For four and a half years I supervised the assembly plant at Hydra Hydraulics. It wasn’t what I set out to do with this life, but I settled into it easily enough. I even grew to like it. The job appealed to the lazier aspects of my nature.
For the fifteen years preceding this promotion, I actually worked for a living. Don’t clutch your pearls too tightly, I assure you I didn’t work that diligently. Though I worked primarily on the manufacturing side of things, I didn’t care to operate any of the machines. My lackadaisical mien made conforming to tight tolerances a challenge I was not up for. The quality technicians refused to succumb to the Polish Hammer rule of the quarter inch leeway. Precision was the buzz word here which is precisely why I opted to work in the chrome shop.
Sure, the chrome solution was known to inspire cancer in the operators who overstayed their welcome, but it allowed for more subjectivity on what constituted a quality part. Subjectivity is a subject I excel at. I refuse to be a slave to anyone’s perception of reality. Especially my own.
So, the contents of this column you’re reading may or may not have happened exactly as I record it. You can apply that to anything I’ve ever written. In fact, you’d probably be wise to apply this to everything you have ever read, anywhere.
Anyway, me and my thirteen-inch cock were working as the floor lead on the manufacturing side of things back in the summer of 2020. I’d managed to escape the chrome shop when it burnt down in an “electrical mishap” that had absolutely nothing to do with me. It was an odd time with Covid ramping up and everyone wandering around like old west bandits with their lower faces obscured with their choice of the illusion of protection. I might mention here for the record that during the entire Covid fiasco, I was not afforded one fucking day off. No sheltering in place. No sweet unemployment checks. I was deemed an “essential worker” in the parlance of those times. “Rubes” was what we called ourselves, muttering beneath the thinnest swatch of fabric.
When I got called to the office, they had to wait fifteen minutes for me to get out of the bathroom. They should have known better than to page me during my hourly bathroom break. You’d think the odds were in my favor. Three fourths of the time I’m nearly working. I fully expected to be terminated. Work had slowed with so many customers and suppliers going dark. I figured I was expendable. Behind my charming personality, can-do spirit, and righteous attitude, there at my core exists a lethargy that is boundless, though I’ve honestly too apathetic to measure. Folks at Hydra often question why I bring books to work. The simple answer. To read them. And I never waited for breaks. At Hydra Hydraulics where common sense is a rarity and incisive thinking largely absent, the consensus belief is that I carried those fucking books to give the appearance of intelligence. As if I were putting on airs for those idiots. Wondering why the books changed every few days would have required a more analytical turn of mind than they were capable of mustering.
In the human resources office, I was confronted by the human resource manager, the plant manager, and the operations manager. These were the three people I tended to avoid during the course of my shifts.
Well, I thought to myself. This is it for me. Maybe I could get my job back at the comic shop, slinging funny books for a few shekels north of minimum wage. At least it was a happy place. The comic shop. And I was happy there. Unlike Hydra Hydraulics which mostly manufactured misery as a by-product of the cylinders for dump trucks, cranes and tractors.
Randy, the operations manager, led the conversation. When he wasn’t demanding perfection from a horrendously broken system, he was a personable enough fella. My quick wit and amiable conversational skills blinded him to my derisive disregard for authority and utter contempt for an honest day’s work.
After a few seconds of cordial conversation, he got right to it. “Polish Hammer, how do you feel about taking over as supervisor for plant two assembly?” He showed me a ridiculous figure written on a slip of paper that was double what I’d been earning on the floor, overtime included.
Some people may have felt a stirring of pride, a feeling of prayers answered, hard work rewarded. As a cool cat who’d been claiming these last fifteen years these jackasses were only capable of elevating fools, I felt as though I’d gotten one over on them. I didn’t know the first fucking thing about assembling hydraulic cylinders. But to be fair, I’d kept my mind blissfully unaware of how to do anything in that godforsaken factory.
“I’m good to go.” I even gave them a thumbs up cause that’s the kind of idiot I am.
When you walk into Hydra you will find that there are two different kinds of employees. There are ones who only know me as an assembly supervisor, a bald, scowling pillar of authority. Then there are those who still call me “Shaggy,” a throwback to the days when I favored long hair and cultivated a ravenous appetite for other people’s drugs. The latter had a difficult time reconciling me to the former and vice versa. Of course, that dual nature was what made me such an interesting motherfucker to begin with.
There are some people who still attempt to connect me to the High Life incident of 2008 when, during a bathroom remodeling attempt, ninety-six empty Miller High Life beer cans were found strewn about on top of the ceiling tiles. The resulting plant meeting was a one act play of absurdity. The plant manager at the time, a short, clueless jackass who went on to poorly manage a fireworks company, stood at the forefront with three cardboard boxes brimming with the dead soldiers. He reminded us there was a strict no drinking policy on the premises. Eyes glanced my way due to my tendency to break the no drinking on the premises policy. Fortunately, there were six other rampant alcoholics employed by Hydra at the time and it could have been any one of those guys responsible. What they never comprehended was that it was possible for seven alcoholics to lock themselves together in the bathroom and share cases of beer on the days the off-shift supervisor laid out of work.
I can see that memory surface in some people’s eyes when I tell them to stop the jaw-jacking and get their asses back to work. This usually happens right before I slip back into my office and work on my novel. In four and a half years, I’ve managed to pen two poetry collections, a short story collection, and the first twenty thousand words of no less than twelve novels.
Like Captain America, I could do this all day. Not fighting Nazis, per se, though I think I could give him a run for his money but writing about all the bad behavior I allegedly perpetrated while on the clock. Which is almost as rewarding. It’s nearly the same thing, really. This column would literally continue for at least another twenty thousand words, which seems to be my limit.
Fortunately, Hydra Hydraulics provided me with the perfect ending for this column by knocking me back down to chrome shop technician and stripping me of every last vestige of authority. Apparently, they had access to my computer this entire time, and there are no other alcoholic writers with access to my computer to muddy the waters. It’s a story that people will be whispering about twenty years from now, when the next regime sees fit to install me as the boss once more.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
