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Looking forward to giving this a read. I want to say it helped turn two of my friends vegetarian, but I could be mistaken.
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Jan 8, 2020 19:20
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| # ¿ Dec 11, 2024 06:22 |
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Tomorrow I shall go there and get a job!
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Jan 9, 2020 06:20
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I'm about ~120 pages in so far. It has been interesting, but I'm finding much of what I'm reading was taught to me at some point in grade/middle/high school already. It's amusing to see a lot of the same practices being used today. Ie. The lawyer who verified a deed was found to be a friend of the person selling. You see a lot of this in current home sales as well. Especially with inspectors. Real Estate agents usually have a network of inspectors they know very well and they'll come in really quick and sign off because the would-be buyers/sellers want to get the deal done asap. Never mind about your HVAC/vent system is full of dirt, or your roof is missing insulation, or your basement outlets are useless. (yeah.) The clocking in a minute late thing still happens as well, just not as drastically. My wife worked for a Copps store and if they were a minute late, they didn't get paid for that 15 minute block and they got written up. If they clocked in early they wouldn't get paid for that time, so you were simply expected to clock in early. Philthy fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Jan 10, 2020 |
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Jan 10, 2020 18:43
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 I used to work IT at an Oscar Mayer meat processing plant for a few years back in the mid-90s off and on. I was contracted out to help fill in when they had someone sick or larger projects going on. The plant was about 8 stories tall, and each floor had about 10-20 sub-areas. I used to service the desktop machines that controlled the conveyors, choppers, sausage squirters, etc. The IT area was in a separate building and before you could enter the actual plant you had to put on a plastic hair net, a helmet, jacket, and plastic booties. At every door you had to stand in a shallow tub of disinfectant, go through the door into another tub, then walk through the room to probably another room and repeat. To get to most areas you had to pass through about 10+ rooms. Because the building was built as rooms were needed, they usually just connected rooms rather than have a bunch of hallways. Most times I had to go through the freezers that had just thousands of pounds of meat hanging which was surreal, then it would exit out into a service tunnel that sort of looked like the halls in Aliens I guess with lights constantly rotating and alarms going off people driving past in forklifts. Many service tunnels had little indents on the side of the wall that had a big tub marked with hazard signs. On the ceiling above the tub was a valve that would occasionally open on its own and literally poo poo out "in-edibles" which was mostly chunky paste gross looking goop. When the tub was full a mini forklift would come, pick it up, and drive it off somewhere. Honestly, it was exhausting carrying a heavy desktop around, but despite that the factory was like a willy wonka land. Each room was unique and had crazy machines making GBS threads out meat slices, or making sausages, or boiling water for some other room. There would be rooms of 50 people standing in a line covered in plastic checking slices of bologna or whatever meat what coming down. That's all they did all day long, they stood there checking meat, tossing the bad looking ones off on some other conveyor which likely ended up being poo poo into a tub somewhere a floor below them. One time I had to go to the hotdog area which required me to go to the 8th floor, which meant up steps the entire way, then go through a room that had an exit to the roof, across the roof in broad daylight and then into another door which was the hotdog room. The hotdog roller coaster was nuts. It honestly looked like a crazy marble machine where the balls go rolling up and down and through loops, but instead it was all hotdogs in a huge room that was about 200'x200' and 20' tall and they shot around faster than you could keep track. The conveyors made no sense to me but it was fun as hell to watch. Most of the people that worked there were minorities that spoke very little English. The only white people in there were the machine repair men, room bosses, and government inspectors. Everyone looked dead who worked in there, though. They just had a stare. You would smell like hotdogs at the end of the day. They had one building that I never got to go in that was the experimental building. It smelled like pure rotting death. I was kinda glad I never got to see what was causing that stench because holy crap. Everything was clean, and they did appear to take safety seriously. I have no problems eating Oscar Mayer meats today. The plant was closed down about 5 years ago due to restructuring and it hasn't been sold mostly because of the layout. It started at a single or double story building and they just kept adding on wacky room after wacky room until it was 8 stories tall. Imagine this filled with pink goop meat being churned.  Part of the end of the hot dog roller coaster. Sadly I couldn't find a pic of the hotdog singles being shot around.  I think this was the flavor testing room.  This wasn't from the plant I worked at but this is what a lot of the rooms looked like. They had hundreds and hundreds of people doing this throughout the building.  Here is a video of the plant having an auction for all the equipment. That last shot is the experimental building on the right that I never got to go in and smelled awful. Thinking about this more, it was likely just the dumping ground for in-edibles and they just called it experimental instead of death dump. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hx-b63RnAQ Philthy fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Jan 15, 2020 |
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Jan 13, 2020 23:35
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Jurgis's stubbornness is getting on my nerves. I get that he is the vehicle to showcase the horror show, but it's frustrating as all hell to read. I'd be on the next boat back to Lithuania after his first realization. Nope Nope Nope NOPE.
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Jan 15, 2020 01:11
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Jack B Nimble posted:Awesome post; and more than a little reassuring after The Jungle. Yeah, even though the line workers looked exhausted at all times I was told they were well paid. I never really asked how much, or looked into it because I was right around 20 and just knew I wouldn't be able to do it. Lugging PCs and monitors around without elevators was hard enough. One other thing that I remember is on the shift change you would see hundreds file out of the main factory entrance, and you would see their wives and kids waiting for them and they'd walk off together. It was a bit  The plant also had an executive side where it was suit and tie for everyone that worked there. The execs had a cafeteria that was the best food ever with chefs making omelettes and pasta and everything every day all day. It was super duper impossibly cheap. I just remembered how awesome that was. The plant workers were also allowed to eat there as well. A lot of this is slowly coming back to me. I don't remember hearing any horror stories thankfully. But, I do remember everyone was scared shitless of the government inspectors. Maybe that's why. quote:You're right that he's a vehicle, but even knowing that I'm struck by how well his arc answers a lot of the common "bootstrapper" counter-arguments to capitalism. Jurgis is huge, hard working, single-mindedly devoted to his family; he's dealt the best set of cards you could give a laborer and look what happens to him. Yeah, I often forget the subtext when I get wrapped up into the characters themselves. I wish I could pull it apart easier, but christ, every chapter I'm putting the book down wanting to scream. WHY. WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS. quote:I just go to the part where Jurgis is in jail and the almost off-handed way Sinclair mentions that the police would semi-routinely beat you to death in the station and say 'he fell' in their report stuck out to me in this second reading; it's a moment of intersection where The Jungle crosses paths with a whole other book that the muck-racking journalist might have written. It's funny, I really don't remember reading that part when I was a teenager. This part made me sad because we are seeing SO MUCH of this type of behavior going on still.
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Jan 15, 2020 05:21
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Thanks for making this the book of the month. I'm not sure it would have ever made it on to my radar. I'm glad I read it! I did enjoy both "halves" of the book equally, though! With the exception of.. The last 10 or so pages of socialism! now! was expected, but god drat that was probably the worst way to try and "sell" it. I think ending it with Jurgis finding out that the mystery speaker was talking about socialism would have been the perfect spot to end and to entice the readers to go out and learn more on their own instead of trying to spoon feed those last pages. But this was pre-smart phones, so....
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Jan 16, 2020 23:58
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The more I think about this, The Jungle would make an excellent HBO type series that sort of revolves around how The Wire was made. Season 1 - We are introduced to Jurgis Rudkus and their current lives in Lithuania. He meets Ona and the rest and they make their way to the USA. They are introduced to Chicago. They get jobs. They get a house. They are happy but something is off. Season 2 - Meat factory. Canning mill. Struggles. Winter. Season 3 - The struggle is real. Fertilizer factory. Death. Abandonment. Season 4 - Life on the road. Self-reflection. Freedom. Winter comes. Season 5 -Living the life with the rich, err now life as a petty criminal, corrupt politics Season 6 -Running into Connor and watching life go to ruin, again, old friends and family, a new beginning, a new job ~fin You could probably collapse it down, or have 6-8 episode seasons. But the way the book is laid out makes it look so perfect to contain certain aspects of it to a season. Philthy fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Jan 17, 2020 |
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Jan 17, 2020 19:48
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| # ¿ Dec 11, 2024 06:22 |
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Keep thinking about this all the time. I’ll likely reread this again.
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Feb 1, 2020 06:11
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