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Nine Months as a Shingle Maker
I can’t resist @jameslileks‘s request for me to expand on my stint as a shingle maker.
Six years ago I was graduating college with a business degree and a seven-month pregnant wife. I had worked full-time at a local farm and home store throughout college but it wasn’t going to pay the bills once the little one showed up. Every day I’d check the job postings, applying for everything that would pay well enough and provide some sense of career opportunity. Numerous interviews and a few other offers but nothing quite like what I was needing or wanting.
Then one day I got a call from a prominent local shingle manufacturer about an entry-level production position. I had already interviewed with them several months prior for a corporate job but was turned down. The production position was going to pay over twice what I was making not counting overtime, benefits, etc. The company is one of the largest privately owned roofing manufacturers in the United States with its headquarters in southwest Missouri and several other plants across the country. While it wasn’t quite the type of job I thought I’d be landing, I figured there’d be a lot of room for opportunity considering my education.
I was wrong. Maybe I was an impatient millennial. I don’t think so though.
I was placed on the original line, the line that started it all back in 1945 out of a converted streetcar house. Today the line produces laminate shingles, the company’s most popular shingle. There are essentially two types of shingles: three-tab and laminate (or architectural). Three-tabs are simply cut out of an asphalt sheet. Laminates are cut in a pattern then glued (laminated) back together to form not only a better-looking shingle but a better shingle overall. Most shingles today are laminated.
The process started with fiberglass mat. The fiberglass plant across town produced big 4’x6′ rolls of mat which were trucked to plant. It was nasty, itchy stuff. The mat was unrolled and ran through the coater which applied a layer of asphalt and granules (the granules not only give the shingle color but are also what protects the shingle from the sun’s UV rays). It’s then cooled with water so it can be cut, laminated, and stacked into bundles. The individual bundles are wrapped, then robotically stacked onto pallets, and shipped out the door. One “square” of shingles equals 100 square feet. Three bundles make one square. Four guys worked on each shift and if the line was running well, we could produce over 300 square an hour. Bare mat to pallet, it was a single, continuous process. It was hot, dirty, fast-paced work.
I started as a forklift driver. Most days (or nights, the line ran almost 24/7 the entire time I worked there) forklift driving never stopped and you were always behind. After a few months of that, I was trained to be an inspector. Drivers took over at the robot, made sure shingles were moving out the door, waste dumpsters were dumped, and assisted with line breaks. Inspectors inspected the finished product, made sure the wrapper was working, and took care of the cutting, laminating, and stacking portion of the line. The other two positions were coater and floater. The coater took care of the mat and asphalt coater. The floater bounced around for breaks and helped out anywhere it was needed.
I was making really good money but was miserable. I worked five different shifts in nine months, all swing shift bouncing from days then nights each turn. I quickly saw there’d be little opportunity out of the plant, even for a business degree holder. Upper management/corporate operations were all either ex-military or engineers or both. A fellow employee on the line had a bachelor’s in math and was actively trying to get in the Navy’s nuclear program. He failed and instead joined the Marines. Another employee was a certified meteorologist.
I told myself to give it one year and start looking elsewhere. Nine months in, I got a call from a friend about an opportunity with his utility and, five years later, here I am.
It was a long, hard time but valuable experience looking back. I think I’ll keep it back there though.
Interesting note, the owner of the company is a major Republican donor and is infamous in Missouri for being anti-union and pro-business. Very Kochesque albeit on a much smaller scale.
This was not the company I worked for but here’s a good video on how shingles are made. Our machines looked just like that:
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Published in General
That’s one reason I got into computers. I really dislike doing the same job over and over. With computers, I get to write a program ONCE, and then the computer does the same thing over and over, perhaps even millions of times, while I read or something… as God intended…
Oh, a blast from the NARN past: was it JK Thompson again? :-) Are they still around?
@jameslileks
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Double amen.My mother had shingles. Flattened her for months –not an easy thing to do, even at the age at which she got them. The day that I heard that there was a vaccine, I was at my doctor’s office.
Much has already been said of Management Follies(tm). But the fascinating thing — and that which I shall one day endeavor to chronicle here — is From Whence Stuff Comes(tm). A teaser: Those “granules” on your shingles? They started life as a mountain. (In the case of 3M, that mountain is/was in central Wisconsin, a place called (wait for it) Graystone.) Itty bitty rocks can be made anywhere — not so much the correct itty bitty rocks. Even the “aggregate” in asphaltic or cementitious concrete must meet precise specifications, and must be hauled from quarries located wherever it happens to be. For just one example, Haverstraw, NY, is not going to grow to the south — there’s a very large and growing hole in the ground there.
Waiting for that. Sounds good.
Get the next generation vaccine if you haven’t already.
Your post is excellent too.
In Silicon Valley the term was “Ninety Day Wonders.” Thais meant the start up with the amazing new software package or device was starting to kick butt, business-wise speaking.
So then the investors demanded the owners get some people “trained in business management” to come in. Once in a while, the MBA’s did pay attention to what the company was about, how it operated and why it operated in that manner, and they kept those aspects of the early business template in place.
But more often than not, the MBA’s came in and shuffled things around, just so that it looked like they made a difference. And often they did make a difference, just not in the correct direction. Then unless the owners were able to convince the investors that the MBA’s needed to be shown the door, the fabulous start up soon folded, another good idea gone to ashes in the dust bin of Silicon Valley’s history.
And of course, the investors would never blame the people THEY hired…
I am always amazed by how companies want to minimize “payroll” without really knowing what the people do all day. In my consulting days, I did software for a company that was instrumenting a wire cable manufacturer. They made the sort of multi-strand cable used in cranes. It was built by taking wire and making a small cable by wrapping it and then taking the small cables and wrapping them to get the finished product. The instrument I was programming was to detect breaks in the wire as soon as possible so the cable could be unwound and the break welded. The initial design was supposed to use optical sensors.
Now, I didn’t mention that as these wires were being wrapped, they were being sprayed with a lubricant pretty much like a combination between motor oil and tar. The result was that these optical sensors were less than an inch from a spinning cable covered with tar. A second problem was that the workers knew that management wanted to use the new system to cut back on “payroll”. There wasn’t a lot of motivation to keep the sensors clean.
The optical sensors were eventually replaced with magnetic sensors which were less prone to problems.
The real problem was that when I was there watching production, it was true that the people working on the line spent a lot of time watching, but if anything bad happened, it took multiple people to take care of it. The final cable reels were HUGE and they took a lot of wrestling to sort out.
Sometimes, you just have to have some spare capacity, but management can’t stand seeing people standing there.
Meanwhile, management is just standing there…
I hated roofing.