Laughing in the Dark

When I was in college, my first summer was spent working at a soda bottling plant.  We made mostly store brand sodas and the facility was not what you would call state of the art.  Most of the machines were old and didn't really work quite the way they did when they first fired up the plant.  Maintenance was highly reactive, always seeming to be a step behind rather than anticipating the obvious and trying to stay a step ahead.

It was not a great place to work.  Productivity was down and, for the most part, management had very little idea what to do about it.  And so I found myself, at 19, a summer employee, sitting in a production meeting with the plant manager and the president of the company, along with the man who ran the other machine on my line, being asked what exactly was going wrong.

In my naivety, I answered honestly.  I told them that they needed to seriously consider a major overhaul of the two machines on our line.  We ran 12 oz aluminum cans, loaded them into case trays and ran them through a shrink wrap machine.  Our line was the fastest moving line in the place and also the oldest, when things went wrong, they went wrong rather catastrophically.  I was new, so naturally they thought it was my fault.  It wasn't, and my co-worker, who had been around long enough to know what from what, agreed.  He saw me fighting the machine when things started going wrong, he knew that what was happening really wasn't anyone's fault.

However, my approach probably wasn't the best, I told them that I was really just here for the summer, I was there to make some money and skeedaddle on back to college.  My intent was to present myself as an "objective" point of view, to tell these men who didn't seem to have much of a clue what was going on right under their noses, what was what.  It was not well received.  Apparently a greenhorn, summer employee is not the right person to speak truth to power, and if it hadn't been for my partner's defense, I probably would have been fired.

As it was, we both found ourselves switched to second shift, which I thought was going to be terrible, but ended up being a lifesaver.  My partner told me it would be, but I wasn't sure.  He said second shift was run by a different sort of crew, they were a lot less uptight.

Second shift is where I met John.  John was bald, barrel shaped African American man who had being doing this job, or jobs like it for pretty much his entire life.  He was now maybe in his late 50's maybe even 60's and he absolutely knew not to take stuff too seriously.

When the stuff would start to go awry, you could hear John's booming laugh, over the considerable din of the machinery.  One time, in the wee hours of the morning, we lost power and everything went absolutely black and silent, and all you could hear was John's laugh.  It was actually very reassuring.

Sometimes, when the system is broken, all you can really do is laugh.

So much of our world is just dysfunctional, at least the parts that involve human beings.

There's a whole lot of stuff that seems like we just can't fix it.

I wonder when the right time to speak a prophetic word actually is.

The lesson that I learned on that summer job was that you can't really expect to be heard if you're the new guy.  You can't really stand apart from a situation and offer "objective" truth.  There are many places where the system is just too big for you to influence.  We like to tell ourselves that we can change the world, but we all have limits, our rights, our abilities, our very being is limited by who we are and where we are.

All things are not available to us, that's a myth.  We are not entitled to do anything we want, we have limits, and limits, despite what some might imply, are a good thing.

It's difficult to watch systems run amok, whether they're fairly simple things like production lines or more complex systems like churches, political systems or what have  you.

Sometimes the only sane response is laughing in the dark.