I don’t dream, I wake up.

Three in the morning.

I turn my alarm off. Fear and Hunger lore hums out of my laptop on the bedside table. I turn off my laptop. I hug my partner for five minutes. This is the most human I’ll feel for the next ten hours or so. Five minutes is up. Just a body now, and I move it out of bed towards the door. 

Hand on the doorknob, not thinking, and turning it, I crumple it up like it was made of paper.

On my drive to the factory I try to remember where all the meat is. I’ve worked at the factory long enough that I can, and do, remember. A lot of my work involves inventory management, which is just a really fancy way of saying I know where the product is and I am strong enough to lift it. There’s a car that’s been tailing me for a bit, which is kind of weird but I get paranoid sometimes. All day, just me and my electric pallet jack going from freezer to freezer and then from prep room to prep room. Lifting meat, lifting trays, lifting boxes, and when I have free time between the rooms I go to the mezzanine and stack pallets on top of one another. A good trick I have for remembering where everything is, is I remember what it feels like to be yelled at when I don’t remember. This dude is still in my rearview… what the fuck. I think of the factory like a matryoshka doll, except instead of dolls, it’s a box inside a box inside a box. I just have to remember, I need to remember. One of the first things Robert said to me was to follow the schedule but don’t fully trust that what it says is what we are going to be running that day, which is kind of weird to say about a schedule. Working around it is weird too. I get pulled over for going 80km above the speed limit, but instead of suspending my license and impounding the merry, I just have to pay 400 something dollars. 

Thirty minutes early for work, I like chugging a 473ml can of red bull and smoking exactly one cigarette. You have to have rituals. Something to delineate the sections of your day. I have three cigarettes: One before my shift, one at lunch, and one in the car on my ride home. I mainly do this because if I don’t then it’ll all fall apart and I’ll be unmoored, out to sea, food for the fishes. Friday is our busiest day, we run Save-Mo’s Black Forest ham, and yeah it fucking tastes good so we slice thousands and thousands of it in one eight hour shift. It’s our heaviest product. Each log of meat is around a meter long, weighing in at forty to fifty pounds give or take. In my second week here, before my current position when I was just in pre-prep feeding the line, I was feeding the pieces onto Line 1 via the hole in the wall when my arms and legs gave out and I slipped onto my back into the bin. I miss those days sometimes. That doesn’t happen anymore. There are, at any given time, at least 60 logs in one combo. If I’m feeding in pre-prep and my boy Chase is receiving and peeling the logs? We can finish a bin in 15 minutes. It’s beautiful in a way that I can’t really talk about at parties, ‘cause most of the time when I talk about what I do at a party I see people try not to feel bad for me. But I’ve gotten over it by remembering I can punch a hole through a person now. 

Chase was twenty-two when I started and had already been working at the factory for a year before I came in. He had only lived in canada two years before working at the factory. Early on, just getting to know each other, him telling me about his younger siblings back home,I asked him if he sends money back to his family. He scoffed, looked at me incredulously, and said, of course. I guess I had offended him. He just reminded me so much of my dad in that moment, and how we would go to this one store that sold those phone cards people would use to call people from back home before WhatsApp was a thing. A lot of my coworkers remind me of my dad. 

Walking through South warehouse towards the Pack and Slice department, I pass by Courtney and say ‘Morning,’ add a ‘Happy Friday,’ and jokingly she replies, ‘nah nah nah not yet don’t fucking say happy Friday to me yet, wait til the end of the day and we’ll see.’ I worked with Courtney’s son a little bit at another factory, he was in a different department, but these places often can’t retain employees so the employees that do stay end up working in a different department than they are supposed to, to make up for the lack of labourers. Fuck being properly trained, Capital is watching! But that kind of circus can only last so long so factories will often hire temps, workers who get paid a fraction of full-time workers and aren’t protected by the union. Capital is always watching. I came back from a vacation earlier this year to my supervisor saying I got a raise and a new position, and I found out later that Courtney, our union steward, had helped facilitate that. She had seen that I had been doing three more things than I needed to do for the amount of pay I was making and they dug up some title and now I’m doing the same thing I’ve been doing except I’m making way more money. I’ve been lucky in my experience that I’ve worked mostly at unionized factories, for all the shit we have to eat at my factory working the line, we at least have protections from further abuses the company would freely dole out if there wasn’t some kind of governing body keeping them in check. But if they really want you out, these companies find a way, even if you’re in a union. 

When I told Courtney I worked at her son’s factory she asked me which department, I said Raw, and she looked at me like I was a victim. A lot of my coworkers who’ve worked for the company for ten plus years and have been in the factory circuit also gave me similar looks. They know what I didn’t know when I first started this factory shit: pressure doesn’t always make champions. A lot of the time what you get for the work you put in is money and brokenness. Physically, mentally, and spiritually. I think that’s what my coworkers see when they see me push myself too hard, like on days like today, no feeder for the first hour and a half, and even when I do get one I only get him for an hour at a time before he has to go cover breaks in packaging because we’re short people, which pushes my own break back, and well fuck, maybe I don’t even get a break because the freezer in cooler 5 is fucked so I cant keep the skid of frozen prosciutto in the pre-prep room for too long without it fucking thawing, which means I have to keep going to and from line 3 to the freezer every five minutes, five minutes I don’t really have because Save-Mo runs faster than me on the highway in the morning and I still have to keep pushing that on Line 1, and for some reason line 2 has three fucking change-overs, and also I have to keep track of all the plastic films for each line and anticipate when I’ll need to feel up another skid of film and and and and…

They say that I shouldn’t work so hard for a company that doesn’t give a shit about me. 

But I think the company… does give a shit… because I’m broken in the way they like the most: I’m hyper-obedient and I’m as quiet as stone. And my body isn’t all the way broken yet. I can feel it creeping up, but I just never fucking think about it and that’s worked pretty good so far. And man, the money is good, you can’t make this type of money with my lack of everything… with what I’ve turned my life into. 

They say you can go back to school. Do something you really love instead of this.

Wasn’t there something you wanted to be when you were younger? 

I don’t dream, I wake up. 

Painting by Kiersten for The Decom Post