You're Fired, Part Two

#2

After my Junior year in college, I found out that the Goodyear factory where I had worked the last two summers was not hiring summer help that year. It was a great job and paid good money. I worked the 11PM to 7 AM shift in the Banbury division (we took the raw rubber in bales, threw it in a two-story mixer with a bunch of chemicals and lamp black powder, turned up the heat, and out of the bottom came usable rubber that ran through a big pasta making machine that turned it into thin sheets that hung up to dry before being shipped out to the rest of the factory. The lamp black was terrible stuff to get off your face. It took a lot of time and vaseline to clean it from around your eyes, so most of us only did that on Friday morning when we finished our last shift of the week. Which meant I spent most of the summer looking like a raccoon. Ann barely mentioned it (three or four times a week, tops). When I got off work at 7 AM, I would meet Ann for breakfast or to play tennis, then she would go off to work and I would go home to bed. We had evenings together, until 10:30, when it was time to go to work. One of the pluses of working at Goodyear was that as I went off shift, I would swing through the first floor of the factory and say Hi to my dad who worked the morning shift. He was a supervisor and my most lasting memory of him at the factory was coming downstairs and hearing him explain to a young man that a box of #4 washers shouldn't be dumped into the bin marked #5 washers and that he'd better get busy sorting washers. Although he used a lot more colorful language than that which I think he learned while in the Navy.   

So when the Goodyear plant quit hiring, I was forced to look for something else. My brother Alan and Ann and I spent part of the summer making candles which we sold to gift shops and department stores. As you can imagine, not a lot of money there. Probably not even enough to pay the damage we might have caused melting wax over an open flame in Mom's kitchen. Luckily we got the fire out in time. Mostly it helped to fill the time in the summer. Every weekend we went to a craft fair and set up a booth selling candles to people passing by.   

I found out from my roommate Guy that the steel mill in Cleveland he worked at needed help and I was welcome to move up to his house and we would work together. So I packed what I needed into the VW bug and headed for Olmsted Falls. It turned out the steel mill was owned by his girl friend's father, which is how we got jobs there. I worked most of my time on a big machine that pressed down on a piece of steel and made something out of it. After 40 years, I have no recollection of what it made. It was just tedious work (I was low man on seniority and got the worst job). It broke down often and I would have to sit and wait for someone to come fix it. The machine was probably 10 feet tall. On one of the days when I got to work I was a little early and someone else was running the machine. It must have broken down for him, too, because when I got there he was hanging from the top of the machine pounding on it with a small sledge hammer. When I asked him what he was doing, he said, "Percussive maintenance."  

On our last day of the summer, with two hours to go before we were officially off the job for the last time, my machine broke down again. I called it in and when Guy came by to see what was up, he suggested that we take a tour of the plant and say goodbye to everybody while they fixed the machine. Guy had an office job and had a lot more freedom than I did. Ten minutes later the foreman found us and fired us on the spot. When he escorted me back to the machine to get my stuff, it still wasn't fixed. I asked why I was being fired for not working when I couldn't be working, he said I was required to stay by the machine. I asked when the machine was going to be fixed and he said they needed a part. It was down until the next day. He also made some comments about how we weren't in the union and there wasn't anything we could do about it. Probably one of the main reasons I have been in a union on every job since then if it was possible. When he walked us to the gate and we punched out for the last time, I had lost 57 minutes of work time. I know Guy and his girl friend talked to her dad about what happened. I don't think anything came of it except to let her dad know we weren't goofing off when we could have been working.   

So that was job #2 for being fired. Soon, firing #3.