The boxes on which I perform my magic are not cardboard. I’m talking about corrugated board-single and double wall. To confuse board of that sturdiness with the stuff of pastry boxes is a horrid blunder. As with most things, there is a culture behind box making. It is the corrugated industry that I know, and in my memory it includes the deep scent of steamed paper, a vending machine stocked with orange Dreamsicles and my father’s slide rule.
I am the daughter of a man who has scheduled the production of corrugated board and boxes for 35 years and seven months. When I contemplate my father’s career, I focus inevitably on the issue of job security. First, I think how fortunate my father was to have known an era when jobs could be had- and came with dental benefits. Then I move to gratitude that my father never fell under the shadow of downsizing. Unlike so many of this peers, he wasn’t east off with decades of service but just not enough to collect a pension. My father is leaving this summer by choice, and I am thankful that his job lasted to his retirement.
He is grateful, too, and when he receives only a handshake and no hoopla on his last day, he won’t complain. My father had his cake–a steady job for more than three decades–so he really doesn’t expect any icing. These days, economic blessings aren’t so much opportunities bestowed as bullets dodged. Still, I have to believe that a person’s working life transcends the exchange of labor for money. It has to matter that for more years than I have been alive, my father walked into that steam-scented plant and transformed box orders into an efficient production run.
It never was a glamorous job. His shared office had no window and contained tired furniture. Each day’s objective was the same, though order specifications and grades of board varied. The challenge was to determine the best method for the next day’s production, the one that would result in the least waste and the fewest machine setups. In between, there was paper to be ordered, rail delivery to be negotiated and inventory to be maintained. As the decades passed, the tools of the scheduling trade changed: the quiet slide rule was replaced first by a calculator, then by a computer.
My dad changed, too. He had come to that job feeling–as I do now–that everything was still possible. He’d served his time in the air force during the Korean War. Then, while my mother worked as a secretary to support them, he earned a college degree courtesy of the GI Bill. After graduation my father painted houses for a season until he was offered a position scheduling the production of corrugated board. He took it, though he has told me that he never planned to stay. It was not something he envisioned as his life’s work. I try to imagine what it is like suddenly to look up from a stack of orders and discover that the job you started one December day has watched you age.
For 35 years, my father did his job well. He crafted production runs that fit like a dovetail joint. Always there were last-minute cancellations and order changes that required him to tear apart the rims, then rebuild them so that the company could fulfill its promises to customers. His days frequently lasted far beyond nightfall because he worked not just until the job was completed but until it was done right. Though it is never officially acknowledged, in the days before computers, my father’s manual scheduling enabled his Eastern-division plant to repeatedly hold the national record for producing the greatest yield of board with the lowest percentage of waste. Through it all, he kept his health problems to himself, cared for his aging parents on the weekends and, in partnership with my mother, raised three daughters.
Still, no merit raises, no accolades, not even an office window. As a child, I was unaware of these indignities. Instead, I saw the shining ice-cream machine, the soft-lead colored pencils and my father’s swivel chair. Then there were the boxes, enough of them to form a tunnel across my front yard. We crawled through them, my sisters, me and every kid on the block. They were our toys, our Halloween costumes, and later they moved us to college, graduate school and adult lives.
I realize that on some fronts we are all replaceable. After my father’s retirement, someone else will do his job, and, as scheduling software advances, the position will become less and less specialized. But if technology has taught us anything, it’s that a machine is only as skilled as its operator. It is people, not products or profits, who create meaning. And that’s what desperately needs to be said. All of us need to know that our lifework has mattered, but in the swirling quest for bigger, better and faster, there is no time or space for affirmation. Even when it has been 85 years of a job well done.
The mantra of the bottom line attempts to convince us that our lives are secondary to the market. Like so many workers, my dad’s skill and dedication to task helped his company remain competitive in a fluctuating economy. Still, the vocabulary of disposability, full of double-talk and sidestepping, is spoken with no context other than the latest quarterly report. Yesterday we were laid off, today we’re downsized and tomorrow we’ll be rightsized. If we happen to make it through, like my father did, there is only silence.
I want my father to know that by crafting production runs day after day, he did more than fulfill a job description. He created boxes, and they were marvelous units. In them, my sisters and I found unconditional love and all the hopes of childhood. They carried us through, their French folds never buckling. And now we breathe our “thank yous,” grateful for him, his work and language that distinguishes us from timecards and machines.
