3052 - An old job of mine

A friend and I were looking for a job between college semesters. We found a culvert pipe company that was hiring. One that actually made the pipe. It looked like this...

Of course it came in various sizes. But it was made on the same punch press machine. I tried to find a picture of the punch press I worked on but no luck. Below was about the size. But there were no fancy electronic controls on it. It was very basic.

The pipe was rolled from flat galvanized aluminum sheets on a roller similar to this...

So my friend and I show up for work on the first day. At $1.25 an hour we weren't going to get rich but it was work. What was the first thing we see? A guy being helped out by two other guys. Seems he had just smashed one of his fingers off in the punch press.

The guy showing us the ropes said, 'Wow, that's the second guy in two days to do that". Note to self - keep your fingers out of the punch press.

So we learn the job and started cranking out culvert pipe. After a couple of months we thought we deserved a raise. The answer was that we hadn't even made 500 feet of pipe in one day. Maybe if we did that they would consider it. So one day we started on 15" pipe. It was easy and fast to make.

So we were busting our butts trying to get 500 feet of pipe cranked out. We were almost there when they said that they didn't need anymore 15" pipe and we should start working on 48" pipe. Needless to say we didn't make 500 feet that day but we did get our first lesson about getting screwed over by corporate assholes.

They sent letters to us the next summer asking us to come back because they were hiring college students for the summer again. Well it wasn't going to be us.