"Your arms were flopping around like a dead fish," my girlfriend said as she gently nudged me to let me know she was heading home. I hadn't been very social, having just finished my second day at work, apparently having fallen asleep watching TV. "I'll see you tomorrow," I said and kissed her goodbye. My life had taken a strange turn after dropping out of college in my first year (1978). A small group of friends and I decided to move out of the campus dorms and occupy a two-bedroom apartment. The apartment was far from campus, cheap enough for us to afford, and large enough to be reasonably comfortable with two to a room.
Pell grants and student loans were no longer an option, so I took a job at the local flour mill to earn enough to continue being independent. The smallest flour sack I handled was 25 pounds, and I moved hundreds of them daily.
The work was hard, and apparently, my body was still getting used to the loads, hence the "flopping dead fish" comment. But, truthfully, I enjoyed the work, the pay was okay, and I worked eight hours daily. We took breaks in the morning and afternoon with an hour for lunch. After one of my roommates came to work at the mill, we carpooled the short distance together.
The flour mill was owned by a local family and had been in existence since 1867. Once on the outskirts of town, Logan had grown up around the large brick building land locking the site from expansion. Trucks would drop the wheat, and conveyor belts and grinders would do the rest. There isn't (or wasn't) a lot of technology at play in the mill, grain got dumped through grates in the floor outside in a covered area, and a conveyor belt would haul the load to a storage tank at the top of the building. Then, depending on how busy we were, pipes would funnel the wheat to anyone or all of the five grinders on the second level.
More tubes would send the wheat husk to a separate bin where we loaded 100-pound gunny sacks and sewed the top with heavy hand-held machines before picking up the bag and stacking it on a cart. Finally, with a load of about 600 pounds, we would tilt the carriage back and wheel it into another truck or the storage room. It was heavy hard work and the mill burned through workers who would stay until noon on their first day and never return.
Large grinding machines would process the heart of the wheat onto conveyor belts, moving the finished product back to the top of the building and into a large tank that ran the entire three floors. The tank resembled a large funnel moving the bulk of finished product into 25-pound flour bags and, on rare occasions, 50-pound sacks. It was everybody's job to ensure the tank stayed empty enough for the new flour; if not, it misted flour [^1] down from the third floor. My primary job was running the nozzle at the end of the funnel; however, as you can imagine, someone needed to give me a break every hour or two.
The loading machine was pressure driven by the weight of three stories of flour resting above the nozzle. My job [^2] consisted of picking up a bag, [^3] slipping it over the nozzle on the machine, and pushing a button. The bag's lower half rested on an arm adjusted by weight; when the pack reached the desired weight, the device reset itself. Then, tilting the 25-pound bag backward, I would fold and tuck the tubular-shaped opening back inside the bag and stack the sack on a pallet. Generally, if we were trying to stay ahead of the grinders, two of us worked the machine, one to load and the other to wheel the load away. On a regular work day, only one person did both jobs, allowing the flour to back up inside the tank until production was stopped, or a second person helped with the loads.
After a few months of operating the machine as trained, I decided to try something different. Instead of removing each sack from the apparatus, folding, and stacking the load, as instructed. I instead slipped a new bag onto the device as I tilted the full bag backward. Technically there were two bags on the machine at the commencement of the cycle; however, as the new bag filled, it allowed me enough time to fold and stack the first bag, thus saving a few seconds with each load. One day the machine blew off the bag with such force I called the Forman over to help me figure out what had gone wrong with the machine. The bin was empty. The Forman was dumbfounded; never before had he seen the bin empty during normal production; in fact, it had always been the opposite curtailing production to allow additional space in the bin. I showed him how I had changed the loading sequence of the machine, and he was impressed. From then on, the mill could rotate people in and out of the device, run at full capacity allowing the funnel to fill, and assign someone to catch it up, dramatically increasing production to the entire mill. [^4]
In his essay on Wealth, Ralph Waldo Emerson says, "Intimate ties subsist between thought and all production; because a better order is equivalent to vast amounts of brute labor." [^5] It was "brute labor," to be sure; however, a better order of saving a few seconds per bag changed the entire mills' production capabilities. [^6]
Written November 29, 2022
Footnotes:
[^1]: Flour mist is flammable, and the mill had burned down once before due to a careless welder igniting the flour mist in the tank attempting a repair.
[^2]: As I had been trained.
[^3]: Each bag had a tubular end designed to slip over the nozzle on the machine.
[^4]: I am still waiting to receive a penny for this improved production. I didn't receive a bonus or additional compensation for finding a better order for the mills' processes.
[^5]: Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Wealth." *Ralph Waldo Emerson*, 18 Jan. 2021, emersoncentral.com/texts/the-conduct-of-life/wealth/. p.2.
[^6]: I would work at the flour mill for about a year before returning home and redirecting my life in a more promising direction.