The Stripper Booth

Miguel has been showing me around the factory floor for the past couple of shifts and getting me started on some of the more mundane tasks. He's set me up on the third step in the manufacturing process making the color shifting pigment. It's a tiny room they call the Stripper Booth. When he first mentioned it by name I was thinking hell yes! Strippers! I immediatly began daydreaming of hot broads scantily clad doing the nasty to shiny brass poles. Unfortunately the Stripper Booth is nothing at all like the mental image I got.

It's a tiny closet of a room that's stuffed with a crazy contraption. It's a machine we load rolls of coated plastic into and strip the pigment from the material. Each roll has to be threaded through a series of metal blades that really aren't blades like a knife or anything. They're more blunt than they are sharp. The plastic coating goes into a chemical wash, through the blades, and spools up on the other side of the basin. There's two identical sets of the machine one on the left and the other on the right. To run this setup properly you have to ensure there's enough tension on the plastic so as it goes over the blades it literally scrapes off the color shifting pigment from the plastic. As it's being removed and collected in the chemical wash, the stripped plastic makes a horrible squeaking noise. The best way I can describe it is like this. Imagine an old woman that is driving her car down the street at 35 miles an hour and she forgot to pull the emergency brake. So one tire is locked up and squealing on the pavement as she drives by. And as she's at the wheel of her car she's also strangling cats with her bare hands. That screeching squealing noise is what we get to hear the whole time we're running the Stripper. I've been using ear plugs to try and dull the noise but it isn't helping much.

The cool thing is watching the color shift happen as you move your position between the two basins. If I'm working on a color shift that's green to gold, the left basin will be swirling with the most beautiful iridescent emerald green, and the right one will be filled with bright liquid gold. If I lean a little to the left the green will begin to shift to gold, and the other one will shift from gold to green. It's gorgeous. I would imagine that someone doing some psychedelic drugs would probably never want to leave after seeing this stuff swirling around peacefully. It's got to be one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. They tell me that they can make any color on the visible spectrum change to any other color. All you have to do is tell them which two colors you want and they can make it happen. Very unique technology to be sure.

While I'm running the Stripper Booth I still have to wear a full body chemical suit and if I am working over the machine they require I put on safety goggles. The safety goggles keep steaming up on the inside on me so again I can't see what the hell I'm doing. When nobody is around I don't wear them since it is just fucking me up but as soon as I hear footsteps I put them back on just so I don't get hassled. The booth has it's own fresh air supply so I don't have to wear a respirator which is good but I can see tiny particles of the pigment floating around the room. I wonder what those will do to me after I've inhaled a bunch of them over time. Hopefully it won't be like Asbestos poisoning or some shit. Anyway after I've stripped clean all the material from the plastic rolls I have to drain the pigment plus chemical wash into a collector. It cakes up in the collector and when it's dry enough I scoop it all into a container and send it off to the grinder. There's a guy that runs this grinder machine in the other room and that somehow sets the pigment up to be made into a printable ink. We don't do that here though. We just manufacture the pigment and then the Swiss somehow make it into a useable ink. That's their secret.

The grinder guy is sort of a weirdo. I don't know him at all yet. He leaves work at six in the morning like the rest of us but instead of going home to take it easy and go to sleep he heads out to golf courses and plays golf all day. Then he comes back in to work at six in the evening all beat to shit and looking like hell. He usually gets a couple hours sleep if at all. I don't know how he does it. Me, I need as much sleep as possible or I can't function and I turn into a hater. I hate the world and everything in it if I have less than six hours sleep a day. Eight or more hours sleep is ideal so I try to get in as much sleep as I can. It's best for everyone around me if I got a good amount of sleep in between shifts. Trust me.