Today’s guest post is by Steve.

I got my first “real” job when I turned 16. My dad, a top executive at his factory, didn’t want to be accused of nepotism, so he arranged for me to work in an allied business that he never dealt with. The business where I worked was a silk screen processing plant.

Our work was to use squeegees, screens and paints to emblazon various products—t-shirts, sweatshirts, pennants, caps—with college logos or mascots. After we had screened a design on a shirt or whatever, that object would be covered with wet paint. We would then send it down a long conveyer belt under a bank of heat lamps. All those lamps made the shop as hot as a steel mill. There was a concern at the time that sweating too much would deprive our bodies of precious salts, so we spent a lot of time around the cooler belting down water and eating fistfuls of salt tablets. Workers occasionally fainted, dropping gracefully to the floor by their work stations.

I remember when Gina went down. Gina was a skinny Italian girl with a hooked nose and saucy mouth. She looked like a pocket rocket version of Cher. On the day I started working in Silk Screen Processing my dad pointed out Gina, saying, “Keep your distance from that Dago girl. She’s already had one kid out of wedlock.” His warning, of course, just inflamed my interest. Our production manager—an excitable man—happened to be nearby when Gina swooned and hit the floor. Gene knelt over Gina, babbling wildly about how she needed air. Then he suddenly noticed that his hands were up under Gina’s blouse, unhooking her bra. With a scream, he lurched to his feet and fled the building. That incident became just one more reason the workers held him in contempt.

A raw ink design on a shirt looks cheap, so most of our sweatshirts had ink designs that were flocked to make the design fuzzy and elegant. Flock is a curious product, sort of like thousands of tiny short hairs, and in your hand it feels like a handful of dust. After we had dumped several cups of flock on the wet paint of a sweatshirt, the shirt was filthy because of the excess flock. All those tiny hairs settled deep into pores in the shirt and refused to leave.

That’s where I came in. My dad designed a Rube Goldberg machine that was basically two Hoover vacuums, one upright and one upside down. These two vacuums met face-to-face with perhaps three quarters an inch of space between them. My job was to fold a sweatshirt, hold it tightly and then run it back and forth between the two roaring Hoovers. Two minutes of sweeping a shirt between the Hoovers would clean it up almost like new. I’d throw the clean shirt in a big bin and reach for the next flocky shirt. I could never get ahead. The faster I cleaned the shirts, the more dirty ones they would stack by my machine.

It was unpleasant. The Hoovers roared at such a volume that I could not listen to music or converse with the workers around me. The machines were hot, plus the effort required to drag the shirts back and forth between the whirling beaters was exhausting. Sheets of sweat ran off my chest and back as I worked. But the greatest sacrifice involved with working on those Hoovers was boredom and isolation. I couldn’t say a word to anyone all day.

And you know what happens when you run a Hoover over a loose rug: the beaters eat the fabric, the fabric gets wrapped around the belt, and the machine seizes with a sick whoop that often means the belt is broken. And if the fabric in question is a white sweatshirt, as most of ours were, now it would be ruined with black rubber skid marks. To keep shirts from getting sucked into the Hoovers, I had to pull and stretch them to keep the fabric taut. We only screened enough sweatshirts to fulfill each order, so if I spoiled a shirt or two we would be forced to set up an emergency run of that design to replace the ruined ones. Guess how popular that made me with the workers who had to replace shirts I had spoiled with my Hoovers?

There was a final twist. Because I was “the boss’s son,” I was terrified of being seen as a slacker. Typically for me, I over-compensated by attacking my job with a ferocious effort, suffering in silence while forcing myself to smile with the fixed grin of a corpse. The bosses couldn’t find anyone else who would do that job. After a day or two on the Hoovers, anyone with half a brain quit. Not me. I got to suck flock off sweatshirts all summer long for three summers in a row. At the end of that time, shaking with rage, I asked the production manager what I had done to cause him to keep me on those damned machines for three years. “You were fast and you were always smiling,” he said, “I wanted to keep you happy.”

The only good that came of all of this was my determination to get a college education. I wasn’t sure I was smart enough to do college work. Nobody in my family had ever been to college, and I had hardly distinguished myself as a scholar in high school. But having sampled the delights of factory work, I was ready for a change. After sucking flock off sweatshirts for three years, inorganic chemistry didn’t seem so formidable.

What is the worst job you ever had?