Article April 1, 2002 Issue

End of the dead-end job

By Chris Shoaf

Factory Work. Melting aluminum ingots and recasting them into metal sheets that were then used by other industries.

I took this job so I could make a lot of money to support my family. The factory ran 24/7, and the hourly wage was premium. But the work was indoors, and the factory was unbearably hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It smelled bad, and the employees were unfriendly to new workers. To top it off, the rotating shifts soon proved to be exhausting. My eight-hour shift would change every couple months, turning me inside-out and topsy-turvy.

A sign on the road summed the whole thing up: Dead End. The plant was located at the end of a dead-end street, so every day I drove by that sign. The longer I worked there, the larger this sign loomed. It grew in my mind to be a curse, a prison sentence, a succinct history of my so-far not illustrious career.

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