“Thank you, Jerry, you’re the only light at the end of my tunnel most days,” I said with a smile and took the coffee from him.
“It lights up my entire day just to see that smile on your face,” Jerry said and walked away quickly before our rat faced manager happened to look from his office upstairs and saw the friendly exchange between one of his supervisors and the factory worker he’d only just chided for her lack of performance on the factory floor.
Soon I found that familiar old rhythm of just going through the motions and when Ben Orwell smiled at me from his work station next to mine I gave him a big smile right back.
I had no doubt in my mind that the true reason why our assembly line was moving slower than the rest was actually the fact that Ben wasn’t all that handy or skilled at his job. He was a little clumsy, to be honest; always dropping his tools and struggling to fit the various electrical components together.
I could easily have told Grant all of this to cover my own ass, but I wasn’t a snitch and never would be one. I was not about to start ratting on my fellow workers just to keep the chief rat happy. Guys like Ben were the salt of the earth and he was always ready to help me out or cover for me when I was a bit late. He was a slightly slow in picking up on the whole assembly procedure but I knew that he would eventually get the hang of it and then we would gradually pick up our pace and catch up with the other three assembly lines.
“I take it our friendly manager Grant has had the little ‘pick up your pace’ talk with you too this morning?” Ben asked after we’d been working for a while.
“He sure did, has he had the same talk with you?” I asked.
“Yes, only mine came yesterday after my shift was over.”
“Seems like he’s really gunning for that promotion now,” I remarked and pulled a sour face.
“He sure does, I just hope we don’t end up as the casualties of his ambition, I really don’t know what I’ll do if I have to lose this job.”
I was going to ask Ben about his home situation but then thought the better of it. He might just interpret my interest as something more than casual conversation and then I might just have to deal with his amorous approaches at work on top of all of the stress I already experience every day on the assembly line. Instead, I just picked up another electrical component and fitted it to its socket without making any further small talk.
I glanced up at the clock on the factory wall and noticed that there were still six hours left in my shift and I suddenly felt like just taking off my overall, slamming down my tools and quitting that godforsaken, soul destroying factory job. I could just picture how everyone would look at me as I defiantly strolled out of the premises and opened the door to freedom outside.
Maybe I would land a better job if I burned my bridges and just cast my lot in with the rest of the job-seeking population…maybe I could meet a man if I paid more attention to my appearance and started going out to places at night. Or maybe I could learn some new skill, like how to do nails or I could do a hairdressing course and start earning better money as a hairdresser. Maybe I could go and live with my parents for a while, even though that would probably be a real financial strain on them…there were so many possibilities I could think of and all of them seemed light years better than doing my boring, robotic assembly job with no real prospects of ever being promoted to something better.
“Are you okay? You seem to be a million miles away from this place in your head today,” Ben remarked and I just smiled at him.
“I guess I’m trying to twist my mind around the fact that I have six more hours of this before I can go home,” I replied and tried to smile. I think my attempted smile ended up as more of a grimace and Ben shook his head in agreement with what I’d just said.
“Tell me about it. I’m still trying to come up with some way of convincing myself every day that this is all worth it and that I’m not just slaving away my life in some downward spiral.”
I saw Jerry walking up to me and realized that I hadn’t been working quite as fast as I should have. There was a hold up in the assembly line as I was not sending any components upstream on the conveyor belt that ran past in front of my workstation continually.
“Don’t worry, Jerry, I’m stepping right up,” I said before he could ask what the problem was. I actually felt totally justified in working that slowly for a change; after all that rat faced Grant had just berated me for my slow pace so I thought it would only be fair to make myself at least partially guilty of the baseless charge he’d laid at my feet.
The rest of my shift went off without a hitch and when I got home I just collapsed on my bed, like I always did at the end of each working night.
I went to the kitchen to get a glass of water and saw immediately that Justin had been up to his antics again. The place was a mess and half the contents of the fridge were packed out on the counter. I was too tired to even get angry and just went right to my bedroom and fell asleep on my small bed.
I had a dream and it was somewhere between pleasant and scary. I was standing in the kitchen and Ben Orwell walked in and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
“You take it easy today and just relax honey, I’m off to the factory,” Ben said and opened the front door to go to work. In my dream, I went over to Justin’s room and he’d already dealt us a hand of cards to play gin rummy.
I woke up and took a look around my bedroom. Ben Orwell was not there and I felt relieved and somewhat disappointed all at once. Relieved because I’d not yet given in to the possibility of ending up with a man that I didn’t love and slightly disappointed because I realized that I was still all alone in the world.
“Just a little while longer…just hold on a little longer,” I muttered to myself and fell asleep again.
NATHAN
“Why the hell would they just leave and fly all the way back to China instead of waiting for me another 10 minutes?” I exclaimed in exacerbation.
“The Chinese people consider it a grave insult to be left waiting! And you were more than half an hour late!”
“I told you, dad, there was a lot of traffic and I was doing the best I could to get to the airport on time.”
“Stop feeding me that fucking bullshit! I know you went to that Riley girl’s yacht party instead of doing what I’d asked you to. Did you really think I wouldn’t find out about it!?”
“I can’t believe you spied on me again, dad,” I said, not knowing what else to say. What else could I possibly say under the circumstances? I’d been caught red-handed and I was probably going to get docked a part of my allowance or something like that.
“Well, I’ve had enough of this,” my dad said in an alarmingly calm tone of voice, “it's time you found out how the world out there really works.”
“Just don’t send me off to one of those boring seminars again, please. There’s nothing more boring on earth than those goddamned seminars!”
“You’ve just sabotaged the deal of a lifetime with your careless attitude and you really think that’s the only punishment you’re going to get!? Mr. Cheng now wants to renegotiate the entire deal that would have taken our factories to China where we would have saved more than 50% on production costs! It could all have been signed and sealed by now if you’d simply made the effort of picking them up at the airport!”
“Just calm down, dad, I’m sure we can still negotiate a good deal with the Chinese guys,” I said while checking a message from Janine on my iPhone. That chick surely knows how to bang well each and every time.
My father stood up from his leather chair giving me a very long look, like if he was considering something one last time.
“I’ve looked the other way for far too long while you’ve been living it up like some kind of playboy. But even my patience has limits. Look, son, I tried to be fair with you and what did I get in return? Disrespect and disgrace! But it’s time to change that. I’m canceling all of your credit cards, blocking your accounts and taking
your sports cars away for three months. You will live in a small apartment in a run-down suburb and prove to me that you are capable of honest, hard work or you will never see another cent of my money in your lifetime.”
“What the hell, dad! You can’t be serious! Just what exactly am I supposed to do to prove to you that I can do this so called honest hard work?”
“You will go and work on the factory floor of our manufacturing plant in Round Rock, Texas and I will get my meanest managing supervisor to keep a close watch on your ass. If you even miss so much as one single shift because you partied too hard I will have you fired and then you can join the queues outside the unemployment offices!”
I sat there absolutely stunned. I was waiting for my dad to say that it had all just been a joke or something, but he just stood there with an angry expression on his face.
“Go pack your bags. I will give you enough money for a bus ticket down to Round Rock and I will set you up in a small apartment.”
I sat there staring at my dad trying to take it all in, but it was almost too much for my mind to process.
“And one more thing, you will not be allowed to tell anyone that you are my son. You will be just another ordinary worker on the factory floor and you will have no special privileges.”
What the fuck???
It all felt like some kind of bad dream and I kept hoping that I would suddenly wake up and discover that none of it was real. That didn’t happen though and it slowly dawned on me that all of this was really happening and that my dad was really serious. I didn’t even get an opportunity to speak to Janine Riley before I left as my dad had even gone as far as taking away my iPhone.
“You can save up and buy yourself a cell phone with your first weekly pay,” my dad said as I had to hand over my gold-encrusted limited edition iPhone to him.
“Common dad! Let's talk about it with mom,” I tried to negotiate one more time but the expression on his face indicated that I’d better leave before something even worse will happen.
***
So that was it. In one single crazy moment, I’d gone from being an eligible, rich young bachelor to a dirt poor peasant with no money in the bank. My dad made good on all of his promises and when I tried my credit cards they’d all been cut off and my bank accounts had all been frozen. The thing I missed most of all was my silver Porsche. My sports car had almost been some kind of extension of who I was and I felt like a part of my soul had been cut off now that I had to stand and wait for the bus to take me to some godforsaken small town where I would have three months to prove that I could do an honest day’s work. Saying that I was mad at my father would be an understatement. He was the last person to preach about hard, honest work. How pathetic!
The Greyhound bus finally arrived and I got on board. I watched the gray landscape flashing by through the bus window as we started the long trip down to Round Rock and I suddenly decided to treat the whole thing as an adventure. After all, just how hard could it be to do some manual labor for three months to get back all of my previous privileges?
I lay my head back against the seat with a smile and closed my eyes. I could already picture myself excelling on the factory floor; earning the praises of management and my supervisors as I aced the little job my dad had planned for me.
“This is going to be a breeze and I will be back on Janine’s yacht before you know it,” I told myself and fell asleep in the seat of the Greyhound bus as we traveled toward the factory of Edward Electronics in Round Rock, Texas.
EMILY
“What the fuck are you doing? Are you trying to invent some new technologies right here on the factory floor!?”
I felt sorry for the new guy as I watched Grant jumping down his throat in front of all the other workers. I have to admit that Grant had a point, though. The new worker had made a total mess of the components he was supposed to fit and had joined the various parts together in such creatively incorrect ways that it did indeed appear as if he was trying to invent some new computer machine. It was going to take someone a very long time to correct all of the mistakes he’d made if they could, in fact, be corrected at all.
“We don’t have time to fix all of these components you’ve messed up! Just throw them in the rubbish bin and try not to screw up again. And by the way, the cost of these wasted components will be coming right out of your salary!”
Grant turned around and stormed off to his office, leaving the new guy standing there like a boxer that had just taken a flurry of heavy punches.
I took a closer look at the young man who’d just been on the receiving end of Grant’s fury and found myself wondering what on earth he was doing there in the first place. I could tell from the appearance of his hands that he’d never done a manual work in his entire life. He had the looks of movie star and I wondered why the hell he wasn’t on a photo shoot somewhere, earning big buck with his impossibly good looks rather than trying to work on the assembly line of Edward Electronics. His blonde, wavy hair was cut in a very fashionable style and his gorgeous blue eyes seemed almost unreal in its clarity and sparkle. He looked as if his well-toned muscles had been shaped by many hours of working out in a gym, rather than some kind of manual labor.
“Welcome to the wonderful world of Edwards Electronics,” I said with a smile and held out my hand for him to shake, “my name is Emily and don’t worry, I will show the ropes.”
“Nathan, pleased to meet you. Do you come round here often?” he said with a broad grin and I smiled at his little joke.
“Oh, I come here all the time, it’s simply the best place to meet exciting new people,” I shot right back at him and he smiled again.
Nathan looked extremely relieved to have at least one friendly person to talk to after his run in with Grant. Jerry had paired him with me for his first shift and Ben Orwell had been moved to a different assembly line, at least for now. I had to admit that Nathan was a vast improvement on Ben, at least as far as looks were concerned. I was going to have some eye candy right there in front of me all day, even if Nathan was probably going to slow down our entire assembly line while I tried to teach him how to assemble all of the various computer components.
As the shift went on I discovered that Nathan was quite a complex character from the looks of it. He was very friendly and chatty and made a lot of jokes all the time, but he seemed almost offended when I corrected him on some of the obvious mistakes he was making. I got an impression that he wasn’t very used to being told what to do.
He didn’t even know how to hold a screwdriver properly and it was almost impossible to teach him, as he kept pretending that he knew what he was doing when clearly he did not. After a while, he finally started getting the hang of it and the assembly line very slowly picked up speed as Nathan found his bearings. Things were moving painstakingly slow, however, and I could just see in my mind’s eye already how Grant’s temper was going to flare right through the roof about the slow pace at which we were now moving in our assembly line.
For some reason, the shift just flew by and I couldn’t believe my eyes when Jerry walked up to tell me that it was time for me to fall out.
“Time to pack it in for another day, Emily,” Jerry said with a friendly smile.
“Is the shift finally over?” Nathan asked.
“It is over yes, but you’re going to have to stay for another couple of hours, young man. Grant has asked me to do some additional training with you,” Jerry said and Nathan looked as if someone had punched him in the gut.
“Well it was nice knowing you, I don’t think I will live through this night,” Nathan said and smiled at me as I took off my overalls and prepared to go home.
“Oh, I think you will be just fine, see you tomorrow,” I replied and winked at him before walking outside.
I looked up at the sky and breathed the evening air deep into my lungs. There was a little stir of excitement inside me and I felt almost happy as I walked home briskly to go and see if my litt
le angel had destroyed the kitchen again with his amateur food preparation skills.
NATHAN
So, my first day at work on the factory floor wasn’t exactly the tour de force I’d thought it was going to be. It was, to be perfectly honest, a total disaster and I felt like the whole thing might just end up being far more of a challenge than I’d anticipated. I really struggled to figure out the finer aspects of computer component assembly and wondered how the hell I was ever going to get so good at it that my dad would decide to allow me back on the gravy train.
I’d never imagined that the laptops I’d used all my life and taken for granted were actually so difficult to make. It wasn’t just the fact that the various components were so damned intricate in their design that made the work so difficult, it was also the pressure of wanting to perform well so I could get started on proving myself as a hard worker and just get my old man to restore me to my former lifestyle.
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