My Short Career As A Parts Catcher

Factory Jobs Suck

This is a brass part.

I was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Even in the post-hollowing out, de-industrializing rust belt, there were still plenty of factory jobs for anyone who wanted them. As a recent high school graduate with lackluster grades, college was off the table, and my work options were limited. For a while, I worked in a movie theater. I took tickets as an usher during the day, and at night I fixed the springs in the seats. For $3.50 an hour, I lay on my back and unscrewed coiled springs from the seats that would not return to their upright position.

The movie theater floor was sticky with candy and slick with spit from chewing tobacco. The seats smelled musty from decades of farts and god knows what else. My manager played Uriah Heep, a ‘70s prog rock band, over the theater speakers while we worked. It was disgusting, boring, work and it left me exhausted. As I lay there, fiddling with hardware with my filthy fingers, I contemplated my life. The years stretched out ahead of me. My future became a dark weight that sat on my chest and stared into my eyes, like a cat stealing the breath from a baby.

I joined the Army National Guard and went away for six months. Army bootcamp was difficult, but not too bad really. I came home with new motivation, discipline, and more self respect than I had when I left. I started thinking about community college, but I needed a job in the meantime, so I took a job at a factory as a parts catcher.

The work involved me sitting on a stool at the bottom of a slide that came off a giant, incredibly loud machine that turned giant sticks of brass into little bolts. I wore industrial headphones and still the noise drowned out any possibility of thought. The brass parts slid down the machine, and I grabbed them and stacked them in a basket. When the basket was full I put it on a conveyor belt and shoved it along to God knows where.

The machinist in charge of the machine walked around, fixing settings, and checking my work. The only thing he ever said to me was, “Miller time!” when we clocked out at 5pm. He could not wait to get home and get drunk. I did not drink. But the cumulative effect of 8 hours of catching parts was a crushing despair. As I said, I had just returned from six months of Army training in the desert, so I thought I knew something about putting up with long days and punishing conditions. But the monotony of catching parts, the lack of any intellectual stimulation, the complete absence of society and conversation really, really sucked.

After a week of catching parts I complained, so they moved me to the deburring station. Some other brass parts made by the factory had little metal lumps on them called burrs. My job was to sort through piles of these parts to find those with burrs, pick them up, and file off the burrs. I could work at my own pace, rather than the pace of the machine, and the noise wasn’t quite as bad. But I had to stand, not sit. It was slightly better work, but day after day it was pretty damn awful. And when I lay down at the end of each day, my future still sat on my chest and sucked my breath out of my lungs.

I get that we live in a world of things, and that someone, somewhere, has to make those things. I’m also humbled by my utter lack of ability to spend my days as one of those people. Call me soft, weak, spoiled, pampered, all those things. But a decade of standing next to a rumbling monster of a machine and catching parts would utterly destroy me. I only lasted a few months. I quit that job and took another job on a line at a bottle recycling plant. My fellow workers and I stood before a conveyor belt and sorted bottles that had been returned for deposits. We listened to classic rock and chatted. At the end of each day, I was covered in rotten soda syrup. I complained, so they moved me.

Then I tore open plastic bags filled with returned cans and fed them into a machine that crushed them and then shot them into the back of a semi tractor trailer. Among the cans were half-eaten sandwiches and dirty diapers. That job also sucked.

The working conditions of all those jobs involved all the safeguards of a labor movement at its prime. 8-hour days, weekends off, safety equipment, and a minimum wage! All those hard-won benefits by laborers before me were little comfort.

I’m willing to bet money that all the Americans who want more factory jobs in this country have never been a parts catcher. Nor have they picked up a file and deburred anything in their lives. I’d like to see them try.