A grain of salt for current thought
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.
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