When we first moved here, I was still working at National Catheter. It changed hands a few times sort of. It was still being run by Dave Sheridan until it went to Mexico. Before that it had been part of other companies including Malinkrodt. I think that last one was where it was part of the same group that owned Avon. Or maybe Avon came after that.
Before I left there I was given one lousy share of stock in Avon. I signed it over to my son when he was little. God knows what happened to it. It disappeared in the basement of the Mill Street house and I never heard another thing about it.
It was more trouble than it was worth because while it was still in my name I had to pay extra on my income tax just to get a separate sheet filled out for it. I think once I got a fifty dollar check when the stock split, "whatever that means."
I may have told you back on the Kingsbury pages what I did there and maybe not.
I was hired at first for the glue line. I have a vague memory of being scared the first day but then aren't we all a little nervous when we start a new job? I'd never worked in a factory before that. I was deathly afraid of failure but I was also sick to death of working in retail.
Maybe I just needed a job I could get lost in and still bring home a paycheck. I got paid real good there and there were great benefits at that time.
They made medical tubing of various kinds. Everything had to be extremely neat and clean. We all wore hair nets and white uniforms while we did jobs on the main floor. If you were a guy you didn't wear white, of course. I never saw a guy gluing except for Dave himself when he was trying out new things.
The floor managers were both female. Margaret was a much older lady in charge with a somewhat younger girl, Jean, next down the line.
Guys mostly did warehouse jobs and hauled around "coffins" of plastic catheters or ran extrusion machines.
Coffins were long rectangular card board boxes that the tubes were temporarily packaged in for the express purpose of hauling them around the factory. They would, when finished become packaged in plastic envelopes and processed through a chamber that "killed" all the germs.
There was a "yellow sheet" in this business. If one of your products had something bad in it, it was posted to this yellow sheet and your company got a bad mark. I remember one time when our company was on the sheet. A catheter had been packaged and gone to the customer, AKA hospital, with a human hair in the package. That caused a supreme uproar.
Nobody knew whose hair it was but it didn't matter. Girls usually had hair sticking out under the net, whether accidently or on purpose, who knew. Younger ones were still into attracting guys and there were guys there so they may have "let" a curl slip out so a guy would know they were still pretty underneath the netting. You really couldn't help it if some hair didn't stay under there unless you might have taped it on your head or shaved yourself bald.
I don't have any photos of me in the net that I know of.
I worked on a lot of projects there. On the glue line we had small metal racks at each "station". I think there were maybe fifteen girls in a row doing this but there were more rows. They also switched jobs around so sometimes you glued things differently because they were different products.
I sat all day, except for breaks and glued. What I glued was this small almost clear white balloon on to each catheter. They arrived at my station with the balloons on them and my job was to use a needle thing to put a line of glue under the edge of both ends of the balloon. This balloon would be inflated while it was in the patient to hold the catheter in there.
Once the line of glue was all the way around another line of glue was brushed on it to seal the outside edges smooth to be sure it stayed inflated in a person. You put the catheter on a metal rod in front of you and twirled the opposite end of it to get it to turn around on the rod while you glued. Then you hung them on the rack beside you to dry before they could be put in the box.
It was a boring job and you could easily do it while your mind was elsewhere. Some of us, myself especially, brought in tape players and played music using ear plugs. Sometimes I borrowed book on cassettes at the library and "read" while I worked.
You couldn't get good radio reception there because of all the machines. There was just too much static. We did have a good country station coming out of Albany, I think. I taped a lot of them and would play back my favorites at work.
If I was playing music the girls near me wanted to hear it too so with the permission of the floor managers I'd take out the ear plugs and play it but not too loud because maybe someone else wouldn't like my music.
One day a young blonde girl was sitting beside me gluing when I noticed her eyes were shut. She'd made a real mess of her racks and a few tubes were wasted because she had slapped on the glue and stuck them on the rack where they touched each other, a big no-no, and dried in a big mess all together. A couple of us went over and pulled out the bad ones and stuck them in the trash. They would be ground up and stuck in containers to be sold as scrap plastic.
Her name was Chris. She was the daughter of a minister and she'd been out drinking the night before. She was probably hung over but she was also running on a low battery because she didn't get much sleep. I don't know how we managed but we kept her out of trouble that day.
The only names other than hers that come to mind of glue girls were Norma and Tilly. I can see other faces in my mind, some friends, some not so nice ones but the names just aren't coming to me. Norma was a tall skinny blonde, older than me and married.
Tilly was a short chubby brunette also married. I was the virgin and mostly older than the girls who worked there. I may have been older than Tilly. Tilly's real name was Adelaide but she hated it.
Some of us would argue and get ticked off at each other but we usually made up within a week or two.
There was one girl who really irritated me. I don't know why now but she just bothered me. I got into a bitch fight with her but it was only with words. Nobody ever got in fights with hands like guys do there. I'd never even heard of guys fighting like that there. This girl was a little brunette. I don't know if she was married or not.
It was almost shift change time and she was still crapping at me. She was sitting right next to me and I couldn't avoid her.
I was into that fortune telling stuff back then. I could at times say something that would come true. It was probably by accident. I was pretty angry at her this day. She'd messed me up and I almost didn't make my quota.
I finally told her that I could see her getting in an accident with a train. I was nasty. It was spite and anger. I probably just thought I'd scare her a little.
The next day she came in and told them all I'd cursed her. I was suddenly, maybe not so suddenly because a lot of people knew me, accused of being a witchy. It seemed that on the way home she had almost forgotten to stop at a train crossing and had to slam on her breaks to avoid a disaster.
I really think she was so upset, she was not only looking for something to happen but expecting it to happen. It wouldn't have mattered what. If she'd messed up in traffic and got into a car accident that would have been me cursing her as well. I still felt a little guilty.
Within a few weeks she had switched around and suddenly she was being friendly with me. Maybe she just realized it was all hokey coincidence. I figured I'd just keep my big mouth shut but you know that was never going to happen.