She was the boss from hell, or so it seemed at the time. I was a very recent hire at the factory, so recent, in fact, that it was my very first day on the job. I had the added bonus of not having the slightest clue as to what I was supposed to be doing. I had gotten the grand tour, which consisted of the front office, the main production part of the plant, the warehouse, and for some inexplicable reason, the men’s room.

No, she did not lead me inside the men’s room during the tour, but she did drag me up to the sign posted directly over the men’s room door, (the one clearly marked, “men”) and told me that was what that room was for. I thanked her very kindly as it was a good thing she had told me before I walked in that room looking to buy a man.

After recovering from my “tour” I was guided back to the office where I filled out seventy-two separate forms, apparently signing my life away in triplicate, and then I was sent back out to the main production floor, which was by that time, already well in full swing. It was unbelievably noisy, and at that time, hearing protection was not a popular item in that particular factory. As a result of this combination of noise and no noise filter, I could not hear my ultra-patient (not) boss as she explained the ins and outs of building a tiny, aggravating contraption called a “plunger”.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the plunger was a necessary ingredient for the building of automobile starters, which is what we were supposed to be building. I say, “supposed to be” for the simple fact, that it appeared that I was not the only one without a clue. I surmised that fact by watching some of the testers doing their jobs, and noticed that they were setting aside an awful lot of finished parts and disassembling them. That’s never a good sign.

Anyway, she parked me in front of a large table, informed me that this was the second easiest job in the shop, and I was going to learn it or else. She placed in front of me a large, wooden board with about seven million little holes in it, and instructed me on how to place little metal rods in them. First she taught me which end of the rod was up, and then told me I had to plant them in their little holes very quickly if I expected to keep up with the others. I looked around at the others. Hands were flying, parts were flying. Rods were filling the holes at an alarming rate. They were machines. Automatons, with blank stares. My new boss told me my quota would be 300 of these parts an hour. That didn’t sound so bad.

Famous last words. It was… very bad. I sat down, filled the board with rods. Most of them upside-down. My boss frowned and shook her weary head. I had been her employee for about an hour so far and already she wore the shell-shocked stare of the long-suffering. But the best was yet to come. After the board was filled with rods, springs had to go on them, which should have been easy but was not, because all of the springs in question were mated together like coat hangers in a closet. You can’t just pull two springs apart either. They have to be unscrewed from each other. Try doing that with a handful of springs and you will see my difficulty. Plus, only certain springs could be used. There were two sizes, and they were frequently mixed together. Oh, and did I mention that my boss was a lefty? Everything she taught me I had to learn over again… in reverse.

So, the springs were all in place. Now I needed to get a handful of these little black caps that slipped over the top of the bottom spring. Easy. Please make sure they are right-side up. Thank you. Through some trial and error I got them all arranged. Keep in mind that my closest companions in this debacle were already on their fourth boards by that time. After the caps came large, flat washers which had to be placed on top. The good side had to go up, of course, because if rust should show, the world would know that we were building junk. Can’t have that, now can we? So the washers were carefully placed. My co-workers were on their sixth boards by that time. I was getting really nervous.

Then came little fiber washers known technically as….fibers. These had to be placed on top of the large metal washers which surprisingly enough, were not named metals. Under penalty of death you could not skip any of the steps and they had to be done in order. Next came the impossible dream, little tiny clips called “clips” that were to be fitted around the tops of the metal rods. The clips were impossible to hold on to, shaped like horseshoes without the horse, and were too small to fit around the tops of the rods. This was not meant to be a deterrent. The clips were to be forced, pushed, prodded, begged, cajoled, screamed at, cursed at, pounded with a hammer, and finally, squeezed tightly around the metal rods because once they were in place after three hours of struggling, they were suddenly too loose to remain where you put them.

So, flat-tipped pliers were employed as the final annoying step in the forty-five step clip assemblage process. After that is finally over, you get to pop on the small top spring. This means going through the whole spring de-mating process once again, and getting them all in place firmly so they don’t fall off. Of course, springs are springs, so when the spring was sprung down on the top of the rod, it would almost always spring out into space. Safety glasses did not help. There. The board of plungers were complete. Oh yeah, except for the squeezing part. Each completed part had to be squeezed to make sure the springs weren’t sprung. If they did not move when you squeezed them it was back to the old drawing board. You had to tear the bad ones down and start again. Did I mention that my quota was 300 parts per hour?

That quota was the death of me. I simply could not hit it no matter how hard I tried. Every so often I would glance around the room in despair and suddenly noticed a huge, green, ugly looking machine sitting against the far wall. Nobody was using it, so I wondered what could possibly be its purpose. I asked one of the automatons sitting nearby. Without her hands skipping a beat, she turned all the way around on her stool, and looked in the direction I was pointing.

“Oh,” she said. “That’s just the plunger dial. It builds these things by the thousands.” Suddenly hope dawned, bright and shining in my soul. There was a machine that could do this faster and easier. Yes! “Then why are we sitting here doing this if there’s a machine to do the same thing?”

“It’s broken,” came her reply. Of course it was.

The broken plunger dial remained broken for what seem like eons of time, several years actually. But finally, long after my boss gave up on me and put me on another job, (the first easiest) the thing was fixed and….almost ran like a dream. Soon after it was started up again, teams of women were assigned to run it. Why women you might ask? Simple. Men could not build plungers as the parts were too small for their larger fingers. This was the general male excuse anyway. One of the teams included me, so I was sent over immediately for training. My early training consisted of my boss guiding me over to one particular woman who apparently had been working in the shop since Noah’s day, and telling me this woman would take care of my training. Then my boss ran and hid for the next two weeks.

During that period of time, I was “in training” and was not allowed to leave that machine…ever. The machine in question, the plunger dial, was my babysitting nightmare come true. This thing was as bad as seventy two toddlers. Nothing on the machine actually worked right, nothing was truly automated. The machine had to be watched like a hawk, and only two people were allowed to run it. Every so often a part would jam up in the track, and the whole dial had to be shut down while my trainer grabbed a nearby allen wrench, (the dial was never without one) and unscrewed the part of the dial assembly that had jammed up. This was a regular occurrence and I had to watch her every single time she did it. Soon, it would be my turn.

If you were standing up top, on a raised platform above the machine, it was your job to monitor the loading of the metal rods, the loading of the metal washers, the large springs, the caps, and various other conveniences. Yeah we could build several thousand plungers per day, quite easily, but we were chickens with their heads cut off, scrambling to make sure none of the parts were missing during the machine’s operation. The dial was in operation all day, even during breaks. To say we were busy was an understatement. The person on the floor, beside the machine, had control of the stop/go buttons, monitored the track to make sure it didn’t jam and loaded fibers and springs onto the completed parts. This person also had to un-jam the machine whenever it threw a tizzy.

The top position was considered the envious “easy” position, while the bottom space was studiously avoided. I became, after a while, the usual suspect at the bottom position, and could easily keep up with everything on that machine. I had conquered the beast and it had only taken two weeks of non-stop training to do it. I was now the official “mom” in charge of the plunger dial, and “mom” was required to answer all questions regarding its usage, and guess who it was who was responsible whenever bad parts were discovered? Yup, “mom” again. But I had definitely conquered it. I was actually able to walk away from that machine from time to time and still manage to keep up with all of the responsibilities regarding it.

When that plant shut down and we were to be transferred to another plant nearby, my “babysitting nightmare” was the very last machine to be loaded into the truck. I really can’t say I hated to see it go, but it did give us one last babysitting job after it left…we had to clean up after it. The platform that had stood for so many years beside that machine had been hiding a treasure trove of dust, old rusty parts, pennies, nails, odd bits of wire, dehydrated animal and insect remains and several dozen miscellaneous machine parts which probably explained why the machine had always been so recalcitrant to run. A few shovel loads later, the room was spic and span, and we could finally go home.

As you can probably gather, I never learned much from my actual boss. I did learn one thing from her though; lefty/loosey, righty/tighty. To this date I cannot tighten a screw or loosen one without thinking of those words. Years after my job transfer I found out that my boss was a relation of mine. It figures.