Back when I was 20 and a newly minted college dropout, I worked at a Kraft Jell-O pudding plant. I helped manufacture those six-packs of plastic cups filled with gelatin or pudding. If you're eating one of those right now, turn the cup over (finish the pudding first) and on the bottom you'll see a bunch of numbers and the letters "MC". That stands for Mason City, Iowa, my hometown. Sometimes I point that out to small-breasted women in the grocery store. "See?" I say. "I bet you never noticed that before." They never give me their numbers, though.

I worked 12-hour shifts at the pudding plant, from 6:00 at night to 6:00 in the morning. When I went to work, the sun was setting, and when I got off work, the sun was rising. The factory itself had no windows, so day and night ceased to exist for me -- I only knew twilight. To add to the confusion, we worked four days on, four days off. This meant that I might work Monday through Thursday and have Friday through Monday off, or I might work Saturday through Tuesday and have Wednesday through Friday off, or some other weird combination. I hated working that schedule. After a while your internal clock pops a spring and strange ideas start rolling through your skull. It's no surprise to me that Jeffrey Dahmer worked in a chocolate factory.

I was not a Kraft employee. I worked for Kelly Temporary Services on a team of workers including people from North Iowa Vocational Center, an outfit that provides jobs for developmentally disabled people. You have guessed correctly that none of my duties required advanced language or mathematical skills. My favorite job was dragging around a pallet truck and picking up empty cardboard boxes and taking them back to a machine that bundled the cardboard for recycling. I liked that job because if I hurried and collected all the cardboard (it's not as hard as it sounds), I could ditch the pallet truck and sneak off to a secret bathroom in a corner of the factory that nobody seemed to know about. The bathroom had a single toilet and a lock on the door. I would set the alarm on my watch and sleep on the floor for 20 minutes. Sometimes I would jerk off, too. Quit looking at me like that. I always washed my hands before I went back to work.

My least favorite job was loading stacks of plastic cups into a huge machine. This job was so slow and tedious that I developed strategies for dealing with the boredom. For example, every time I finished loading a case of cups, I would keep one and put it to the side as a counter. Only after I set five cups aside could I look at the clock. So loading plastic cups at the pudding plant taught me patience, an asset that became valuable later when I started running marathons and ultramarathons. (I can say with confidence that the words in the preceding sentence have never been placed in that particular sequence before.) Sometimes I would overload the machine with cups and then go to the bathroom, where I would catch a five-minute nap. "Wow," you are saying, "you sure used to sleep a lot back then." I still do, asshole. Mostly with your mom.

Once Kraft experimented with a cheesecake snack product and I got tapped to help make it. This meant unwrapping 50-pound blocks of Philadelphia cream cheese and dumping them into a huge vat. I bet you didn't know that Philadelphia cream cheese came in 50-pound blocks. I always thought about taking a bagel back there and spreading some of the cream cheese on it, but most people in Mason City don't share my sense of humor, and I probably would have gotten fired. After I put the cream cheese in the vat with some sugar and milk and artificial flavorings, I would turn the mixer on and then stand around while some Kraft guy talked to me. The mixer was really loud, and I was wearing ear plugs, so I couldn't hear anything he was saying. He seemed pretty excited about it, though, so I always nodded in agreement. I hope he wasn't telling me about how he liked to molest little kids or anything like that.

I learned from working at the pudding plant that everything comes from somewhere. Look at all the crap spread around your house. Go ahead, do it. Pick up some random item, like a toenail clippers. Some group of people, somewhere, depends of the manufacture and sale of those toenail clippers for their livelihoods. They get up early and spend all day making the best damn toenail clippers they know how. They get mad at their daughters for buying toenail clippers made by other companies. They worry that people in Mexico or the Phillippines might be willing to accept lower pay to make toenail clippers. One of them probably drives a truck with license plate TOENAIL.

There were some cute girls working at the pudding plant. But I never talked to any of them.

+posted by Lawrence @ 4/07/2004 11:55:00 PM