The WorkGroup

When I was working at the Ragu Spaghetti Sauce factory that used to be in Rochester, NY, I learned what my name is in Italian. No, it’s not Cristofo or something cool like that.

The Ragu factory was an ethnic experience unlike any I’d ever had. Growing up in a small town I was only exposed to one language, outside of foreign language class and the occasional French-Canadian tourist.

At the sauce factory though, all the signs were in Italian. Those of greatest importance were translated onto smaller signs, or smaller print in Spanish. Finally, the printers saved the smallest signs and fonts for the least important information in the least prevalent language in the factory… English.

On my first day, my job involved folding back box on the packaging line. I stood in a cage above the production line and folded back the flaps of the boxes that came from some mysterious room behind me. After folding them, I’d send them down the chute to be bottled by the machine.

My job was fairly important to the process because if a box made it to the bottom of the conveyer unopened, all the jars that were bound for the box would end up in a mess of sauce and glass on the floor. I found this out the hard way.

Everything was going fine for the first hour or so until the people in the mysterious room behind me started sending out boxes faster than I could fold them back. I desperately tried to keep up to keep feeding the conveyor to the bottom.

I thought I was doing a respectable job until I heard the line foreman yelling to me from the bottom. I was about 20 feet up, and with the steam in the factory it was hard to hear him.

“HEY” was all I heard. I gave him a cordial wave back, do which he replied more emphatically

“HEY” and pointed to the conveyor.

I looked out of the cage to the conveyor below and noticed that a number of boxes had been snagged on the conveyor, and hundreds of jars of sauce had fallen to their messy demise before they could shut the line down.

The foreman yelled some directions to me in Italian, but from his frantic gestures I could see he was trying to give me instructions about dislodging the jam.

I crawled through the window of the cage onto the conveyor, and now heard several dozen

“HEY’s” from the now growing group of guys who were no longer busy on the line because of the snag.

I finally dislodged the snag, to the “HEY’s” and general applause of the line workers below.

It was then I learned that as far as I was concerned, my name in Italian was pronounced

“HEY!”