Wired but not fired: part one

I recall a summer job my good friend Barb and I took at small electronics manufacturer. She and I had spent our earliest forays into employment as waitresses but something possessed us to go in another direction. Perhaps it was the fact that we were still in high school and had no skills of any kind. We did however have our looks and we were breathing which seemed to be resume enough to land the jobs.

The first day of work they put us on an assembly line. The job was inserting these tiny diodes into little boards in just the right teeny holes as the conveyor belt flew past us like a bat out of hell.

I was barely managing to keep up, but Barb was sporting one inch nail extensions making it virtually impossible to pick up the parts nonetheless place them in a circuit board. At one point I think I saw her crying while riding the convey belt in an act of sheer desperation. Finally, the much older and more experienced workers (picture Rosanne Barr and Sandra Bernhard in hairnets) took pity and pulled her off while tossing her a nail clipper.

As we took our lunch bags out on the lawn that day Barb came up to me, clutched my arm, pointed to the woods behind the factory and mouthed two words, "Let's Run!" I got her through the rest of the day by having her visualize us as Lucille Ball and Viviane Vance in the sketch about the candy factory.

The next day we whined that this job was just too hard and asked to be moved to a different section. They put us in this little room with...

(See tomorrow's blog Wired but not fired: part two where Barb and I screw up and whine our way through an entire company).