Working at Exhibits Southwest the last thing you want to be is under the influence of mind altering substances. The work involves every power tool you can imagine being utilized in a custom woodworking shop, every piece of equipment that is used there as part of your daily task list will literally remove body parts in an extremely short period of time if the operator loses concentration or just makes a simple mistake. You see, every one of these machines comes with a slew of safety features and guards all of which have been removed in an effort to make them faster and easier to use. Some have even been rewired to bypass the automatic shutdown feature that was included that would render the equipment inoperable if the safety guards were removed. For example the blade guard on the chop saw, this particular saw has a 10 inch blade that is designed to very rapidly cut through wood up to 12 inches wide. The guard has been removed because without it you can literally cut through wood as fast as you can lever the blade up and down, approximately 40 times per minute. You get on this saw and chop long pieces of wood, or non-ferrous metal, into short pieces of wood, or non-ferrous metal, at a very rapid pace. This is a production shop and the more you produce the more you get paid. With the blade guard in place the production number drops to around 15 pieces per minute, the math and the point here are very simple.
The table saw, perhaps the most dangerous and notorious saw for removing fingers, also has a blade guard, or I guess it did when it was first bought, but it is long gone now. This saw cuts sheet goods, 4x8 sheets of plywood, MDF etc. It will cut through ¾ inch material pretty much as fast as you can feed it into the blade. Now I have been talking about wood and metal up to this point but take a second to ponder if you will, if these blades can cut through hard woods as fast as the operator can move them then you must realize that they would cut through human flesh and bone just as easily. And these are just two of the machines in a shop full of machines. Now if you were going to be operating this type of equipment all day long every day with no safety guards in place you would probable want to be as clear headed as possible and paying very close attention to what you were doing. You might possibly want to call OSHA at some point and report that this place was in violation and people’s safety was being put at risk.
You might, but you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t because the only reason people work at places like this, the only reason some people are attracted to this kind of work environment(besides a pretty good paycheck) is that because at this place as long as you are producing and making money for the company you can do pretty much whatever you want. And what the whole crew I worked with wanted was to get as high as motherfucking possible. We were a very close knit group who spent our work hours working together and our off duty hours sitting at the pub talking mostly about work. Out of the 9 of us at least 4(myself included) were pretty much geniuses and during those pub hours we came up with ways to get more work done in less time and therefor more money in our pockets.
So we showed up most mornings for work still drunk from the many shots consumed the night before. We smoked weed openly at all times and did just about every other mind altering substance known to man at one time or other and as often as possible. To be honest all of us were pretty much wrecked near out of our minds every single day. We would have gotten DUI’s for driving but man did we get a lot of work done. During my 1.5 years there no one lost a finger to the saws or was injured more than a Band-Aid could handle. Even the unskilled labor was pulling in around $800 a week (did I mention we didn’t pay taxes either). It was the stupidest most irresponsible immature work experience I’ve ever had and I still look back on it longingly and sometimes refer to it as “the good old days”. I don’t know if you have ever done “magic mushrooms” but the real question is, have you ever operated a table router on “magic mushrooms”. If you haven’t I would probably suggest that you never try, probably suggest. If you are one of us, one of the few the proud the twisted, then man you got to try that.
great writing.
ReplyDelete