By Andrew R.
For the summers of my eighteen and nineteenth years I worked at a window factory in Manchester, NH. My life was organized neatly by a series of alarms and whistles.
6 a.m. alarm: shower, brush teeth, dress, put on steel-toed boots
6:15: get in car, turn on The Howard Stern Show, drive
6:45: set alarm on cell phone for 6:55, sleep in parking lot
6:55 alarm: walk to the factory, punch in, 8-7-7-1
7:00 whistle: work begins
10:45 whistle: 15 minute stretch break
12 p.m. whistle: lunch, clock out, 8-7-7-1
12:28: clock in, back to work
1:45 whistle: 15 minute stretch break
3:00 whistle: clock out, 8-7-7-1
I all but lived out of my car during those summer months, splitting my time between my then-girlfriend’s mom’s condo and my parents’ house. I kept a blue duffel bag in the back seat of my ’98 Dodge Status. On hot days, my deodorant and chapstick would melt all over my clothes, so I learned to pack them in my lunch bag with an ice pack.
I really hated working at the factory, but it was good money—something like $13 an hour—so it was worth it. Besides, my uncle Paul, who worked in the front office, got me the job and my father told me in no uncertain terms that I’d be taking it. Paul pulled some strings and got me hired as a full-time employee, which meant I got paid more and couldn’t be fired on a whim like the temps. I was lucky, my father said.
In the grand scheme of jobs at the factory, I had one of the best. I worked in Bow/Bay, which was housed in a separate building, away from the chaos of the rest of the factory. We needed the extra space because we assembled huge picture windows. They were made with up to eight separate panels and sometimes measured ten feet tall. Some of the windows were so big they took three people to carry, though it was a point of pride to try and lug them yourself.
In the morning, I’d collect the windows that we’d be assembling that day from the warehouse and load them on yellow carts. Then, as needed, I’d drill holes in each corner of the window’s plastic frame and attach trim around the edges before passing it on down the line.
I finished my work most days before the first stretch break and, like the rest of the guys in Bow/Bay, I got good at filling time. I’d sweep the entire building every day, which took about two hours. It was a fruitless task. By the next morning, a new layer of dust had settled back on the cement.
Dust was everywhere. The building was old and it sort of became a part of the architecture. We kicked it up with our equipment. It got in our mouth and in our ears; it somehow got in our pockets too.
It never seemed to bother the guys I worked with though. Some of them had been there for decades, supporting their kids and girlfriends on $13 dollars an hour (some made even less) with no benefits. I guess the dust was the least of their problems.
The guys intimidated me. From the moment I arrived on my first day, I didn’t quite fit in. I think it was my glasses. I had black plastic frames that screamed rich boy. And that’s how they saw me. I was a delicate high school graduate who was going off to college. They were lucky if they had their GED. I wore boot cut jeans from the Gap, they sported those loose-fitting pants with one too many pockets. I mostly kept to myself. They talked about pussy and beer. They farted and made dick jokes and called each other faggots.
In a summer and a half of working at the factory, the most I said to the guys was “How was your weekend” or “I’m gonna need a couple guys to lift this thing.” It was fine with me and I think it was fine with them too. There was no animosity; it was more of a collective ambivalence.
I was carrying a double-hung window onto a cart on a particularly steamy day in mid-July when Matt, a stout dumpy guy with dirty fingernails, jumped out in front of me. Startled, I lurched forward and smashed my face onto the side of the window and, just like that, the arm of my glasses popped off.
I knelt down to pick it up, hoping it could be reattached, but it was hopeless. “That sucks,” Matt said, walking away. “Ya know what, fuck you,” I said. Matt turned, looked me in the eye , picked up my glasses and walked away.
For some reason, I didn’t stop him. I just let him go. I fumed quietly as I went about the rest of the day, feeling my way around the factory. I thought of what I wanted to say to him: “You’re a real piece of shit, you know that. I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here so I never see any of you again.”
I hurried out the door as soon as I heard the 3 p.m. whistle, got in my car and started to pull out of the parking lot when something on the hood caught my eye. It was my glasses; the arm had been super-glued on and there was a thin piece of wire wrapped around the outside.
I put them on and drove home. At work the next day I found Matt. “Thanks for trying to fix them,” I said. “No problem man,” he said quickly. Then he walked away, I went back to work, finished off my second summer, and never saw any of them again.
