The Soap Factory

  “Nice shoes.” The factory worker said, walking past Christopher at the security gate. Christopher looked down at his suede steel toed deck shoes. He believed now he should have bought the regular steel toed work boots for this job like the men who were passing him wore.

   “What’s the name again?” The security guard asked squinting at a computer screen.

   “Christopher Quinn. The temp services sent me.”

   The security guard put a finger on the computer screen and pointed with his other hand at a massive five story building. “Level three. They’ve got you on the soap lines.”

   The third floor of the building was worn out with concrete walls covered in chipped paint and concrete floors that looked like they were covered with years of sticky black tar puddles. Christopher went by several assembly lines where a continuous single bar of soap moved along, and was mechanical chopped into appropriate lengths and dropped into small soap boxes ready to sell in stores. In a further area, powdered laundry detergent was filling into boxes that moved along another assembly line. Laundry box tops were folded and glued shut by mechanical means. Workers stood by the lines to pull out any boxes that didn’t fold right and to prevent any jamming that might occur.

   Christopher felt chilled in his striped golf shirt.

   “Nice shoes.” Christopher turned to meet a man holding a scanner and a clipboard. “Ray Hutton. I’m one of the supervisors. You Christopher?”

   “Yes.”

   “You ever work in a factory before?”

   “I’m a student.”

   “It’s October. We only hire students in the summer, and that’s sons and daughters. You related to someone here?”

   “No. I’m from the temp services.”

   “Okay, this is temp, but it’s full time. How can you go to school?”

   “I’m not, they threw me out.”

   Ray looked at him for a moment then said, “Let’s sit in my office for a minute.”

   The office had no door, and Ray’s desk was an oversized metal monstrosity from the nineteen-fifties. The office floor was the same concrete covered in blotches of blackened crud.

   Ray began again, “Why’d they throw you out of school?”

   I was doing my Masters, then they told me after the first month that I was at the bottom of the bell curve. They overbook the classed because they expect some students to drop out, but if no one drops out and the class has too many students then they look at the lowest marks and they drop you. My marks were good, they weren’t as good as everyone else.”

   “That’s it? You can never go back? What were you studying?”

   “Anthropology. I can go back. But that’s next year. And all my student loans are due now because I’m not in school.”

   “Where did you work before this?”

   “Summer co-ops. Research mostly.”

  “Why aren’t you working in an office?”

   “The temp services say I don’t have any actual office experience for clerical or administrative work.”

   “Why don’t you get a job where you working before?”

   “Those were student jobs. They only hire students for them. I’m not a student anymore. Right now.”

   “Did you ever work in a factory?”

   “No. They said it would be light industrial work so it didn’t require any experience. As long as I had the safety foot wear.”

   “Steel toes.” Ray nodded. “Okay, don’t worry about it. We run soap lines here. We have to keep the place cool so the soap doesn’t melt. You might want to wear long sleeves in the future. Here’s your safety checklist, read and sign the bottom. Ask someone to show you the eyewash stations. Your line, the one I’m going to assign you to, is being changed over right now. When it’s going were going to have you dropping free measuring cups into the boxes because they still haven’t come up with some machine to do that for us. But they might be a day or two to get the lines refitted, so for now you’re going to be cleaning the floors.

   “Don’t rush. Take your time. Make sure you know all the safety regulations. You see down in that far corner? That’s the power wash station. You’ll find what you need to wash the floors. Start at that end. Wherever you wash, put out safety cones. Take your time, it’s make-work, but it pays the same.”

   Ray left the office and Christopher read and filled out the form on the clipboard. He couldn’t see where his supervisor went, so, after much hesitation, he left the clipboard on the desk.

   A guy named Burt from the soap lines showed him the eyewash stations. Christopher read all the posting around these and then went to the power wash station. He looked at different shaped mops. There were several types of buckets, with or without wheels, and a large metal frame on wheels that had double square sink basins. It moved with surprising ease. Christopher inspected several soaps cleansers in a tiled cupboard. A binder overstuffed with laminated papers was on the middle shelf.

   Christopher took out the binder. Across its cover was taped WHMS. It was a mess of warnings about handling liquids safely. He deduced that there could be a lot of trouble in combining the wrong cleaning liquids together in some cases. He looked over the factory floor and could not see the supervisor. He read some more but felt no closer to any idea of what things he should use for the job.

   Finally, Christopher pushed himself into action. He found a water hose in the station and began to fill up one of the basins in the double basins on wheels with water. Then he found a floor cleaner he recognized from ads on television and poured some in with the water. Suds grew very quickly. Alarmingly quickly. Christopher put the floor cleaner back on the shelf. He had only planned to fill one of the basins halfway but the suds were taking over. He found a smaller bucket and used it to divide half of the over-soaped water into the second basin. He filled both basins almost to the top of each, but it barely reduced the thickness of the suds in the water. He checked the floor cleaner bottle again and found the word, ‘concentrate’.

   The basins looked like one ridiculous bubble bath overflowing with suds.

   As Christopher began to push the basins out of the wash station area, he tried to reassure himself that there was a lot of factory floor to wash, and he had a lot of time to do it, and probably as the day went on his suds would get lower and lower as he kept washing. It only looked like he had over done the soap because he was at the start, it would look better when he had mopped a bit.

   Christopher began mopping. When the soapy water hit the floor, it did little to bring up the black gummy surface. He scrubbed in one area with little effect. The white soapy water on the blackened floor left only a black and white and grey soupy mess. He began to think maybe washing the floor wasn’t about getting up the black stuff, but just giving the top layer a quick wash to kill germs. Like the black stuff was never going to come up anyway. He tried. Washing over and over. Scrubbing here and there where he thought he could make a difference. None of it was working. Worse, he knew he had way too much soap still in the basins. But, what would they think if he dumped it out and wasted all of it?

   He was temp services, he would be easy to replace.

   Forty-five minutes, and two dozen orange safety cones later his supervisor found him. Not even a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of the floor was mopped.

   “How are you making out?” Ray asked.

   “Not good. I don’t think this floor’s ever been washed.”

   “No, it was washed last spring. Why do you have all this soap?”

   “I used too much. I didn’t realize it was a concentrate. Am I supposed to just mop the top?”

   “Mop the top? No. No, you’re mopping down to the concrete.”

   “Oh, is there a power wash machine, or something, I’m supposed to be using?”

   “No, a mop and water. Take this back to the station and empty it.”

   Christopher pushed the basins back to the station. Ray followed, talking to the odd worker on the way. When they got there, Christopher found plugs in the bottom of the basins to empty them onto the station floor drains.

   “Give them a rinse.” Ray instructed. “Okay fill them up with water. You take the water out, put lots of it on the floor, put your safety cones out, leave it, come back to it after a half hour, forty-five minutes, and then dry mop. Everything will come up.”

   “What kind of soap do I use?”

   “Christopher.” Ray pointed. “You see all those dark spots out there? On the floor? That’s all soap. It falls on the floor and then it gets stepped on and stepped on. It’s all soap. That’s what we make here. All you have to do is add water.”      

   That afternoon Christopher finished a proper mopping of one quarter of the third floor. The next day he returned in long sleeves and his soap line was up. He spent that day sitting on a chair on a raised platform dropping one measuring cup at a time into the laundry soap boxes that went by him one at a time. When he was on his breaks he’d laugh at the spots on the floor as he walked around.