Reply #23: Passivation and Wash Technician.

[Chan790]

In a manufacturing plant that makes screws for every military subcontractor on the US DoD roster (as well as specialty manufacturing for a number of high-tolerance high-equipment-stress low-fail-acceptability industries...like oil-drilling, mining, deep-water equipment and space/satellites); they literally hold the patents on like half of all the different rivets, fasteners and screws used across the entire spectrum of military equipment and there is almost no piece of military tech that doesn't use something they exclusively manufacture. Anyways, my job consisted of washing 60lb pans of screws 10 hours a day in "climate-controlled" 125'F heat at 90% humidity in a 140decibel environment, spin-drying them and routing them to the correct department for processing (they get bathed between every manufacturing step.) This job sucked. Once a day I'd forget that my hands were dirty and I'd touch my face or my eyes or my mouth. I was required to keep a jug of water for hydration and by the end of the workday, it'd have a 1/4" skein of motor oil on the surface. The chemicals used to passivate and wash caused my skin to blister and fall off.

The best part? My mother's (at that time) the quality-control director of the company...so I spent all summer with a target on my back surrounded by former Marines (the unofficial HR motto was "We only hire our own kind. Semper Fi.") who viewed me as fair-game for revenge because she (Bad: a civilian. Worse: a woman.) makes their lives hell from her fancy office with her fancy desk and fancy clothes and engineering background and big paycheck and useless son.