#bluecollarblues

I’ve always believed that moments of grace can be found anywhere, even in the most unlikely of places.

After weeks of fruitless searching, I finally landed a regular gig … working the graveyard shift at an auto assembly plant in Kansas. And, in keeping with my general philosophy, I’ve tried to open myself up to this experience. I’ve unclenched my hands, turned on all my receivers, and tuned in to the strange, hard beauty of the car factory.

Bright, saturated colors … canary, scarlet, neon orange, royal blue … delineate a dense geometry of pipes, posts, rails, racks, fences, bollards, stairs. The effect is almost like looking at a hard-edged Op-Art painting, or maybe the world’s least fun playground. Banks of fluorescents cast a merciless glare over everything, making everyone appear tired and haggard, highlighting baggy eyes and bruises and thinning hair, reducing makeup to a clownish abstraction. I’ve never seen a light quite like this: the plant somehow manages to seem bright and dingy at the same time. It’s a cruel, headache-inducing illumination, and it is by far the most intolerable aspect of my job. The only things that look good under a light like this are the cars, which gleam with all the throbbing, hallucinatory brilliance of the new. Their panels, so shiny and perfect, seem to scream “THIS IS THE AMERICAN DREAM, AND YOU CAN HAVE IT!”

These are cars that have never been driven, cars that have no stories. They are as blank and empty as moving boxes, waiting to be filled with the dreams and belongings of their owners. These are cars that have never transported muddy dogs, or groceries, or barfing kids, cars that have never seen a hailstorm, or gotten crapped on by a bird, or sheltered a homeless family. They are so nascent, so full of latent potential, that they seem somehow newer than “new”.

There is a constant music of whirs and whizzes and zaps, as the robots hoist and weld various parts together. Electric horns sound off short music cues as sections of the line encounter problems. Each area has its own special song, rendered rather gracelessly by buzzers; so far, I’ve heard “How Dry I Am”, “Do Re Mi”, “Greensleeves”, “The War of 1812”, “Crazy”, Ravel’s “Bolero”, the “Star Wars” theme, the “Spiderman” theme, the "Jeopardy" theme, the “Three’s Company” theme, Holst’s “Mercury”, and … most grating of all … a snatch of “Little Willy” by The Sweet. As you walk through the different parts of the assembly, you can hear the songs overlap and echo and cancel each other out, as if some kid were let loose in a Japanese toy store and set off all the gizmos at once.

I work in the rear of the plant, near the body shop. The first thing you notice upon entering this zone are the sparks … sparks flying everywhere, soaring through the air, bouncing off catwalks and cages, skittering across the floor … an astonishing display, absolutely arresting, like watching a fireworks show inside a garage. You have to wear safety goggles and Kevlar sleeves at all times while walking through the body shop, lest you get pegged in the eye or singed on the wrist by a hot bit of metal. Workers sometimes get burn-holes in their shirts. The first time I got shot by a shower of sparks, I cringed like a pansy playing dodgeball; by the third time, I felt as if I had undergone a rite of passage, even as I hurriedly batted at my clothes and hair. There is a weird burnt smell to the air, something like gunpowder, and a nasty black dust coats my entire office floor. If you drop a sheet of white paper, it will come up grey on one side. I shudder to think of what I might be inhaling.

But the most impressive things one encounters in the factory, the most awesome and intimidating things, are the robots. Robots that hoist and spin, robots that weld, robots that shift parts from one place to another. They are surrounded by wire cages, for safety reasons, and humans rarely go inside. Workers stand at the periphery of the robot cells, ignoring the sparks ricocheting all around them, and they feed a steady stream of metal into the cages. If the supply of parts is interrupted … say, for instance, because I fail to do my job as the receiving clerk … the line shuts down. Andons, large overhead signs alerting workers to the needs of their robot overlords, blink things like, “ROBOT STARVED / STARVED FOR PARTS”, which scans as a melancholy bit of poetry. It’s a strange thing, to be constantly reminded that we are here to serve the robots, not the other way around.

As I pass by their platforms, the robots peer down at me, tilting their heads like curious animals in a zoo. It’s hard not to assign emotional qualities to their poses: imperiousness, inquisitiveness, pique. Once in a while, one of them will pause its work, and seem to aim itself directly at me. I know it’s only an illusion, as these robots lack eyes or brains or anything with which they can formulate emotions or malice … but the effect is deeply disquieting. I hurry past.

The parts themselves have exotic names: floor pans, tie bars, wheel houses, motor rails, shock towers. When I first landed the job, I was excited to learn that I was responsible for moving around these “shock towers”, whatever they might be, but I felt mildly disappointed to discover that a “shock tower” was only another hunk of die-stamped metal, crimped and bent like a discarded chewing gum wrapper.

I like watching the forklifts waltz across the scuffed grey floor. Under the guidance of experienced and capable drivers, their movements are surprisingly graceful. Forklifts have the right of way here, not people, and so you always must be very mindful of your surroundings as you walk along the narrow pedestrian lanes. Pillars are painted a loud orange, with the legend “CRUSH ZONE” emblazoned across them. It would be all too easy for a careless walker to get cinched between one of these pillars and a passing load of racks.

I had always imagined that an assembly line was literally that … a long, narrow line, with lots of people standing on either side, workers in blue overalls wielding wrenches and rivet guns, the square-jawed proletariat of a WPA mural. But it turns out that the “line” isn’t so much a line as a collection of broken segments, snaking throughout the giant building, with cars dipping into and then rising again from the assembly cells. As I make my way across the plant, to my cramped little office at the receiving dock, I pass cars in various stages of development … some glistening with fresh paint and shiny new headlamps, others just skeletons, mere suggestions. The layout is confusing to the untrained eye … doors get put on over here, and then taken off again over there, fully built cars are gassed up right next to the cell where the motors get put in. Because I have only a cursory understanding of the sequence, it all seems rather random and fractured, but it apparently makes sense to the people who are in charge of such things. Overhead, half-built frames hang from suspension trolleys, and their slow, stately progression around the corners reminds me of the load/unload area of a Disney ride. Like, the crappiest Disney ride imaginable.

The restroom, right next door to the clerk’s office, is the only john close to the dock that all the truck drivers have access to. It’s nominally a ladies’ room … but it gets used by maybe four ladies, tops, and about sixty men, conservatively, so it remains absolutely filthy. The hairy butts that slide and squeak against its toilet seat have been sweating in trucks all day long; I imagine any woman using this loo would want to hover far above the microbial horrorshow that the men leave behind. There is a Plexiglass dispenser on the wall holding a few dusty maxi pads and tampons, and they aren’t the frilly, euphemistic kind of feminine products, with delicate pastel graphics and names like “Yoni Whispers” or “Georgia’s Petals”. No, ma’am … these are the cheapest ones, with cardboard applicators, and they look harsh and industrial and uncomfortable. They might as well have the words “VAGINAL HYGIENE” stenciled across them.

I just heard from a coworker that if the dock’s plumbing is not regularly maintained and pumped out, the pipes will back up, quickly, and send a torrent of raw sewage sloshing into … wait for it … the clerk’s office. They know this because it’s happened before. This useful bit of trivia tells me two things: one, that it’s no mystery why this office has such a high turnover rate, and two, that it’s always a good idea to know where you sit in the scheme of things.

My job, essentially, is to act as a traffic cop for the ten doors of the dock. I take incoming trailers, direct them to various lanes, tally their contents, communicate with the forklift operators who unload and reload them, create outgoing manifests, and assign the reloaded trailers to truck drivers. It’s stressful, tedious, data-heavy work, and the endless piles of paperwork on either side of my desk make me feel like I’m stuck in the bottleneck part of an hourglass. There is no end to the process, no possibility for growth or promotion, and the job will never change … until, that is, they figure out a way to replace clerks with robots. I feel less like a cog in a machine than a hamster in a wheel, and the sheer repetitiveness of it all is stultifying. Still, for all its drudgery, my job is absolutely critical. If I fail to get these trucks moving in and out of the doors in a timely and orderly fashion, the bins will empty, the poor robots will be starved, STARVED FOR PARTS, the line will shut down, and production will grind to a halt. It gives me a weird sense of power, to know that I can bring the workstream of hundreds of people to a standstill just by transposing a handful of numbers.

Though I’m working hard, staying focused, and performing well, I know that I’m not really cut out for this long-term. Working the graveyard shift means that your workday stretches over two calendar days … you come into work on Sunday night, leave Monday morning, and come back in that same Monday evening. Without the mental reset of every “tomorrow” being a “new” day, your days and nights begin to blur together, and your sense of time becomes seriously distorted. The lack of sunlight throws your body’s natural rhythms out of whack, and it’s hard to decide which daylight hours should be sacrificed for sleep. Your social life takes a nosedive, as you are either sleeping or working during the time your friends are out doing things and eating dinners and hosting parties. Worst of all, though, is that all this busywork … and there’s a lot of it … yields no tangible results. Nothing ever really gets “finished”. There is no project to complete, no goal to meet, no end in sight to the paperwork. It’s basically a harshly-lit nightmare of tedium: stamping, scribbling, stapling, screen after screen of data entry, a flurry of phone calls, lots of text messaging.

I do get to use a walkie-talkie, though, and I spend lots of time shouting things like “GO FOR DOCK” or “COPY THAT” into the radio. This all feels very manly and commanding, an attitude I rarely get to adopt, and it lends my otherwise dull paper-pushing job a little macho gravitas. I can wear my usual Joe Schmoe drag … combat boots, flannel, paint-spattered jeans … and until I open my mouth to name-drop Proust or start flapping my arms around, people might assume I’m just “one of the guys”.

It’s odd to feel so out of place in a work environment, and yet still be able to perform the required tasks well. I guess it boils down to adaptation, to how quickly you can adjust yourself to an unfamiliar and somewhat scary situation. I do really enjoy my relationship with the hostlers, forklift operators, and truck drivers. Through the sliding window of the dock clerk’s office comes a steady stream of incoming traffic … and along with every driver comes a story, like a secondary cargo on their manifest. I hear their concerns, their frustrations, their worries, whatever is it that they’re dealing with: car repossessions, alimony, child support, court dates, infidelities, deaths. It’s almost like being in a church confessional, except that we can see each other, and the confessions go both ways.  

And as I walk to and from the clerk’s office, either waking up or falling asleep, I pass the different parts of the assembly process, and I look at the expressions of people’s faces … the tired eyes, the clamped mouths, the mixture of boredom and concentration … and I wonder what we are all doing here. Does the world really require so many more cars? Are we all here to fill an actual need, or are we just building vehicles in order to keep busy and earn money? The corporate line, of course, is that we are all engaged in a heroic American enterprise, the most red-white-and-blue of blue-collar jobs.

This place employs thousands of people, working around the clock, and its resource consumption must be exorbitant. For many employees, the factory is the enabling engine of their life, and so work consumes the majority of their energy, time, and attention. As I walk through the plant, past all of these strangers, I wonder about what might be happening in their lives, in the worlds they occupy outside of this assembly line: families, school, church, second careers, retirement plans.