Work With No Chance of Laser Tag? WHAT???

Today I went to work with my Dad. My Dad works at a metal processing plant. I worked at a metal processing plant today. Holy shit does real work ever suck...

As many of you may know, I have a part-time job at Laser Quest (Live action laser tag at it's best). A job at Laser Quest can sometimes be stressful and definitely tiring. But at least no matter how tiring said laser-based work can be, it is not tiring all of the time. We have down days, we have days where we do nothing at all. We have days where one person comes in, we have days where hundreds come in. But I have never found LQ to be mind-numbingly boring. Unfortunately though, LQ doesn't find me valuable enough to give me more than 9 hours a week... So here we are.

Anyways, today I woke up at 5:30 am. Yes. For those of you who don't know, there is a 5:30 in the morning. It is still dark out at said time. Then we embarked off to work where I learned how to make the aluminum bases of industrial smoke detectors (the ones that set off sprinklers in office buildings). So from now on, when you see newly installed smoke detectors in your school or place of business, know that I probably made part of that. Anyways, in order to make this part, you take a bowl-shaped piece of aluminum, about the size of a CD and place it on a press. You then press a button which stamps a weird shaped hole in the top. Then you take that off the press and put it on another stamp while placing another bowl on the first stamp. Press button. Remove first piece and put in a bin. Repeat about 4000 times. That isn't an over-exaggeration. The odometer on my machine read 3820 at the end of the day. I literally did the same three motions for eight-and-a-half hours. One can only wonder how much it would cost to train a Rhesus monkey to do this job. I mean, after the overhead, you wouldn't have to pay it anything because it doesn't have human rights. It was really that easy.

A 70 ton press, the machine I sat at all day -->

The thing about this job was that it was so easy that my mind was not being challenged and there was nothing to keep mind occupied other than the numbers on the odometer. The radio was too far away to hear over the roar of the other machines, one which sounds exactly like an airplane flying low overhead. Not to mention that with the noise you kind of need earplugs. So in your head you're trying to think of other things but really you're just counting every time you hit that button. I made a game of this. You know when Bart gets detention on the Simpson's and he has to lick all of the envelopes? And Skinner gives him advice on how to make it go by faster? I did that. I would count how many I could do in an hour and then try to beat it the next hour. This led to some serious productivity. Another thing I would do is get excited with the patterns in numbers. For instance, I would get excited when I hit 111, 123, 222, 234,333, 345 456, 2345, etc. You have no idea how excited I was when I hit my birthday, my pin number, 2112 (Temples of Syrinx), and especially 3456. That was a high number and a pattern. Now you see why this kind of job can be freelanced out. If you had the same person doing this everyday, they'd probably kill themselves.

It is from this experience that I am even more set on a University education. I definitely won't survive in a world with no mental stimulation. So to all of you, don't give up hope, or you too will be counting numbers on a machine. Or worse! You'll get a machine without a counter!

Another thing I've decided on though, is that I also love money. So I'll be working there tomorrow and all next week as well. Hey, it's not forever.