Have you ever been in one of those jobs that was so routine
that you didn’t have to think much at all, just do it? Oh, I have been, when I was in my mid 20’s.
I used to joke that when I went to my locker at the beginning of my shift to
change into my uniform, not only did I lock my street clothes in that locker,
but my brain as well.
This was back in the mid 90’s. I’d been in Germany already a
couple years already, so my German was understandable, for the most part. I
landed a manufacturing job and found myself working swing shifts on a factory floor.
As I may have mentioned before, I was actually a trained medic, but since my
language skills were not adequate enough to work in that field, I found myself
looking for a job where I didn’t have to interact too much with other people,
especially when any misunderstanding could make the difference between life and
death.
I had never worked swing shifts before, and I never really
wanted to either. My father had been working shifts for well over 20 years and
I saw what a toll it was taking on him. Besides the factory where he worked
often laid off the new hires periodically. So I joined the Army to learn a
skill that would help me land a job where I didn’t have to work shifts. Okay, I
was naïve, had I thought it through then I may not have wanted to be a medic,
since paramedics and hospital staff often have to work shifts too. But here I was less than 10 years later doing
exactly what I was trying to avoid in the beginning.
I had been used to getting up nice and early due to my
military service, but this is not saying that I liked getting up at 5 A.M. Even
that wasn’t the worst part of the morning shift. The management would always be
there hovering around making sure you’re not only doing what you’re supposed
to, but also making sure you were doing it exactly like they wanted, and I’ve
never been a fan of micromanagement.
Of course, anytime we’d get visitors from our general
offices in the States, they’d run and get me to give the tour of the lines. We
had an engineer from research and development visiting who apparently didn’t
catch my name in the introductions. Had he done so, I doubt he would have mistaken
me for a German. At the end of the tour, he decided to complement me. “Gee,
your English is really good.” I smiled and said “Thank you, yours isn’t that
bad either.” Leaving him with a puzzled look on his face, until I explained that
I was from Pennsylvania.
Late shift really sucked because by the time you got off
work practically everything except the bars were closed. I had actually worked
late shift all the time before when I worked in a rest home back in the States.
After work I could still go to Kroger’s and buy frozen pizza rolls or some
other snack if I wanted, but not in Germany. Nope, back then they closed the
stores at 6 P.M.
But the night shift was a different story altogether. There
was very little management there, so you could relax a bit more. If you didn’t
sleep the whole day, you could still get up on time to buy something before you
went to work, and we hardly had visitors during that time. But night shift
brought its own challenges. First of all you had to get used to working while
most people were sleeping and fight with yourself to stay awake while the hum of the machines tried to lull you to sleep. Especially when your tasks were as routine
as mine were, feed the machine and clean up scraps. Secondly, when you’d
mastered staying awake, it was the boredom that took over next.
I overcame this by being a bit of a prankster. I’d tape
together my colleague’s tools in their tool bags, making them borrow somebody else’s
until they could free their own. I’d take a screenshot of the shift report and
use the picture as the desktop background. This was always amusing because they
thought that the background picture was their report and they’d get pissed at
the computer because it wasn’t showing what they were trying to write. I used
to use the boxes from the raw materials to construct cardboard costumes and
weapons and attack my colleagues. A knight in cardboard armor. Okay, I was a
bored young man just trying to stay awake and doing what I had to do.
Well apparently I took it too far one time and nearly got
myself fired over it. You see, the finished product would be boxed up at the far
end of the line, palletized, and picked up with a forklift to be taken to the
warehouse where the pallets would be wrapped with stretch foil and labeled. If
you’ve ever driven a 5 foot high pallet with loose boxes, then you know you
have to drive very carefully. Occasionally a forklift driver would hit a bump and
lose a box forcing him to stop, pick it up and put it back on the pallet. So I
filled one of the empty boxes with scraps from the production line and taped it
closed. When the forklift driver passed my workstation, I threw the box on the
ground so he would hear the ‘thud’ and stop. I’d hide my decoy box and leave
him looking for the fallen box. When the next driver came, I did the same, but
this time I left the box for him to find it. I waited until I saw him
completely confused as to where this box should go on the full pallet before I
let him in on the joke. So I had a bit of a laugh at the expense of my
colleagues, with no harm intended. Of course, I could only do this once or twice
before the joke got old, so I planned to destroy my decoy after my break.
When
I came back, the decoy was gone. I searched everywhere, at this point I was
wide awake and not bored in the least bit. Then I saw it, not where I left it
mind you, but in the hands of the warehouse manager. The box top was open and
the scraps were clearly visible and he looked pissed. He was marching toward my
manager to complain about it. I cut him off and tried to explain in my broken
German. He explained to me that someone had seen the box and thought a forklift
driver had lost it, and my decoy was nearly on its way to the trucks waiting at
the loading docks. He asked me in German “War das Spass” which could be understood
two ways. How he meant it was, ‘was that a joke’. How I interpreted it ‘was
that fun’. So of course I answered ‘no’ which only made thing worse because he
thought I did this intentionally to harm the company. Fortunately, one of my
German colleagues intervened and explained to the warehouse manager that
it was a stupid joke. Seeing how shaken I was, I guess he decided to let me off
the hook, because I never heard anything about it again. And I decided to be
more careful about pulling pranks. Yeah, that definitely was ‘not fun’.
I hope you've enjoyed this episode of "Tales from the Dorkside".
Be sure to recommend, if you did.
Thank you
