​​​​​​Because humor is funnier when you know it's true.

The graduate

The recession of the 70’s made it very difficult for college graduates to get jobs, even for an engineering graduate like me. I burned through the summer of my graduation attending job fairs and pursuing any leads I could find. But at the end of the day, I was still unemployed. My parents decided that I could use their ‘help.' 

My father made some contacts at a manufacturing plant where he once worked, and found that they were willing to hire me. But they weren’t hiring engineers. They were hiring people to operate presses for molded plastic parts – hot, dangerous presses. And so, like Benjamin in the movie The Graduate, I was starting a career in “plastics." 

As machine operators, we had to work on rotating shifts. Thanks Dad! I may have thought I was a night owl but the graveyard shift quickly proved me wrong, as I was as exhausted and disoriented as everyone else. And the automatic injection molding presses were very anxiety-producing, as I had to oversee as many as six machines at once, with alarms going off periodically to harass me to clear a jam or to feed the machines more plastic resin. I felt like Lucille Ball on her infamous cakes-on-a-conveyor-belt episode. 

But it was the individual compression molding machines that were the worst. These presses converted black powder pellets into Bakelite plastic through high hydraulic pressure and high temperature from steam-heated molds. Two negatives concerning compression molding: 1) if a part got hung up on the mold, there was an excellent chance that my hand would get badly burned trying to free it, and 2) it was guaranteed that my nasal passages would become completely caked with Bakelite powder. I blew black deposits into my handkerchief and could smell Bakelite for hours after I got home.