Like everybody else who works in a small business in America, I did not see COVID coming whatsoever. I think it is safe to say that it caught almost everybody off guard when it hit, unless you are into a lot of conspiracy theories and all that sort of thing. Personally, I kind of believe whatever anyone tells me and can barely form my own opinion on anything, let alone a serious issue that’s turned political with a lot of different factors and cultural elements playing a part in it. Anyways, I would consider myself to be a pretty simple human being.
I get up at the same time everyday, drink the same coffee, eat the same breakfast, drive the same Chevy 2004 Silverado to work, and work the same job Monday through Friday. I am currently working at a factory that designs and builds airplane parts that are to be shipped off to other factories that put together different parts, and somewhere down the line a plane is built. Now like I said, I am a very simple man, so I have no part in designing any of the plane parts, I simply sit at my factory station and build them.
With all the happenings of the pandemic, there were open ended questions about what was going to happen to our factory. Obviously, planes still needed parts; however, the trouble was that people did not really need planes at the moment. There was a huge decrease in demand for planes all over the world which led to extreme labor shortages in factories just like mine. For a few months, I was very worried that I would be put out of work and forced to try to find work elsewhere or even apply for disability. However, to our relief and surprise, our factory turned from creating airplane parts to making face masks in order to help with the supply of masks to the general public. I guess that, when everything with the pandemic first started, everyone and their mom was trying to buy face masks at the same time, and we had never seen demand for masks like that before. Understandably, there was not enough supply of these masks to keep up with the huge demand and there was a great mask shortage. The government wanted to avoid a mask war or price gouging, so they decided to hire out companies and outfit them to produce more masks.
So I spent a large part of my time during COVID helping to make face masks in the production line. I didn’t find there to be a huge difference in building plane parts compared to making masks - as I said before, I am a simple man. To me, factory work is factory work and that’s all there is to it. While working on masks, my job was to check each mask that came down the conveyor belt to make sure there were no mistakes or missed seams on the mask or anything like that. Then the masks would fall into various poly bags that they will be shipped in. The poly bags will then be sent down into different boxes and packaged in a way that makes them ready to send off to stores. I hope that this article wasn’t as boring to read as it was to write.
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