Work provides cash for paying bills, keeps idle hands busy and inspires us to develop more efficient ways to do its tasks. Or, as Thomas A. Edison once observed, work is an opportunity dressed in overalls.
It was the monotony and tediousness of the task that sent a million tiny grommets out of the factory and into our home many years ago.
The grommets came from my husband’s factory. Two companies requested very similar parts for their cars. Each wanted small rubber disks about the size of the tip of the finger with a stem. One company wanted a slightly larger, fatter, taller grommet than the other company. The letters EU identified one company’s grommet; the other had no mark. Although similar, the parts were not interchangeable – and yet somehow a million parts from the two companies still became intermingled.
If quality assurance found even one EU grommet in a box of plainly-labeled grommets, the box had to be re-sorted. Factory sorters tried, but they did not achieve such perfection.
The engineers designed a machine to sort grommets by size. It did a good job … but it also allowed a few EUs to fall into the plain grommet pile.
“We just kept running the boxes of grommets through the machine,” my husband said. Finally he turned to his supervisor and said, “We can do this at home and it would be faster than what we are doing here.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I am positive we can,” he confidently assured the man.
So he brought them home. For weeks, instead of playing games or reading books, we spent our evenings sorting piles of grape-sized grommets.
My husband especially recalls our first-grade son’s system, “he would take a shoe box top and put the grommets in there and shake them. They would bounce, land flat side down with stems up so he could easily sort them. He would push the ones with EUs out a hole in the box top.” The boys earned a set amount of money per jar that they sorted.
No one exactly remembers how much we made sorting grommets. Maybe $50 a box – not as much as we initially expected – not after other factory employees heard about the piece work and began taking boxes home to sort. Not long after we began sharing the opportunity with friends at church, but we did enough sorting to keep our fingers black with rubber and our pockets green with cash.
Years later, when our little boys had grown into teenagers and pre-teens, my husband came home with another bit of piece work. The employees at the sheltered workshop had taken a Christmas break just when his company needed a large order of the parts they usually assembled.
The company had tried to have a machine assemble the rubber sleeve over the plastic tube, but too many parts did not pass inspection. The parts had to be assembled individually.
With a big order of assembled parts needed, my husband brought the work home just as our children left school for their two-week holiday break. Everyone tried their hand at the task, but the same son, now in junior high, loved the challenge. He developed a quick, efficient way to earn a lot of money quickly.
“I made the most money in the family,” he proudly recalls, estimating he made around $600 during those couple of weeks.
“To get the rubber sleeves on you would put them in warm water. It had a little lip you had to slip it over. When the rubber cooled it stayed on. You also had to trim the pieces. Once you learned the technique – the quicker you could do it, the more money you made. For me that was the motivation,” he recalled.
Our kitchen stove and a pan provided the hot water. The dining room table became work space for any of the children interested in earning some cash. His determination kept him at the table the longest.
“I did burn one batch of the rubber sleeves. I left the pan on too long and all the water evaporated, and the rubber started to burn. It stank pretty badly. I had to clean out that mess,” he said. Except for that one mistake, his work went smoothly and he went back to school with cash in his pocket.
Not exactly the usual image of a family, sitting around the fireplace cracking and shelling nuts or harvesting dried beans from the pods – but it served the same purpose.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org.)