Swing Shift

Working a night schedule has been good for me. I'm sleeping better than I ever did working on dayshift. On days, I always felt sick. Swing shift allows me to sleep into the early afternoon and I wake up when my body can't sleep anymore. For the most part each day when I go into work at the factory I'm totally rested and relaxed. It's cool. Each night is like a Friday night. I can get completely hammered if I want to and still be able to sleep off the hang over the next day before work. There's some other advantages to this schedule too. I don't get stuck in traffic anymore. I have a shift window between two and five in the afternoon. So whenever I decide to head in for the day everyone else around here is still stuck at their jobs so the roads are virtually empty. When my shift is done and I drive home, the signals are always green. I don't miss all the cars and idiots wandering around. I've found there's enough stuff that's 24 hours these days so I can still run some errands at 2am if I want to. Pick up my mail at the post office, buy groceries, pay some bills. That sort of stuff.

Our swing shift crew running the robots is myself and usually four other people. Sometimes five, if we happen to have that many people trained up. A couple of guys have quit recently so we're down people right now. Miss Dish has been there working on the robots for a couple of years and when I got hired in, she was my trainer. Great lady. She's from American Samoa, which is an island somewhere out in the Pacific. Miss Dish is alot of fun because she's always talking junk about the people we have to work with on dayshift, and she's one of the few women I've run across that can handle my warped sense of humor. Most women just want to throw stuff at me or kick me when I open my mouth. So Miss Dish and I are getting along just fine.

We have two girls in their twenties working with us right now. Gina and Tina. I've been here long enough that our supervisor decided to have me train them up as operators on the robots. I've taken them on and tried to do the best job that I can. If I train them right, they won't run into as much trouble as some of us have when we first started running these noisy beasts. Tina is really short and she's already had like three or four kids. Sounds to me like she has a bad life. Her old man is always pulling some disability crap on whomever his last employer was, and he's currently out of a job. Tina's the main bread winner for their household and she's trying to do well here but I detect she's a little intimidated by the machines. Don't know how to help with that, yet.

Gina on the other hand dove right into it and she's doing okay. Her problem is she yaps too much with guys that she is attracted to. So she's wasting alot of time with a few of the wandering "players" of the PC area. It's kinda funny to watch these guys try to pick up on her. They must be on the edge of desperate because to be quite honest, Gina ain't that hot. She's super cool, but not good lookin'. She's about five foot something and skinny as a boiler pipe. No curves, no boobs. Her hair is jet black and real long. Straight all the way down her back. Her eyes always have dark circles underneath them and her nose is big. Real big. She also has this weird speech impairment when she talks. I used to hear some kids talk like that back in grade school but they send them to a speech therapy class and they usually break them out of the habit early on. Guess she missed that class.

There's a nutcase over in the Racking department I've become pretty good friends with. He's Senor Random. Senor Random got my attention one night when he shimmied up one of the support beams to the ceiling and started howling like Tarzan over the PC board lines. Apparently he's done it so often that nobody on the hand load lines notices him anymore. That was the first time I saw it and I was like, what the fuck? I ended up talking to the guy in the cafeteria and he's actually damn funny. We've been hanging out at lunch sometimes, and we've gone out to hit the local bar after work a couple of times. Seems like a good guy. Really crazy though.