The WorkGroup

After temping in a few factories I learned a scary truth about unskilled factory labor. In most cases, you’re only doing the job because either they can’t find a machine that can do it efficiently or cheaply. Sometimes unskilled factory work can involve a little bit of human judgment that a computer isn’t “smart” enough to do.

It took me a few days of drudgery to come to this conclusion, and once I did, I discovered the key to successful line work; if you do your task with the mental and physical characteristics of a robot, you’ll do the job more efficiently, and hopefully get through a boring day with a little more sanity.

My first line job was folding back box flaps in a spaghetti sauce factory. The boxes came out of a room behind me, and my job was to fold the flaps back so the machine below me on the conveyor could drop them into the box.

When I started my shift, box production was really slow, so it was okay. My only problem was boredom. I was sure that at least three hours had gone by, but I’d only been there less than an hour.

As the whole production line sped up, so did the flow of boxes from the mysterious room. I was jumping around the cage like a monkey, trying to pull the excess boxes off the line, while grabbing each box and folding back furiously. I looked like Lucy in that old video of her in a cookie factory or something like that.

Then, I became Mr. Roboto. I stood with my arms above the conveyer, and did the exact same motion with every box that came by. The key was that I’d taken THOUGHT out of the process. I became a robot. From that point on, the boxes never seemed to come too fast… all I had to do was adjust my speed switch.

By shutting off my thought processes, the day also went much faster. I didn’t spend the day thinking about ways to change the world, but given the choice of being a robot and losing my mind… I chose being a robot for the shift.