Two Life Lessons from the Minimum Wage World

The minimum wage workforce does not get a lot of respect in our country. The typical goal is to get out of a minimum wage job to a “real” job as quickly as one can. But these are essential jobs. Assembling, serving, packing, cleaning, schlepping. They are very often our first exposure as teens and young adults to the work force. Even though they are simple jobs skill-set wise, there is much to be learned about working life, principals that apply to every job from bottle washer to CEO.

I was only briefly part of it for a couple summers in high school. I worked for a temp agency, working short-term jobs (from a few hours to a few weeks) at small businesses and factories in my town. One stint in particular was where I learned two important life lessons. They may seem trivial on the face of it, but to me the were profound.

It was a bottle-filling factory, to put it simply. We tended machines that filled bottles and tubes with various glues, oils and liquids, then packaged them for sale and shipment.

Lesson #1: Stay Busy.
In my bottle-filling job, the machines were temperamental. They would frequently malfunction. The first time the machine I was on shut down, I simply sat and waited. Mistake. Within minutes, the boss came by with a putty knife and explained how to get glue off the floor. I felt insulted, until I looked around and noticed how everyone else on the line looked busy, even with the machine down. They cleaned, they stacked, they sorted until the machine came back up. Moreover, they were doing essential activities that were hard to keep up with when the machine was running. They remained useful. And employed.

That putty knife was my friend the rest of that gig. Anytime my machine went down, I was the glue master. I stayed employed at the bottle-filling factory while several other temps came and went. I only moved on when the entire temp force was released when the work dried up. At every temp gig after that, I made sure I kept busy when the machine went down.

In the temp world, staying busy is a survival essential. You are only employed for exactly as long as you are useful. The moment you are seen as no longer needed, back in the queue you go. And in today’s employment environment, every job is a temp job it seems, no?

Lesson #2 Use your freaking head.
Back in the bottle-filling factory, a group of us worked this one particular line for several weeks. I was the young kid, a fresh 18, waiting for college to start. The others on the line were older, in their 30s give or take, working temp jobs while awaiting a better gig. It was a fairly slow-paced and quiet machine, so we chatted while we worked.

I made a rookie mistake. Once again, the machine went down. Not wanting to look un-busy (see #1 above), I took to cleaning some of the tubes of product that had gotten dirty in the machinery. I found myself with a big box full of ones ready to go to the packer at the end of the line. The guy running the packer was kind of a mysterious guy. He looked like he probably led a pretty hard life outside the factory. We did not say much to each other, but we had mutual respect going after this long time on one machine.

I took the big box of cleaned product and dumped it on the conveyor belt. The big slug hit the packer and snarled up the system. The guy at the packer growled at me “Use your [freaking] head!!” All I could do was smile sheepishly and go back to cleaning.

The “freaking” part is very important here. He used a more…choice…term, but the expletive is what makes this phrase work. It conveys the exasperation at the sheer foolishness that not using your head yields.

Those four words stuck with me. I should have known dumping a slug of product would screw things up, if I’d only taken a moment to think about it. Life in general is like that. Think ahead about how your actions will affect a others, particularly those down the line. Miss a deadline, dump a project on an underling, finish something in haste that really needed more care, and you can bring down the whole line. In life, yack on a cell phone in traffic, hit your little brother with a toy, make an insensitive comment to a friend…all these things lead to trouble that could be avoided if you “Use your [freaking] head!!”

To many adults, these lessons seem trivial. But we are not born with the knowledge. I’ll bet you know an adult or two who never learned these lessons.

It may have been minimum wage, but my experience was gold.

USPS Price Increases: No Big Deal since 1971

The recent announcement that the rate for United States Postal Service first class, 1 ounce stamps is going up from $.41 to $.42 in May 2008 has everyone reminiscing. I myself remember when a stamp was 8 cents…I think it had Eisenhower on it, if I recall. Now, 42 cents sure seems like a lot more that 8 cents, but actually it is exactly the same! If corrected for inflation, an 8 cent stamp in 1971 would be worth in 2007 exactly…you guessed it…42 cents!

Observe the graph, and you will see that the price of a first class stamp has remained somewhere between 40 and 55 cents in constant, 2007 dollars since 1971. (We are using 2007 dollars because that’s what the inflation calculator tool I used uses…and it’s a good frame of reference because we all have a sense of what 2007 was like financially, 2008 is still too new!) Once we get past the inflation spikes of the late 70’s, there’s one recent outlier in 1999 where it came in at 52 cents. Not sure what happened there. But aside from 1999, since 1985 it has been a very steady 41 to 45 cent range, and a very steady 41 to 43 cents since 2001.

I think the USPS is doing a pretty good job keeping costs reasonable.

Props to Five Cent Nickel’s post on the subject for the idea for this post.

This graph uses this Inflation Calculator . Postage data is from a graph linked in this news report

Compact Fluorescent Lights: Cheap enough to burn out early

Compact fluorescent light bulbs are very efficient, using a fraction of the electricity of the comparable incandescent bulbs. A common argument against them is that CFLs are significantly more expensive. This is offset by their longer life, in the range fo 6000 to 10,000 hours depending on the model. This is compared to an average life of 550 to 1000 hours for typical incandescents.

Another common argument against them is that if the CFLs happen not to last their advertised time, 6000 hours to 10,000 hours, then that additional expense has more than wiped out the gain.

Well, good news. CFLs have come down in price to the point where even if they fail well before their expected time, they are still cheaper to operate. Let’s run the numbers. 

Things I have done I am not supposed to do

We here at Corrected Wisdom like to think ourselves superior to the average slob. Still slobs, but better than average. We are also cheap slobs, never wanting to pay more than we have to for anything. So, stuff normal people would call someone to do, or buy a fancy gadget to do for them, we like to try ourselves because, well, we think we’re smart enough to manage it ourselves, and too broke to pay anybody anyway.

So let us list the things that we have done that we really did not have to if we had any sense. Or money.

Global Warming: Somebody tell Rush to pipe down

So the local radio station has been running a promo for Rush Limbaugh. It’s a little snippet of monologue from his show. They change these from time to time. Currently, it’s a screed on global warming. In essence, Rush expresses doubt that we little humans could possibly destroy something as big as the Earth with human-induced global warming. (Here’s a similar discussion from transcripts of Rush’s show.)

Well, he is right.