My First Job

I got my first summer job at age 16 working in a food processing plant in my hometown of Joplin Missouri.

It was a full-time summer job, and I was assigned to the “box room” as an assistant. Our job was to fold boxes into shape, staple them, and stack them so the production line could use them to package food products coming off the line.

The production floor was kept at refrigerator temperature, so we wore coats even during the hot and humid South West Missouri summer. The line moved fast, and once it started, you had to keep it supplied with boxes. If you fell behind, they had to stop the line – and you didn’t want that to happen.

My job was to fetch pallets of flat boxes from the warehouse with a pallet jack and bring them to the box room. I organized them depending on what we were packing that day and made sure I had enough on hand for the planned production volume. I also had to keep space clear for stacks of assembled boxes ready to be wheeled out to the production line just outside our doorway.

Once everything was in place, I grabbed a flat box, folded it into shape, and handed it to my supervisor, who ran the industrial foot-trigger stapler. It fired two big staples into the bottom of the box. Once it was stapled, I grabbed it back, stacked it, and started over. We moved fast. Occastionally we had to reload the stapler with big rolls of staples; just like reloading a machine gun belt. You had to be fast at that, too – we were under fire from the production line and didn’t want that to slow us down, either.

We usually did a single product each day. Sometimes it was potato salad. Other times baked beans. The worst days were onions. The room next to ours was filled with folks slicing onions nonstop, and the fumes drifted everywhere.

After a month, I got promoted when my boss was going a little too fast, misjudged the timing of triggering, and drove a staple through his hand. That halted production for the day.

The next day I was running the stapler, and now I had my own assistant.

The rest of the summer passed uneventfully, and I never had a stapler accident.

When I returned the next summer, the production line had been upgraded. Now there was a bin where you loaded flat boxes, and a machine folded them into shape and taped them as the products were packed, no staples – or humans – required.

I had been replaced by automation. In 1981.