#10
Post
by ToLiveIsToFly » Mon Feb 23, 2009 1:33 pm
I spent the fall of 1989 working in a factory where they make GS cookies - the former Burry Biscuits factory in Elizabeth, NJ (it was Interbake Foods while I was there; who knows what it's called now or indeed if it's even still there).
It was a very weird situation and one of the worst jobs I've ever had. I was a temp in the hiring office, mostly doing typing and filing. The factory was unionized and paid what seemed to me to be pretty good wages (on the order of $10/hour in 1989). There didn't seem to be any onerous skill requirements for most of the factory floor jobs, and there was lots of unemployment in the area, which meant that the line of people who wanted to apply went around the corner most days, for maybe one or two jobs.
So the first part of my day was trying to get into the office. I was dressed very differently from the but many days when I was trying to get in, I would be hassled by the people at the front of the line who thought I was cutting in front of them. That was a bit frightening, but then it would change to "Wait. you work in the HIRING office? Maybe you can get me a job?", which of course I had no influence over.
I worked in an office with the Hiring Manager or Hiring Director or whatever who was always hoping I'd finish my work early so I could help him work on some newsletter he sent to his old Marine buddies. And the two non-temp regular secretaries. They both seemed like they were in their 60s already (but I was 21, so they probably weren't as old as I thought they were), and they had both worked there forever and they hated the applicants, they hated each other and they hated their boss. I have no idea WHY they hated each other, but they were both ranked equally and they both thought they should be in charge of the other. They were always complaining to me about the other person and trying to get me to take their side. They resented that their boss was so transparent about the amount of on-the-clock time he spent working on his hobbies, but they also spent a lot of time sucking up to them. And they were really mean to the applicants lining up. You could just tell that they'd been saying no to poor, mostly-minority applicants for decades and had gone from being nice and feeling guilty about saying no transferring that guilt into resentment of the people who were making them feel guilty. It was very sad. For some reason whenever I see a baseball player mumble a little bit of resentment about an umpire's call, and the umpire gets all up in THEIR face and escalates a beef (I haven't seen that in a while, but I feel like it used to happen a lot in the 90s), I always think of those 2 secretaries. It saddens me a little that I can't think of any of their names.
On the plus side, the pay was frighteningly good for someone who was trying to earn enough money to go back to college and I got an awful lot of free samples. You could buy a HUGE box of broken Thin Mints for like $3. At least once a week I would, and take them to my night job. Every single crumb would always be gone by the end of the night.
