One job was for the Bank of New York. The Reader's Digest had sent out some kind of sweepstakes/subscription renewal mailing, and they had sent the returns from that mailing to the Bank of New York (who had a bunch of mail-opening machines) for processing.
My job was to sit at a mail-opening machine and put the contents of the envelopes into bins. The machine has a horizontal tray of envelopes on the right-hand side; the envelopes are lined up and there is a metal rectangle pushing them forward from the back of the tray. The front of the tray is open; a little suction-cup finger comes forward and takes the next envelope off the tray and pulls it into a little metal track. The envelope is pulled along the track by pairs of motorized rubber wheels, past a razor blade set into a guide at the top of the track. The razor blade cuts off the top sixteenth of an inch of the envelope. Then the envelope stops in front of you, where two more suction fingers pull on the top and the bottom of the envelope to open it.
You reach in and pull out what's inside; the check goes in one bin, the renewal form goes in another bin, and any correspondence or anything else goes in a third bin.
A little light shines through the envelope at the stopping place; on the other side is a photosensor. When the sensor sees that you removed all the stuff from the envelope, the machine automatically puts the empty envelope in the garbage and opens the next one.
Once in a while, some droid only slightly higher on the food chain than you are comes around and takes away your bin of checks and forms. If you run out of envelopes you have to go to the front of the room to get more. The machines are laid out in rows like the desks were in elementary school. You're also supposed to ask for permission to go to the bathroom.
You quickly develop a bunch of paper cuts on your thumb and index finger on your right hand from reaching into the envelopes past the two freshly-cut edges. My second day I brought along band-aids to put on so my fingers wouldn't sting; later, I would put on band-aids before I even started work.
The second day I also brought along my walkman; for a while the music made it almost bearable; I could remove the checks from the envelopes at a normal speed and my mind could float off into the sunset; my hands would be working automatically and my mind would be a million miles away.
Then some yuppie low-level pond scum who was just out of business school came over and warned me, ``You'd better take off that Walkman; the Big Boss will come through here and he won't like it.'' I said, ``Look, there's no need to make me take off my Walkman, I'm working just as well as I was before and I am wearing this so I don't go nuts with boredom.'' The low-level yuppie guy agreed with me, and he said if it was just him it wouldn't matter.
Five minutes later he was back, saying the Big Boss had indeed said he didn't like my walkman-wearing ways, so I had to remove it.
I wish I could say I walked out.
I wish I could say I made the Big Boss come over and look me in the eye and explain to me why I had to take off my walkman.
I wish I could say I made a big fuss, demanded to see the Big Boss, maybe had the Big Boss sit in my chair for an hour not listening to any music at all and see how he likes opening these stupid envelopes.
But I didn't. I just sat there and took off my walkman, and I came back for one more night after that. I was too well trained by the big combine machine of society and my parents and elementary school to think of talking back to someone who was older than me and who wore a suit.
I only worked there three nights, but those were the worst three nights of my working life. The last night I worked there, I looked around at the other people who were working there. Some of them were unfortunate college kids like me. What bothered me, and what still bothered me, was the people I saw who worked there every day. Poor people. Women. Minorities.
I could handle the stress because I knew I would be out of there in less than a week; I was earning $6.50 an hour but it was temporary; I would get out of there and go back up to Binghamton and go solve physics problems again.
What really bothered me was seeing a 40-year-old man, doing the same moronic robot job I was doing. Is this all he had to look forward to when he was my age?
After a while, what bothered me the most was that the envelope-opener machine uses printing-press technology. Those little suction fingers started their life as the paper-handling mechanism on printing presses. They would pull in fresh new sheets of cream-colored stationery and hold them in place as the ink and words were pressed on them. Posters, broadsides, poems and novels would flow out into the world after being stroked by those fingers.
Printing presses are supposed to set people free. They're supposed to let people write down their ideas and give them out to lots of other people. They're supposed to free humanity from the stranglehold that centralized decision-making has on information and knowledge.
It really hurt me to see those same magic fingers holding up envelope after envelope for someone to open. It hurt to see a piece of machinery that could help elevate someone to the heights of passion and wisdom, being used to numb the mind and kill the spirit.
I would rather be scrubbing bathroom floors than opening envelopes on a machine like that. It matters if bathroom floors are clean; if the floors aren't clean then it smells bad when you have to sit there on the pot, and people can get infections and stuff. Someone has to clean the floors; they won't clean themselves. I've done cleaning and mowing and lifting and carrying; I don't mind those. Things need to be cleaned and moved and lifted.
But if none of those renewals got processed, would it matter? If people didn't get their magazines in the mail and they had to go out to the newsstand to get them instead, would it really hurt anyone? Is it worth the $16.95 that you save off the newsstand price for you to get your magazine out of the mailbox every month? Is some direct-mail marketing weenie's need to get a higher response-rating on his next mailing worth the hours of tedium that the rest of us had to go through in order to process those envelopes?
Direct-mail marketing is slavery. It's slavery for those of us who have to open the envelopes and get paper cuts on all of our fingers. It's slavery for that yuppie-guy, who has to spend his time telling me not to wear a walkman and looking like a dickhead for the Big Boss. And it's slavery for you, too - you have to sit there and fill out magazine renewal cards like little pavlovian dogs, mindlessly writing down your name and address and zipcode and checking the little boxes.