May 20
The job they gave me mostly involved solving problems. I found myself good at it—and more to the point, I enjoyed it. I’d take an irate customer who’d been stonewalled so long by someone who didn’t know how to answer his question that he spouted obscenities, and by the end of our conversation, he’d be thanking me and praising the company. Unfortunately, I found that most of the irate customers came from Patty, the leggy blonde. She was pleasing to behold, but an absolute bitch on the phone. She did well with hard collections, the ones that don’t pay because they don’t want to, but when it came to solving problems she lacked empathy, or maybe interest. I wasn’t at all surprised when, four months after I started there, Maria and Randy Schmidt came in and escorted Patty to the door with a box containing her personal belongings. The other women tried hard, but they lacked experience in the products and in how the plant and distribution system worked. I suggested to Maria that perhaps we could take a plant tour, to give the girls a better idea how things worked. Maria agreed and made arrangements with Schmidt. (Even though I was no longer union, and though I called my coworkers and boss by their first names, I still thought of plant management by their last names.) Maria even accompanied us on the tour—though that didn’t dissuade my former coworkers from making cat calls and giving me the eye. “My new coworkers are much better looking than you,” I whispered to Floyd as we passed. “And you fit right in,” he hissed back. Floyd and I had never been friends, but we hadn’t been enemies either. Now, I guessed that my leaving the union, in his eyes, made me a traitor. Even though he wasn’t all that happy with the union, I’d crossed the line and joined the enemy. I’d spent enough time in the plant that I knew not only the loading docks, but also what they did in the various packaging areas and the lab, so I gave the girls a pretty thorough tour. I know they’d had no idea, for example, how big a drum of ethylene oxide was or how difficult it was to move. The one-ton size had to be placed on the very back of the truck so a forklift could reach it, or else the driver wouldn’t be able to unload it. Nor had they realized the size of a drum of dichlorodifluoromethane (also known as Freon 12), and that it took up the entire width of a truck. I saw the light dawn, as they realized why the dispatchers complained at some of the sales office’s special requests. They’d had no idea the difficulty of what they were asking. I also took the group into shipping and had Francisco, the dispatcher, explain how trucks got routed and deliveries were made. “You can’t just make a u-turn in one of these,” he explained. “To take deliveries out of order sometimes means going miles out of the way to reverse direction legally.” When we got back to the office, I could tell I’d scored some points.
Comments