Within Acceptable Tolerances (v)

At work he felt equally there and not there, a little like he did at home. The nature of the work and the work environment enhanced isolation. Men stood alone at machines, working alone in a continual crash and slam of metal being cut and drilled and bent into shapes, of being fabricated. Each man stood alone and worked on a part of a whole product, a solitary step in the process. Each man performed a single small task that was then followed by another man doing another single small task followed by another and another. Each separate from the others.

When Thom arrived, he’d clock in and go to wherever he’d last been at the end of the day the day before. When the horn blew for the shift to start, he’d start to work and finish the job he’d started the day before. Most jobs lasted only a part of a day, maybe a full day occasionally, and only seldom more than a couple of days. Thom was usually given jobs that worked a shear, cutting sheets of aluminum into specified sizes, usually by the thousands. A typical job would be to cut 10,000 pieces, 3.025” by 11.240” from 11 gage, four foot square aluminum sheets with a tolerance +/- .015”. The job would include pulling the stock to be cut, setting up the shear’s cut size, cutting the 10,000 pieces, and delivering the finished material to the next stage, perhaps to have holes punched or have it bent at right angles. Thom never saw the pieces again; he never knew how they would be used.


When Thom finished one job and would go to Jackie, the manager, and ask “Now what?” and he'd receive the next job, never identified by finished product name, but by a job number. There was never a clue as to what he was making, how it would be used, if it would be a bracket on a fire tuck or in an air conditioning system or inside lighting fixtures or a frame for outdoor advertising. And while he never seemed to think about it at the start of a new job or even at the end so much, at some point in every job, he would be struck by the distance between him and the thing he was making because he did not know what he was making. What he did know was if he succeeded in making it well. While he did not know what he was adding to the world, he knew it was within acceptable tolerances.