Michelangelo sibyl from the Sistine Chapel

 

such soft hands

In the past some of my girlfriends have commented that I have soft hands. Well that must still be true, because after assembling the bookcase the other day, I managed to give myself two very annoying blisters. One of them is on the pad of my thumb and the other one is on the side of my middle finger. Something tells me that I'm not cut out for manual labor, if I can't use a screwdriver for a few hours without getting blisters.

Actually the last time that I had a manual labor job was almost six years ago. It was in the fall of the year that I graduated from college that I took a job at a local plastics factory. To be more precise their special niche was injection-molded plastic, which means that they made anything from office inbox trays to the lids of tanning beds. For eight hours a day I would soak in the sights and smells of hot plastic, which has an odor similar to chocolate.

In some ways it was like working with giant Playdoh machines. I would load a hopper on the top of the machine with raw pellets of plastic, which would then get melted and injected into a mold. Then once the mold opened, I would remove the final product. None of this process required too much thought, but that seems to go hand in hand with most factory work.

For me the most amusing part of the place was how they kept on stressing that there was never any waste. If a finished piece was defective or didn't pass inspection it was shredded into smaller pieces and put back into the hopper.

I worked there for almost the entire winter hoping the whole time that I could get another job that not only paid better, but where I would be clean.

After another good night at work, the sound of the doorbell woke me at two-thirty this afternoon. It was a delivery guy with the software that I had been expecting on Wednesday. Of course once I had the software I had to try it before I went back to sleep. I didn't do all that I wanted to do with the software, but I did enough to see that it works on my system.

Due to some good discipline on my part, I managed to get some sleep before I went to work. Somehow I convinced myself to hold off on experimenting for hours with the new software, because to me it doesn't make sense to mess up my system, when I don't have the time to fix it. Beginning Sunday I'll have days to monkey around with my new software without having to worry about anything else like going to work.

 
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