First thing I want to say: I got a raise today.

Finding a summer job wasn't easy this year. Last year, the company where my dad worked, Ounce Labs Inc. had already hired someone to fill their paid internship position. So I needed to start filling out applications.

Origially, I just applied at places where I thought I might want to work. I've never been much for working with people face-to-face. I could stand a job as a stock clerk or something, at, say, Staples, or CVS, or Best Buy. As time passed and no callbacks came, I turned to temporary agencies. First Olsten Staffing, then Volt Services Group, tried to find some kind of an office setting I could work in. Eventually, I started filling out applications for food-service jobs. McDonalds and restaurants of that nature. Twenty apps later without even so much as a "we got your application and will call you when we can pencil you in for an interview" call later, I turned to a third employment agency, Marathon Temps. They specialized in light industrial work, and a mere 10 seconds after I returned to them with my second form of ID (oops), they found me the job where I am working now.

Liquid Metronics, Inc. is a manufacturing plant in Acton, Massacusetts, and a subsidiary of Milton Roy USA, along with Williams, Linc, Hartell, YZ Systems, and Haskel. It manufactures metering pumps and controllers to other industrial businesses. Water treatment, chemical engineering, anyone who works with large amounts of chemicals, probably could have LMI as a supplier for all their pumping needs.

This was irrelevant to me, since I wasn't actually making any of these devices. I was an inventory clerk. My job, as I was shown by my coworker Nat, was to fill parts orders from the workers on the shop floor. An order would come in, I would look up the part number, search the racks of parts, and bring them out on a cart to whichever assembly line needed them. Easy work; I could do it in my sleep. (And given that I had to wake up at quarter to 6 to be to work on time at 7 am, I might have to.)

At eight bucks an hour, eight hours a day, five days a week, for about eight weeks, I would have filled my initial purpose of getting a job: have plenty of spending cash at college. You do the math, and don't forget taxes. But, as I said before, I just got a raise today. I'll be making $9 an hour starting Monday.

Oh, and I've been moved, possibly permanently, to recieving. Now instead of getting parts from a rack to bring to the shelf, I take the parts off the truck, and enter them into the computer system before Ron, the senior recieving staff member, gets one of the other stock guys to move the parts ON TO the shelves. Which means they're training me to drive a forklift. I was thinking, "now THAT would be an interesting thing to put on my resume." Amongst all the computer credentials would be the line "Certified in operation of a Crown SC forklift truck." And the interviewer would think, "WTF?" (or something more professional-sounding.)

Probably the most interesting thing about the job is the diversity. I'm the only white guy there. Scratch that. I'm the only YOUNG white guy there. Other than me, there's my official boss, Fred Smith, who runs the machine shop, Chris, who has taken over as head of the stock room since Fred is going to be away from the machine shop/stock room area more and more, and Brenda, whose last name I don't remember and whose jaded attitude towards work keeps the rest of us grounded in reality. Chris is in his early 30s, and everyone else is at least 40, probably pusing 50s. Then we have two latino guys in their 20s, Nat and Saúl, who showed me the ropes in my early days (god, I work here three weeks and I'm already talking about "early days"). Horn, an asian man in his 40s who spends most of his time working in the machine shop (presumably as Fred's right hand man). Sophoan, an asian guy in his 20s who left about a week after I got here, and whose job was taken over by Chris. And two guys we hired about two weeks after I got here, an african-american guy bout my age named Timmy, and an asian guy, also about my age, whose name I can't remember.

On the shop floor, Spanish is a more common language spoken than English; I'd estimate about half the people out there could only speak enough English to get by on the job. Not much when you consider that all the assembly line forepersons also speak Spanish. I took five years of Spanish classes from 7th grade to 11th grade, then mostly forgot it, but I can still occasionally make out a fragment of a conversation, if I listen closely enough.

So I'll be here for another five and a half weeks. It may not be exciting work, but I'll be bringing in cash and getting something else to add to my resume. And it'll be enough of an experience to remind me that I have the potential to move beyond blue-collar work. As Fred told me, "We want you to go to school, to get an education. You don't want to be stuck in this hellhole."

I don't think it's a hellhole now, but perhaps it's one of those places that's a "nice place to visit," but you "don't want to live there."