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After graduation from high school, building washers, dryers and refrigerators was the dream "summer" job for many in my decidedly blue-collar hometown. There were two pretty good reasons for that. First, if you were one of the fortunate few with college on your horizon, shooting screws was a great way to fatten up the ole' savings account before heading off in the fall. $250.00 per week was a lot of money back in the late 1960's. On the other hand, if college wasn't your thing, then a better than average display of manual dexterity on the assembly line in the summer just might land you a full fledged union membership in the fall. Competition was beyond intense and if you were of the unfortunate few without "family" inside already, winning even an interview for one of these coveted slots was a daunting task, so you can imagine my thrill when I got the call.

The interview itself, despite my apprehension, was pretty uneventful. After a filling out a few forms and proving beyond any doubt that I was of legal age, could read and write and once the Personnel Manager ascertained that I was physically and mentally tough enough to stand in the same spot for hours on end, I was offered a job assembling air conditioners, and what a superlative job it was! I was assigned to the second shift where I would be paid a shift premium on top of the princely sum of $5.85 per hour. But this paled in comparison to the real earning potential as the Personnel Manager explained a particularly lucrative piece-rate bonus that was calculated on the number of air conditioners that rolled off the line each night. The bottom line was I was well on my way to earning more money than I ever dreamed possible.

For any readers unfamiliar with assembly line work, thanks to the insightful thinking of Fredrick Taylor back in the early 1900's, every task on an assembly line can be reduced to a sequence of motions, and the number of motions and the time required to complete them is then reduced to a standard; thus forming the backbone of "scientific management" as well as the piece-rate bonus plan. It seems Mr. Taylor drastically underestimate the guile of the workers. With strategy befitting a chess match, batteries of bright engineers attempt to arrive at the least number of motions needed to complete each step while the equally bright assembly line workers methodically mask the reality with a multitude of carefully choreographed "extra" motions. So in the case of my air conditioner

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