Rivethead - Ben Hamper [88]
Enter Louise Mandrell. She was real. On any given day, you could see her cavorting across American television with a canister of goop aimed squarely at her stylish mass of tresses. She lived, she breathed, she sawed an angry fiddle. No longer could there be any denial. What we had here was an actual entity who was able to confirm for us that what we were doing every night resulted in some kind of tangible cause and aftereffect.
There still remained one bitter disappointment. Our plant newspaper hadn't revealed any information as to which job was to be the Mandrell Suburban. I made a couple of futile attempts to wangle the job number out of the management boys but, to no great surprise, was met with an assortment of lame utterances like “I have no idea” and the old standby “Hamper, just do your job.”
Another factor working against me in my pursuit to identify the Mandrell Suburban was my work area itself. The Rivet Line was just an ongoing series of clone-like black frames. Each one was a duplicate of the one that went before with the exception of the occasional army vehicle. I doubted rather strongly Louise was gonna get her claws on one of those. The information that the Mandrell Suburban would be black and silver, that it would have gray inserts, that it would come loaded, was totally useless to all of us on the Rivet Line. Everything that went our way was identical.
It still turned out to be a better than average shift. At random intervals through the night, I would holler down the line to my co-workers: “This one could be it. Let's give it the rivet!” Dougie would whip into a frantic air-fiddle solo, the Polish Sex God would start making humping motions, Janice and I would genuflect and we'd give it our best. Above us, the clock would swirl by. Another day, another diversion.
Not all diversions were of an amusing nature. I recall one that really gave us fits. GM and the union got together and installed these mammoth electronic message boards in various locations around the plant. They only sprung for about a dozen of these boards and, wouldn't you just know it, with all the available acreage around the factory, they just had to point one of these bastards right at me. It hung about five feet above the picnic table directly across the aisle from my job.
The messages they would flash ranged from corny propaganda (green neon bulb depictions of Howie Makem's face uttering shit like QUALITY IS THE BACKBONE OF GOOD WORKMANSHIP!) to motivational pep squawk (A WINNER NEVER QUITS & A QUITTER NEVER WINS!) to brain-jarring ruminations (SAFETY IS SAFE). The board also flooded us with birthday salutes, religious passages, antidrug adages, audit scores, limericks and the occasional abstract gibberish. (One night the board kept flashing the phrase HAPPINESS IS HORSES alongside a rather grotesque-lookin’ rendering of a horse head. If I had any idea what it meant, I'd gladly pass it on.)
I remember the first day the message board went into operation. For the entire shift, it beamed out one single message. They never erased it. We kept waiting for another phrase to come along and replace it. No such luck. The message blazed on brightly like some eternal credo meant to hog-tie our bewildered psyches. The message? Hold on to your hardhats, sages. The message being thrust upon us in enormous block lettering read: SQUEEZING RIVETS IS FUN! Trust me. Even the fuckin’ exclamation point was their own.
Talk about a confused bunch of riveters—we had no idea whether this was some kind of big bro Orwellian brain-dunk or just some lowly office puke's idea of a nimble-witted gibe. Whatever it was, we were not especially amused.
Just for a moment, let's imagine that you worked for the sewage department. One day you walk into work to discover that the boss has erected a giant neon sign right next to your job that insists SHOVELING TURDS IS FUN! Or, let's pretend you're a shoe clerk. You arrive at your workplace to find a huge billboard that pours