On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, Ed Weick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>When I was in my teens and a high-school dropout, I spent a year working
>in a large west-coast sawmill that supplied wood to a pulp and paper
>mill. The whole purpose of a sawmill is to take large logs and reduce
>and reshape them to something that could serve a purpose such as
>construction or, in the case of my sawmill, making paper. If you were
>operating a machine - e.g. a "jumpsaw" - involved in this process, there
>was no way you could leave it without causing total chaos. We took
>scheduled breaks. At ten in the morning, at noon, and at three in the
>afternoon (and equivalents on night shift and graveyard shift), the "head
>sawyer" would simply stop sawing logs and everyone would go to the lunch
>room or the washroom, or wherever. The only other times the system would
>shut down was if a machine "went mechanical" or if there was a real
>emergency. There was simply no other way of operating. We all
>understood that.
A familiar story. I worked the paper mills every summer through
university. If for some reason we desperately needed a break,
we would have to voice a request which would work its way through
the chain of command til someone could be located who could extract
themselves from their own job long enough to cover for us. Sometimes
that was not possible. I was thinking about these workers who couldn't
schedule their bodily functions to cope with two hour intervals, and I
wonder if this is an indication of rampant diabetes, resulting from
excessive sugar in the diet. Would have been more appropriate if
it was a pop bottling plant...
-Pete V.
