The Plastic Factory

It was one of those shops where the workers weren’t supposed to talk to one another and I was busily researching my ad hoc PhD on the worst workplaces in Britain so we were ideally suited. Wee industrial estate round the back of Higham Hill eats of Walthamstow, factory that made plastic mouldings. I am no entrepreneur, far from it. If I had my way we’d all be living in council housing and handed out food vouchers by some local benevolent dictator: Stalin without the mass killings and fevered paranoia, that’s me. But, if I was an enterprising capitalist kind of chap, the last thing I’d have thought of as my fortune-maker would be plastic mouldings.

Plastic mouldings production is very boring.

Sure, it gives employment to folk but it also makes you want to ram your head forcibly down the grimy old lavatory pan providing there aint someone in there having a sneaky smoke.

Ye hud tae huv a laugh in a dull place like this just to make the time go.

Jings! What was ait about life? Ye were aye wishing yer life away. Clocks. Time. A constant preoccupation. ‘Time and work discipline’ old E.P. Thompson cried it. Wish it was the end of the shift. Wish it was the end of the week. Wish ah wis fucken deid.

The boss-man was obviously thick: an un-enlightened fellow. If he’d let his drones talk and have a wee laugh then they’d mibbe no’ hate the job – and him – quite so much. A happy worker can be a right busy wee bee. A couple of dozen miserable one’s and you might find your wee factory burning down one night.

Whit’s this job I’m doing? I’m marking a rough template of some plate affair with a wee stubby pencil; just drawing a circle for the band-saw guy. I asked him what it was for but he’s Turkish or something and the best I could get out of him was a soup-slurping motion with his hand and the international gesture for ‘loonies’, so I surmised that they were bevelled plates for bam-cases or at least folk who had difficulties eating.

This information somehow added to my misery. But, things were to get even worse. 

After the loony-plates job for three long days I was asked to perform a special function. There was a moulding machine over in the corner by the bogs that was not working properly. The ‘feed’ from a giant roll of plastic was not allowing for sufficient slack which was in turn stopping the machine. My job was to intervene and artificially create said slack. 

At first, I succeeded in doing this by holding the plastic above my head and gently letting it feed in through my hands but this became somewhat painful on the arms so I settled for it resting on my head and controlling it that way. By way of a much-needed diversion, about every five minutes I had to rush around to the cage of the machine to extract the successful mouldings and stack them in piles ready for their next journey in the process. Having done this I would speed back to my head-balancing duties. I did this for about a week before I jacked the whole thing in and went looking for a job more suited to my amazing gifts.

The plastic trays, by the way, were for vivisection laboratories!