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Third shift flashback Someone at work asked me if I had ever worked third shift before and I said that actually this is my third time around. The first time was years ago when I was in college. It was my summer job at a printing factory where they did tee shirts and decals. It was at the tee shirt shop where I first met the kind of people that work third. Most of them were pretty laid-back and there were signs of why they probably couldn't hold down a job with normal business hours. We had people who felt that drug use enhanced their job performance. Then there were those people who lacked any real job skills or higher education. Other workers simply had other interests that were more important to them than a job such as being in a band. Mixed in with this crew were a few college students just working for the summer. Another factor that influenced the personnel was that we printed Harley Davidson tee shirts. It the major contract for the company. It was a job that I enjoyed in terms of how mindless a job can be. It was the closest I ever came to a Metropolis experience. Plus nothing can beat eating lunch at two in the morning. We would sit outside at picnic tables and watch the police pull over the after bar crowd. A team of three people was assigned to each press. There was a printer, a puller and a catcher. The names pretty much describe what each person did at the press. The printer and the puller stood next to one another at the press with a cart loaded down with shirts behind them. The printer would pull a shirt off of the pile and slide the bottom over a horizontal board on the press so that the neck and armholes would be pointing at him. Then the press would rotate and a new arm with another empty board would be in front of him. He would slide another shirt over this board and repeat the process until all eight arms of the press were loaded. Then the fun would start as the ink would be applied to the shirts one color at a time. White would be applied first, because the other color wouldn't show up well on black. The best way to think of this would be as a primer coat of paint. This primer white had to dry before the other colors were laid down on top of it. This was done by passing the shirt under an incredibly hot heat source that we called the flash for about five to seven seconds and then the press would rotate. If the shirt stayed there too long it would start to smoke, which also caused much laughter. Everyone knew what had happened when they saw a little smoke at work. The press would rotate each shirt under a new color until the image was complete. Then it came around to the puller who pulled the freshly printed shirt off of the board and laid it down on a conveyor belt behind him. The conveyor belt passed through an oven where the shirt was cured. At the end of the conveyor was the catcher who inspected, counted and packaged the shirts. Catchers were usually women, because management felt that they would be more concerned with what the visual quality of the product might be. These poor women took a lot of crap from angry printers. Printers did not like to be told when they were making mistakes. First the printer might yell at the catcher for stopping them and then he would yell at the puller for not noticing the mistake before it got to the catcher. Each press printed hundreds of shirts a night with a different design on each of them. The press would rotate and the printer and puller would bend and pivot in unison. Obviously some of the teams worked better than the other teams. It's hard to get three different personalities to work in harmony. Each of the three people had to rely on the others to do a good job. The majority of the tee shirts were black, because black means that your're a bad ass biker. Personally I think that it was chosen because it hides poor hygiene. Those sweat rings under the arms don't show up as easily on a black tee shirt as opposed to a white one. We also printed most of our stuff in extra large sizes for those trim and fit Harley riders. The words "those fat bastards" still ring in my ears as my friend and I did our job. He also liked to refer to the larger shirts as tents. When we weren't printing the sacred logo of Harley Davidson or the motorcycles themselves, wolves and eagles were popular motifs for bikers. Then we would personalize the backs of the shirts for every little Harley shop in the United States. It didn't matter if you were from Alabama or Wyoming. We did every state in the union. Then there was the women's line of clothing that was perfect for every occasion. Pink spaghetti strap tops with white lace trim were adorned on the front with a scripted Harley Davidson logo. Sometimes the ink even had glitter in it. I always felt that no woman could resist such a fine piece of clothing. Besides the people who worked there, the other image that stays with me to this day is the chemical haze in the plant combined with the smell of ink. Floating in the air was a combination of spray adhesive and mineral spirit fumes. After you worked there for a while, you got used to both of these things, but you knew that it wasn't healthy for you. That job taught me a lot about life and the different kind of people in the world. Now for an opposing point of view on John Glenn provided by Jen. I know that I addressed the issue of it being a publicity stunt, but I would take Glenn over any sports "hero" any day of the week. Besides its not as though NASA was sending celebrities all of the time.
audio input at the moment: Urban Hymns - The Verve
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