Log 6: Xtreme Wrapping Paper

I made it to the fabric transfer room! I was given a couple of different jobs today. One of them involves cutting apart long swathes of fabric as they come off a rolling pin heated to 400-degrees. Of all the jobs I’ve done, it’s definitely the most high pressure, because the fabric moves continuously as you cut it, and as soon as you’re done cutting one portion, the next is rolling down off the pin. When you do the job right, it’s a lot like cutting wrapping paper, when you get the scissors at the right angle and just sort of shear through the paper smoothly. Unfortunately, I have never been very good at cutting wrapping paper. My cuts always seem to come out jagged and sloppy. The transfer room was no different. On top of that, because I take so long to cut through each portion of fabric, by the time I’ve finished one, I’ve often missed the window to slice through the next one. Tom is being very patient with me, but I am pretty sure I’m doing a mediocre job at best.

My other job is a little more low-key. Basically, I lay out sheets of fabric and use a machine called the XY cutter that cuts them into smaller sheets to make bags. It took me about four and a half hours to make around 300 bags. 

At lunch I ate with Bob, Chris, and my dad, spending most of the break talking about Minnesota hunting laws and practices. Did you know that in Minnesota, there’s no legal penalty for shooting a person while hunting, as long as you were aiming for an animal? I learned that Bob was once shot in the butt by a friend he was hunting with as the guy tried to shoot a rabbit. Bob has a lot of good stories like that. 

As we were walking back down to the warehouse floor, I suddenly remembered that I needed to ask Chris his birth date. “It’s December 1st,” he told me. “Ok cool, so you’re a Sagittarius. There’s a lot of you guys here,” I replied, nodding encouragingly. As I continued down the stairs - feeling quite pleased to have found yet another fire sign in the vicinity - I heard Chris murmur to my dad, “What does that mean?”

I guess my earlier work in the fabric room was satisfactory (the second job, that is), because after lunch I was upgraded to using the same machine to cut graphics for actual displays instead of just bags. Unlike the bags, the graphics need to be measured before they’re cut and, as I quickly discovered, it requires a fair amount of math to do so.

I tried to follow along with Tom as he showed me how to calculate where the machine should cut for each graphic, but when it was time for me to do it on my own, I had to come clean.

“I actually don’t know how to read anything on a measuring tape besides the inches,” I confessed. Luckily, Tom showed me how to count the sixteenths marked on the tape, and produced a fraction to decimal conversion sheet for me, which was much needed. I guess I kind of thought that if there was going to be literally anything I could bring to this company, it would be my math skills. I was sadly mistaken.

Highlight: Confidently called out, “Patrick!” as the guy Graeme had asked me to get some layout instructions from walked past me down the hallway. He turned around slowly. “My name’s John.” Oof.