I recently did some volunteer work — a two-and-a-half-hour shift where a mix of volunteers and staff sorted food, diapers, feminine products, and other basic necessities, preparing them for drop-off or pick-up. My job was to pack 16 to 18 diapers (depending on the size) into plastic shopping bags.
At first, I had a few partners, so I related to them how when I was about 19, I had a job at a factory working the 6 p.m.-6 a.m. shift, preparing and boxing up what was then a new product called Dryel, an at-home dry-cleaning system. We filled orders that would go out to test the marketplace to see how consumers would respond to this potential new product. Dryel still exists, so it must have worked out.
With Dryel, I had various jobs on the factory line, one of which was taping boxes, another sorting absorbent squares into stacks after a machine cut them from what looked like a ten-foot-tall roll of toilet paper into squares the size of… individual toilet paper squares.
Packing diapers reminded me of that job, I told my diaper crew. And not just because of the toilet paper/diaper association, but because of the endlessly repetitive factory part of it, I said, complaining already about the grueling work I’d volunteered for.
I didn’t tell them about some of the people I’d met in that job: a guy from the Deep South who once, during a fifteen-minute break, announced, apropos of nothing, “I believe in black magic and white magic;” another, a Vietnam vet, told a story of some men in his platoon who killed their own platoon leader after he ordered them on a mission they believed would lead to certain death — a not uncommon occurrence during Vietnam, he said.
During these Dryel days, I was home for the summer from college where I’d taken a course on political ideologies of the world. There had been a chapter or two on communism and Karl Marx and this idea that through capitalism, man is often so removed from his labor that he feels alienated and adrift in work that seems not his own.
A friend of mine from high school worked with me at the Dryel-packing factory, studied the same ideologies, and so sometimes we would write on the back of a Dryel pad, “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains,” And then we would ship it off to who knows where — we were too alienated to know or care. In any case, the revolution never arrived, unless you count the dry-cleaning revolution.
Thinking better than to share this level of detail with my fellow volunteers, I asked them, “What was your first job, or if not your first job, a fun job, or a terrible job — something that sticks out in your memory?”
But as I was talking, I kept losing count of the diapers, and I think they did too, because none of them seemed eager to share. Maybe we all just wanted to pack the diapers and get on with our lives, finish our shifts and go home.
The worst part of diaper factory work like this, I began to think, must be the inability to hold words and numbers in your head simultaneously, so that both your body and some small part of your mind has to be engaged with work you aren’t enjoying, yet you’re unable to let your body do the work while taking your mind someplace else. I suppose I felt somewhat alienated from the work, but what I wanted was to be entirely lobotomized from it.
Because I cannot count in my head and talk, we all eventually synchronized to the steady sound of plastic bags crinkling as orders were filled, knotted, and piled in stacks corresponding to diaper sizes ranging from 1, for new babies, all the way up to big-kid diapers, something called 5T–6T.
After a while, it dawned on me that there was a certain cyclical pointlessness to the effort, since all of it was ultimately destined for the landfill after the babies inevitably sent the diapers to their doom.
Soon, most of the diaper packing crew was reassigned — possibly to their delight — to do other jobs, packing groceries such as garlic and tomatoes and baby food for the eventual filling of the diapers.
The staffers asked us if we would like to switch to these new jobs, but I was now almost happy being unhappy packing the diapers. It was a task I’d quickly grown to know well — a familiar suffering I was reluctant to give up. And so I kept my head down as the others departed for new roles.
I recently had a kind of near nervous breakdown triggered by my real job. The symptoms were severe anxiety and depression, occasional weeping that went on for a few days, consideration of resignation, the sale of everything I own, and a move to Mexico to live more cheaply on a beach in my camper. Nothing too radical.
I also considered checking myself into a psych ward. I wished for death. Mere weeks later it seems a distant memory. I’ve upped a medication, begun therapy again, taken steps to try to ensure it won’t repeat, but all you can do is try, there’s no guarantee.
Not long after that episode, I made a list of about a dozen things I wanted to do differently in my life. One was to volunteer more, and another was to try bouldering. This is an activity where you go to a big warehouse style gym and try to climb fake mountains. There’s no rope, but you never get higher than about 15 feet, and if you fall, you fall onto a 3-foot thick foam mat.
Still, I’ve been bouldering a few times now, and the falling part is scary, but I’ve found that the fear of the falling makes me try harder. So I’ve been getting a great workout, and I was so bored with my usual exercise routine that I’d been skipping it. It’s been great to mix things up with a little fear.
In the meantime, I’m still showing up for my shift.
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