – minus two ten minute breaks on either side of a twenty-minute “lunch” break – I’d be coupled to those three production lines.

In the glass house hundreds of feet away, the great gas-fed furnaces had turned sand and additives into a pool of molten glass. That molten glass came flowing out of its container, high above the work floor, like white-hot toothpaste squeezed from a tube, flashing down red-hot metal tracks toward the molds below. The glass began to cool even as it traveled, changing from white glowing orange to dull red. As it fell, the tube was snipped into precise lengths, and shunted into alternate tracks, each length falling into a metal mold. Behind it, a hollow rod blew compressed air into the mold’s center, forcing the molten glass against the sides and bottom of the mold. Thus the container’s exterior was shaped by the mold and its interior was shaped by the compressed air forcing it evenly against the mold. Then the two sides of the mold sprang apart, and the tube was withdrawn from the top.

Sometimes incomplete bottles were formed, or sometimes they stuck to the mold, or perhaps the reaching mechanical fingers missed the neck and shattered the bottle, or knocked it over. Whatever the mess, it was fixed remotely. Nobody was going to fool with that mechanism at those temperatures, not even with asbestos gloves.

All this happened mechanically, in staccato movements at quick-time. Forming the bottle was the work of an instant. A pair of clamps descended, grasped the new bottle at the neck, picked it up, and placed it onto a metal conveyor belt for its long cool-down journey.

If you were to expose a newly created glass container to normal room temperatures, it would become uselessly brittle, if it didn’t shatter outright. Instead, you need to anneal it. The line that carried the new container from the mold conveyed it directly into a lehr, or cooling oven. At the furnace end, the lehr matched the temperature that had created the container. As the ware traveled, it moved into cooler temperatures. By the time it arrived at the far end, several hundred feet and perhaps 10 hours later, it was only slightly warm to the touch.

At that far end, humans again formed links in the chain. Employees, mostly women, lined up at either side of the conveyer belt, standing with cardboard cartons ready. As the ware came out, they plucked up the good bottles and packed them. As they filled the boxes, they slid them onto roller trays beside them, and the boxes slid the few feet to a dead end at a lower level. Three of those dead ends would be my station for the shift. Usually you got two fast lehrs — lines running large bottles that quickly filled the boxes – and one slow lehr, perhaps medicine bottles packed a gross to a carton.

As the boxes came down, I’d load them onto pallets according to the stacking diagram for that particular kind of box. When I had packed the boxes to the indicated height – six to eight rows, usually – I’d wrap two cardboard sheets around opposite sides and corners, and would strap it up with plastic strapping tape and metal clips. Forklift trucks would come by, drop an empty pallet, and take away the full one. I’d drag the empty pallet into place and start again. Rinse and repeat, for eight hours.

As I got to my station this first night, I saw that as usual the man I was relieving had let things stack up a little. By the end of your shift, you’re counting minutes, and you know that for the guy just starting his shift, a little catch-up activity gets him into the rhythm of it. Familiar territory.