Now and on Earth Read online

  Sometimes it will go like this:

  “Now wait a minute! Wing’s already got plenty of that! You tell ’em to look around down there.”

  “No, they haven’t, Dilly. I’ll swear to God they’ve been crying for this stuff for a week. Let me take it now, and if I find any down there—”

  “Moon! Oh Moon!”

  “What’s the matter, Dilly?”

  “Our friend here is trying to get out with these static tubes. Wing’s got enough already.”

  “Put them back where you got them,” says Moon, eyeing the stockchaser somberly.

  “I can’t, Moon. By God, I just got to have them.”

  “No, you don’t. They’ve already got enough static tubes down there.”

  “Yeah, but they’re short on pitots. I was going to—”

  “Just what I thought,” says Moon grimly. “You were going to change the tape on them and use ’em for pitots. Just wait until Material Control hears about this.”

  “Aw, now, Moon…”

  “Put ’em down, then.” And the old harried question. “What’s the matter with you guys, anyway? Don’t you know what that would do to our records? We’d show fifty statics out and no pitots when we’d actually have twenty-five of each.”

  One of the most infuriating tricks of the stockchasers is the taking of parts from the paint shop or plating direct to the assemblies without telling us about it. Another is to have parts reworked into other parts without a rework order. Yes, there are rules against this sort of thing, but the plant authorities wink at them. Anything to solve an emergency, regardless of whether the solution creates another emergency or not.

  I suppose I should be glad that things are like this, because it would be extremely difficult to hold me culpable for any costly mistakes or delays that occur. I’m not breathing any too easily, but I think it would be. But, despite that fact, I would rather find some other way out. I don’t like so much turmoil; so many arguments. I think there is an easier, less nerve-wracking, and better way of doing things.

  I think the essential difficulty is our system of keeping records. And I don’t think there will ever be any improvement until we change it. As it is, the parts are classified according to positions and assemblies, and a part may be carried in one position one day and another the next. This makes for a lot of erasing and scratching out. It makes it possible for us to show a shortage on a part when we actually have more than we need, and vice versa. It means that the only way you can be sure that you have not overlooked a part is to start searching for it at the top of the first page of the release book and search right through to the last.

  Worst of all is this business of breaking everything up into ship-units of twenty-five. What is gained by that? I wonder if the fellow who set up this system thought of the work it would involve? That to receive a quantity of only one part, the bookkeeper would have to make as many as thirty entries?

  And there are no places to show dates of arrivals and issues. No wonder we can never win an argument with the other departments. It’s simply our word against theirs, or, rather, their many words against ours; so we’re always to blame.

  But to get on:

  I spend an hour or so out on the assembly lines, checking for parts that may have been short-circuited around us, and tracing out the effective numbers on new parts. I may have made this last seem a little too simple when I first spoke of it. You see, many parts on a plane are concealed.

  I come back to the stockroom and usually find a number of parts which do not belong there. Yes, the move-boys did and do have instructions to bring nothing to us until it has been turned down by the other stockrooms; and they’ll always swear that they’ve done so. But if they don’t, and obviously they don’t, there’s little to be done. Moving is pretty much a beginner’s job; few stay on it after their probationary period is over. By the time you reported a move-boy—and I’ve never done it—he’d probably be in some other department. So, to repeat, there’s little to be done. And, of course, these mistakes aren’t always the move-boys’ fault. Probably not more than half the time.

  Speaking frankly, Moon gives me more trouble than any man outside the department. He usually forgets to write down the parts he issues. Invariably, instead of setting down the part number, he uses the name. And, no, that doesn’t do just as well. We’ve got three or four hundred different kinds of brackets, for instance, and it’s impossible to distinguish one from the other by name or description. Particularly when your vocabulary is as limited as Moon’s. You can do it by number.

  Gross is a constant source of trouble, too. But with him it’s deliberate. I can never take his count on anything. I have to make a re-check.

  As for Murphy, well, he’s careful and conscientious and he’s friendly toward me. But there’s a flaw in his vision, a peculiar quirk, which makes him write backwards and upside down: 31 for 13, and w for m.

  In a way, of course, the situation has its bright side—in the same way that my difficulties with the expediters have their bright side. But I still don’t like it. In fact, I feel some days that I can’t stand it. I want to shake Moon, and tell Gross to straighten up or get out, and advise Murphy to see an oculist. But, of course, I don’t. I’ve got to get along.

  I never go to the toilet or take a drink of water on my own time. I don’t have enough of it. The lunch period is only thirty minutes, and it takes about five minutes to get out of the plant and find a spot to sit, and another five to get back in again. Obviously, unless I want to swallow my food whole and do without smoking, I drink and go to the toilet on the company. Everyone does.

  Well, the whistle blows, and I race for the door. And two thousand other men are racing with me. By the time I get outside, sitting space against the sheet-metal sides of the building is already at a premium. I see an empty space far down the wall and run for it.

  “Hey, turd-head!” someone calls.

  I don’t look around.

  “Hey, prick!”

  I hurry on. By stopping I would admit that “I knew my name.”

  I go on down the wall, and if the space I come to is not marked RESTRICTED AREA, I sit down. I unscrew the vacuum bottle as I reach into my lunch sack, so that not one of the precious twenty minutes will be wasted.

  Yes, I mind.

  The first time I was called by “name,” I got white in the face and stopped and demanded to know “Who said that?” It was a boy of twenty or so, clean-cut, good will shining out of his face, embarrassed and very much astonished. He muttered something about kidding, and someone near by said, “Can’t you take a joke?” So I went on, and I’ve never stopped since.

  But I mind. It’s not that I’ve never been called things like that before. You hear some pretty salty talk around hotel locker-rooms and in the pipeline camps. You hear so much that, if you are like me, you will do almost anything to get away from it. And when you do, and have to come back, it is all the harder. Particularly if you are thirty-five and see no way of getting away again.

  While we are on this subject: In the ten weeks I have been here I have heard the word f—k used more often than I had in my life heretofore. Everyone uses it, from the factory manager down to the maintenance men. Upstairs in the office you will hear it fifty times in an hour, and the women and girls have become so accustomed to it that they never so much as raise an eyebrow.

  A part is f—kedup. Sheet-metal is f—kingaround again. If those f—kers in Engineering don’t do this, we’ll do so and so. A design is f—kingwell all right (or not all right). If you’re in error, you’ve f—ked things. You’re f—ked (stumped).

  I don’t know why the word should be so much more popular in aircraft than it is elsewhere, but there must be a reason. I’ve been dallying with the idea of writing Ben Botkin about it—perhaps doing a little paper on it—but, of course, I won’t. If I do any writing, it’ll be on my story. It’s about finished, and I can get some money for it. I hope.

  Generally, you don’t hear as much off
-color talk around the plant as you would elsewhere. (I know I’ve given a contrary impression.) What you do hear is less sordid, seemingly, than the brand outside. There is something light-hearted about it. I have heard only one shady story since I have been here—only one that you couldn’t tell in church.

  San Diego, prior to the establishment of the aircraft factories, was not inappropriately dubbed the “City of the Living Dead.” There were no industries, there was no construction; the town’s one asset was its climate. If you were young and wanted excitement and had a living to make, why, the town wouldn’t want you and you wouldn’t want it. If you were old and had a small income or pension, you couldn’t have found a more attractive place to live (or die) in.

  Well, when the defense boom struck, the town just couldn’t throw off its lethargy. It did ultimately, but for a long time the city fathers’ idea of taking care of a 100 per cent increase in population was to up the price of rents and other living incidentals by a corresponding increase. Living isn’t cheap here now, or even moderately reasonable, but the Government has stepped in and— But here’s the story:

  A newly arrived aircraft worker walked into a bar and ordered a cheese sandwich and a bottle of beer. The waitress took the dollar bill he proffered in payment and gave him back a dime in change.

  Ruefully the aircrafter asked her if there wasn’t some mistake.

  Oh no. Sandwich, fifty. Beer, forty. No mistake.

  “Funny,” said the aircrafter in a tone that said it wasn’t. And his eyes settled on the buxom mounds of her bosom. “What’s those?”

  The waitress colored. “Why they’re my breasts, you fool! What’d you think they were?”

  “Didn’t know. Everything else is so high in here I thought they might be the cheeks of your ass.”

  Offhand, I’d say that two-thirds of the men are under thirty; half of them, probably, under twenty-five. And intelligence is much higher than the average. Once in a while a misfit like Gross or myself slips in, but not often. And you can be reasonably sure that the misfits are not without certain valuable talents. The plant believes that, in them, it has something to work on, and it is willing to risk a little money on the belief.

  Practically every production worker who is not already a skilled mechanic must be a trade-school graduate, which means, invariably, that he is a high-school graduate also. In non-production work, such as I am in, two years of college or the equivalent are required. Degrees are so numerous around here as to be commonplace. An average of only one out of every twenty-five applicants is given a job, and fully a fourth of those are discharged during or at the end of the thirty-day probationary period.

  I mention all this, not by way of giving myself an indirect pat on the back, but because of the newspaper talk to the effect that the aircraft plants have made the WPA and other relief agencies unnecessary. Nothing could be further from the truth. You find no dispossessed share-croppers or barnyard mechanics here. They get no farther than the office-boy in the Personnel Department.

  Well, there’s the whistle. So a final drag on a cigarette and back we go again for four more hours.…

  The office crowd has begun to get its breath by now and is hollering for something more to worry about. The auto-call roars. The phone begins to ring:

  “Dilly? How about a shortage report on Position 4 by three-thirty?”

  “I’ll try. For how many ships?”

  “Well—where are we now?”

  “We’ve got fifty in the yard, but we’re not through with ’em, you know. We need props on about fifteen, and the cockpit leathers and—”

  “We’ve got an acceptance on fifty, though? Make it for the next twenty-five, then.”

  “All right. Say—I notice you’re still figuring thirteen wing inspection-hole covers to a ship. We’re using twenty-two.”

  “We’ll catch it. You’ll get the report for us? Swell!”

  One thing I like about this plant: You don’t have to hem and haw and be sugar-tongued with anyone. They don’t want you to. If you’ve got a criticism or some information to pass on, you do it in the quickest possible fashion, and no formalities. I “Mister” our superintendent, Dolling, and try to choose my words because, without doing or saying anything, he insists upon it. But with anyone else—the chief inspector, the production manager, or whoever—it’s “Here’s the dope,” and on to something else. And if someone, regardless of his position, butts in on something that he knows less about than you do, you tell him where to get off.

  A few days ago, while Moon and I were at the window checking through some travelers, one of the many vice-presidents stalked up. There was a pile of leading edges on the floor; he nodded at them, looked at me. I am older than Moon; I also dress less roughly. I suppose the v.p. thought I was in charge.

  “Nice bunch of edges you’ve got there,” he said.

  I said, “Yes, what about them?”

  “Get them off the floor this instant! What do you think those racks are for?”

  I looked at Moon.

  “Tell him to go piss up a rope,” said Moon idly.

  The v.p. choked, spluttered, and rushed away. A few minutes later our phone rang and Moon answered it.

  “Yeah, I told him that,” he said. “Only I didn’t say pee. Those edges are drilled wrong. We’re waiting for a move-boy to pick ’em up.”

  That was the end of the matter.

  I spoke of having turned out fifty planes. The Government has accepted that many, but only a few of them are complete. We’re short of props, instrument panels, tailwheels, and dozens of smaller items. A few of the things may actually be in the plant; the majority, I believe, are not. Every day searching parties from Dispatch, Inspection, and Material Control go through. But they rarely find anything any more. No one can be sure that an order we received hasn’t been scrapped or loaned to another plant. No one can be sure of anything.

  Some of the things that happen in here are nothing less than fantastic. One Monday morning while I was posting my travelers, I ran across three, for a certain type of fairing, that had no count on them. I checked with all the boys, trying to find out who had put them up, and they all denied that they had. I went through the fairing section, piece by piece, and I couldn’t find anything that matched the description on the travelers. I checked my books; I wasn’t carrying any fairing under those three numbers. I checked with the foremen on Final Assembly; they’d never heard of any fairing like that. Certainly they’d never put any on the planes—I could see that for myself. I began to get cold chills.

  According to the travelers, those fairings had been used from the start. Fifty pieces of each had cleared through me and should have gone on the planes—but they hadn’t and I didn’t have them. As I say, I didn’t even have a record on them. I went to Moon with it. He got kind of pale around the gills and went to Baldwin. Baldwin tore his hair out by the handful and began calling Material Control, and Sheet-metal, Inspection, Dispatching, Painting and Dope Shop. And the various foremen and superintendents came rushing up to his office to study the travelers and—nope, they’d never seen anything like that.

  I won’t give you all the painful details. Blueprint-crib finally solved the puzzle. The travelers bore work-order instead of finished-parts’ numbers. They actually covered only one part which we carried on our books under an assembly number. Some overly-fastidious (and new) routing clerk, averse to the idea of crowding one traveler with the delineation of the hundreds of processes involved in making the assembly, had innocently spread the information through sub-division numbers which he had picked off the blueprint.

  Well, I’ll admit it. I don’t see how I could possibly have anything to be afraid of. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed. It sounds foolish, childish; but it’s been my experience that I can avoid a potential disaster by worrying about it enough. Anyway, it’s just as well to think that I do have to stay here. Because, of course, I must. At least until I can get my story sold, and Pop settled, and Frankie toned down a l
ittle, and—

  As to why the Government accepts planes that can’t be flown, I don’t know. The way I figure it is that we’ve either got a darned good sales manager or someone in the government procurement office is overly anxious to make a showing.

  I’m getting sixty-five cents an hour now. That’s supposed to be very good for a man who has been here such a comparatively short time, and Dolling made it very clear that the company wasn’t obliged to give it to me. It’s as much as Murphy gets; it’s five cents more than Gross’s wage. I think I’m underpaid, naturally, but I can’t say anything so long as the records are in their present shape. It isn’t my fault, but I can’t say anything.

  If anyone has been mistreated here, it’s Murphy. That really is his right name. He’s half-Irish, half-Mexican. When he ruined his hands fighting, he took what money he had and studied mechanical engineering for two years. Some small, cheap, and not very good school that few have ever heard of. Graduating, he was unable to get a job at his profession and he worked as a messenger, soda-clerk, and whatever he could get to do for a few years. When WPA opened up, he got a job as a cartographer on one of the records’ projects. And, with the beginning of defense work, he applied and was accepted here.

  I don’t suppose he was outstanding as a draughtsman. On the other hand he was probably no worse than dozens of others, and, given time, he doubtless would have become a valuable man. But he didn’t mix well, and he looked like a Mexican, and—and he’s down here now.

  …At one o’clock my head begins to swim. I pour out half of the cup of coffee I have saved, and toss it down.

  At a quarter of two my head snaps up and I look at the paper in my typewriter. There are two lines more of type than there should be. When I last looked—saw—there were three lines; now there are five. They all seem to be all right though. I get a drink of water and come back again.

  …just enough to sleep on and not hear and no morning and write no morning and write but drink and sleep but write…