Stacking Plastic

This week’s guest writer is my brother Pete Mohney.

When I graduated from college with a degree in journalism, I was finding it hard to get a job in that field that was worth taking. I typed (this was 1982, before personal computers, so no printing, no auto-correct, just an IBM Selectric and hours of typing and cursing) about fifty resumes and cover letters, and mailed them off to every daily and weekly paper in the region. I was invited for one interview, at the Birmingham News, which was fantastic, as it was at the time the biggest paper in the state. I was called back for a job offer, which thrilled me, until they told me the details—I would have to relocate to Huntsville, and the pay would be $12,500 a year. Granted, this was 1982, but that’s about $6 an hour, tough to live on even then. So, I worked at McDonald’s for a few months, and then got a job at a household plastic molding company that a friend of my dad’s was part owner of. Yay nepotism!

I was not hired because I had any skills relevant to the job, as I had none. I learned this quickly when I was handed the keys to a forklift and told to move some pallets stacked with boxes. This was apparently before the days of training, licenses, or OSHA enforcement of any kind related to forklift driving, at least in that small town. The first thing I noticed about driving a forklift was that the steering wheels are in the back of the vehicle, making it a very different maneuvering experience from a car. I demonstrated my utter lack of skill by stabbing various boxes with the forks, backing the lift into a pole, and finally getting the forklift stuck next to a wall and being unable to extricate it. A co-worker had to move it, and I was called, for the first of many times, “college boy.” This, however, was only the tiniest of the interesting experiences I had while working there (using “interesting” in the evil witch’s curse sense of the word, as in “may you live an interesting life”).

I eventually grew competent enough at driving the forklift, and drove one all day, fetching and returning huge boxes on pallets of little plastic beads (more on that later) to the presses, and shifting about these same boxes once they were refilled with items like cups, dust pans, flyswatters, pitchers, and on and on. Sometimes these boxes would be packed full, and would weigh several hundred pounds; sometimes they would be nearly empty, and weigh very little. The plastic that was used in this manufacturing was not normally delivered in these boxes, but came in tanker trucks. We would line up a few dozen boxes on pallets, the trucker would hook up a long flexible metal tube to a compressor, and he would blast out the plastic beads fast enough to fill a box in about fifteen seconds. Two forklift drivers would take away full boxes and bring empty ones, and if they were late with the empty, you just kept pouring plastic into the full box, and then onto the ground when the box overfilled, until they did. This did not make management happy, and several employees ended their time with the company over these failures. Some of the plastic that blew out from the trucks was in the form of feathery dust, and by the time the truck was empty, I would be covered in a thick layer of this dust. Goggles and a face mask helped only a little, and I coughed up a lot of that crap, and brought a lot of it home on my clothes, to the point where I could drive down the highway with my car windows open and it would blow around like a mini snowstorm.

Next, I was shown how to install a metal mold into a press that injected liquid plastic into the mold, to make various plastic items. These molds were steel blocks, as small as a cubic foot or as big as a footlocker. The biggest one weighed more than two thousand pounds. Installation of these molds involved picking them up with an enormous A-frame chain hoist, rolling the hoist over to the press and lowering the mold into place, then bolting it in place with pressure clamps. As there were no actual bolts running through the mold into the press, just clamps that pushed the mold really hard if you installed them right, you needed to be sure you clamped it in tight. Once clamped in, you removed the support of the hoist and attached hoses that ran antifreeze through the mold to cool the liquid plastic so the cups or whatever could be removed from the mold. There came a time when I didn’t do the clamping job sufficiently well, and the mold slipped through the clamps and smashed down into the floor. Had my hands been under the mold, they would have been chopped off between the press frame and the mold; luckily, I was turned away getting a hose. Another round of “college boy” congratulations followed.

The one time that I actually did the right thing, over the orders of my boss, probably cemented me in his mind as the king of the smartasses. Pallets tended to accumulate, as the company received a lot of goods on pallets but seldom shipped anything out on them. They tried selling them, then they tried giving them away, and finally my boss told me to haul one large stack into a dirt lot, surrounded by pine trees, and burn them. I told him I needed a hose, in case the fire spread to the trees, and he refused. For the first time in my life, I told an employer I wouldn’t do what I was told, as I didn’t want to be the cause of a forest fire. I fully expected to be fired, but instead he sent a maintenance guy to a hardware store to get a couple of hoses and a squirt nozzle. I piled up pallets (though not enough at once to satisfy my boss), lit them, and stood back. And then further back. And then Holy Crap those things burned like torches, and the surrounding pine trees burst into flame. The hose was sadly insufficient to put the fires out with any speed, but did the job well enough to the fire didn’t spread much. It was impossible to add more pallets to the fire, as it was too hot to approach on foot and driving a forklift with its liquid propane tank up to a giant fire would have been suicidal, so instead I spent the rest of my shift watching a fire burn. That fire burned for three days, and whenever it burned down enough, I had to put more pallets on it, by lifting a pallet over my head, walking up and tossing it onto the fire. Eventually all were destroyed, and the fire burned down to a point where I didn’t have to watch it all day. When the last of the wood burned to ash, it left behind an amazing sight – a pile of charred nails, twenty feet across, several inches thick. I sometimes wonder what happened to the hundreds and hundreds of pounds of nails in that field.

Once I figured out what people meant when they asked me to do something like “fetch me a pallet of yeller thirty-twos,” puzzled out that hand-written signs on boxes that read “picher,” “pitcure,” and “pitcher” all meant the same thing, and nailed down the technique of installing molds, I settled into the work and thought I had it all figured out.

I was, of course, wrong. What nobody told me, and apparently nobody really cared about, was that the giant plastic bead boxes, while strong, weren’t strong enough to support the weight of four or five full boxes on top of them if they weren’t themselves packed full. Because of this, none of the forklift drivers made any effort to put the heavy boxes on the bottom and the light boxes at the top of stacks. These boxes would be stacked four or five high, and sometimes the bottom box would collapse under the weight of those on top, making it a challenging experience trying to unstack them with a forklift. Sometimes the one box of a particular color of items might be ten or twelve stacks deep in a row of stacks, and you would have to pull out forty or fifty pallets of boxes before you got to the one you needed. In addition, there was only scattered lighting, and it could be impossible to tell what was in any given box until you moved all the ones in front of it, as most people didn’t bother to label them.

This all leads to my favorite story about the plastics plant. I had been tasked to bring a box of some sort of plastic items to the printing press, and I began unstacking boxes. I finally found a box of what I needed, by means of reaching into a dark box and pulling out whatever my hand hit (always hoping that it wouldn’t be a rat), way back in the back of a row. I needed a full box of one color, and some boxes would have two or more colors of cups or whatever in them, so I was going to have to pull out the rest of the row to see what was in the box by peering through the pallet on top of it. I began pulling boxes out with the forklift, and restacking them in the aisle. I finally got to the stack I needed to reach, parked the forklift at the end of the row out in the aisle, and walked the forty or fifty feet into the row to eyeball the contents of the box before I unstacked all the stuff on top of it.

This was when it got interesting.

I started hearing a soft cracking sound, and creaking, and I realized that the stack of boxes, each box weighing about two or three hundred pounds and sitting on a wooden pallet that probably weight fifty pounds, was leaning forward as the bottom box collapsed. I had only one direction I could move, and that was back up the narrow aisle, which was also the direction the stack was falling towards. I could run faster than the stack fell, or I could die.

I really don’t remember the running. I do remember hearing the boxes and pallets crashing into the ground behind me, and hearing thousands of cups and pitchers and flyswatters scattering and smashing. My legs insisted that I keep running until I reached the nearest exit from the factory, a good hundred feet or so beyond where the boxes fell. Standing there was my boss, a crusty old guy who I later realized had far more patience with me than I deserved. He told me to go clean up the boxes, and went back to his work.

I left that job after a couple of years, probably as much to my boss’s relief as to mine. Since then I’ve worked in a variety of office jobs, grateful that I’ve never had to do one that could, if luck went against me, result in maiming or death.