The Cordwainer

by Christopher Blankley

Chapter Six

  The Four-Boxed Form

  What I didn't understood at the time, what might have made all the difference, was that all two hundred people in that room for Barry's going away celebration were Foremen at The Shop. Perhaps if I'd known that, what was to happen next might not have come as such a soul-crushing shock. But as it was, I was blissfully ignorant as I followed my father out of the Foreman's break room, up a flight of stairs and along a gangway towards the Managing Foreman's small, glassed-in office.

  The Managing Foreman, Mr. Salmon, was an old war buddy of my father's. They had together, unlike so many others, risen up off the floor of The Shop into managerial positions, back before the Employment Edicts – before the chit system. Mr. Salmon was an old family friend, a guest at our dinner table countless times back when my mother was still alive. His portly frame was an unmistakable sight lumbering around town. To work with Mr. Salmon and my father, to be one of “the guys”... It was hard to keep my perspective.

  My father held the door for me as I stepped into Foreman Salmon's ten-foot square office, which was barely more than a desk and a panoramic view of The Shop floor. The mass of Mr. Salmon was discussing some figures written down on a clipboard with three men as I entered. Mr. Salmon was dressed in slacks, pulled up high on his gut, held in place by a brown, faux leather, hemp belt, perfectly circling his equator. The other three men were dressed in ties and short-sleeved, pocketed white shirts – the uniform, I would come to learn, of the accounting department.

  Mr. Salmon didn't look up as my father and I entered, but continued mumbling to the accountants in low tones.

  My father walked up and started to speak without waiting for any acknowledgement of his presence. “Andrew's starting today,” he said, “just back from college.”

  “All the Rices, then, present and accounted for, huh?” Foreman Salmon said without looking up from the clipboard.

  “You bet!” my father said happily. “Any time you're ready, you can pension me off like old Barry.”

  Mr. Salmon snorted at this, finally looking up from his clipboard. He looked me over in my new tie and crisp, white shirt and seemed to approve of my presence.

  “The little Rice boy, huh?” he laughed. My father tittered, and the accountants smirked dutifully. “You've got mighty big shoes to fill, you do son, mighty big.” He held out a hand. I reached out and shook it. As we were shaking I noticed the Managing Foreman look down at Barry's gold watch hanging from my wrist. He looked up, for the first time looking me in the eyes, and the expression on his face subtly changed.

  The Foreman pulled his hand away and I quickly retracted mine, trying to hide the watch up my shirt sleeve.

  “Put him on Number Six, Dave,” Mr. Salmon said tersely to my father and returned his attention to the clipboard. Without another word, my father and I receded from the tiny office and back down the stairs.

  “I...” I started to say, then stopped. My father was walking a few paces in front of me. He was shuffling papers and a pair of clipboards in his hands, arranging them.

  “Line Six is a good place to start. Good for learning the ropes,” my father said as he clipped a set of papers to one board. “But things can move quick down there. You've got to pay attention. No lollygagging or daydreaming, you understand?”

  “Sure.”

  My father handed back the clipboard he had loaded with pages as we reached the bottom of the stairs. There he paused, turning to face me, to impart some sage advice, as he always did in his way.

  “Now, I know what you're like, son, but you've got to keep your wits about you. No goofing off. The Worker B's will take advantage of a new Foreman and try and goldbrick, so you've got to stay on top of them. They know their jobs, but they're always looking for any sign of weakness.”

  “Sure, Dad, sure...” I nodded.

  “I'm serious, Andrew,” he said with a gravity that was uncharacteristic. “This isn't school. This is the real deal. There's no make-up exams, re-tests or summer school here. If you can't make the grade... Well, I don't have to tell you how many other kids you graduated with would like a shot at a job like this.”

  He didn't have to remind me. The thirteen thousand names read out at graduation were a fair reminder. I looked down at the clipboard in my hands and examined the top sheet, determined not to let my father down. I was a well educated, intelligent man, with the full weight of my duty fully explained to me. I was going to try my hardest – I mean, how hard could it be? I'd gotten a 4.0 in differential equations. How hard could making a pair of boots be?

  Not hard at all, I would find out.

  The top sheet on the stack of papers clipped to the board was a simple cover page, I thought, of four check-boxes. I hardly glanced at it, flipping over to the next page. I was surprised to find that the second sheet was the same as the first: four check-boxes next to four lines of text. The third, the fourth, the fifth page were identical. The entire stack of papers were just the same four-boxed form. I flicked through them quickly, looking for deviation, and looked back up at my father in incomprehension. The look he gave me I couldn't quite read.

  “What's this?” I asked, holding up the clipboard.

  “Your job,” my father said defensively. I'd unexpectedly hit a nerve. I looked down at the stack of papers and back at my father. I knew better than to push it.

  He turned and started off across the vastness of The Shop floor, moving expertly through the various conveyors and assembly line stations that crisscrossed and dotted the main production floor. I lowered my clipboard and jogged to keep up with him.

  “Now, this week, Number Six is working on loafers,” he started. “Loafer quotas have been raised by the back office, and we're under pressure to keep up.”

  I was listening. Not understanding, but listening.

  “So, as I said: No loafing about!” he paused in his step, realizing the unintended pun he'd just made. He shook it off and continued: “Not you, and don't let the Worker B's, either. You're a Class A, they're a Class B. Remember that. Never forget it. There's an order to things here, son, a reason for everything. You might not understand it at first, but... Well, it's like the Army. There's officers and soldiers. People to give orders and people to take them. Remember which one you are, son, and you'll be all right.”

  “Yes, Dad,” I agreed, trotting to keep up with him. Large numbers hung over the various assembly line conveyors, large enough to be read from anywhere across the vast expanse of The Shop floor. We were moving quickly toward the massive Number Six, hanging over an indistinct section of the real estate.

  “Now this,” my father said, pausing and slapping a palm down onto the clipboard I was carrying, “is your progress sheet. Think of it as your metronome. I know!” He threw up a hand as I started to speak. “It doesn't look like much, but it's critically important. Every crate that rolls off the end of your line, son, has to leave with one of these sheets attached. Correctly filled out, signed and inspected. This is your oath here, son, in black and white. You're certifying each crate of boots that leaves your production line as fit and ready for market. Without this form, my boy, there'd be no quality controls on the product that leaves this factory. You're signing your name and certifying each crate of boots this factory manufactures. There's a trust there. You're taking on quite a responsibility with this job, my boy. Think of it as a bond.” My father stopped as we approached the Number Six production line and seemed to grow distant. “An unspoken contract... Between you and the greater world beyond these walls... That we manufacture a pair of boots of a guaranteed quality, sold at a fair price.” There was a pride in his voice as the clatter of Production Line Six echoed around him. Then he returned to earth and remembered what he was doing.

  He began to explain, in intricate detail, the operation of Line Six and the function of each station along its conveyor. But I wasn't listening. I lifted my clipboard and inspected the four boxes that outlined the circumference of my job:

  Box
One. These Shoes/Boots were stitched and assembled under my supervision.

  Box Two. The Shoes/Boots were paired and checked for matching size under my supervision.

  Box Three. The Shoes/Boots have been boxed and correctly labeled as “Made in Luma, Washington”.

  Box Four. This Crate has been certified to contain exactly three hundred and twenty pairs of ___.

  ...And there was my single point of creativity: The form contained a space where I was to write in the type or style of the shoes. Below it was a place for my signature.

  By the time my father had reached the end of Line Six, and finished explaining in detail its function, my head was swimming. He'd introduced each person, by name, as we walked along the line. There were sixty-three women – the line was entirely staffed with women – working Line Six. My father knew each woman's name at a glance and was able to inquire about spouses or children with most of them. Beyond everything else, that impressed me the most and presented the most formidable aspect of my new job. It was plainly expected for a Foreman to know his workers by their first names. I attempted to repeat back each woman's name as I was introduced to her – an old trick I'd learned in college – but soon the names were all swimming around in the soup of my brain. Halfway through, I thought better of it and started writing down names in the margin of one of my four-boxed forms, along with their station numbers. But when my father saw me attempting this, he advised me against it, noting the serial number embossed in the top right corner of each form. “Accounting likes to keep tabs on these,” he said knowingly.

  Then, as soon as the chaos had begun, it was over. My father slapped me on the shoulder, shook my hand, and told me he was sure I was ready for the task. Then he walked away, leaving me standing at the termination of Line Six, as the women of the production line worked busily away stitching and assembling boots.

  I looked at the top form on my clipboard, with the names scribbled in the column, and back up at the women working. I took out my pen and ticked the first box on the form.

  And that's how my first day of work at The Shop began.

  That four-boxed form, in its entirety, was my new profession. With the insanity of my first day, I'm not sure I really comprehended that fact at the time. I had ample opportunity to look around at the other production lines. The other Foremen, easily spotted in their shirtsleeves and ties, were as unoccupied as I was. They were watching their production lines, but not overseeing them in any serious way. All that bunk my father had pitched about keeping a firm hand on the reins of the Worker B's seemed to be just that: Bunk. The ladies at their stations were frantically working to keep up with the conveyor. There was no opportunity to even converse, much less loaf about.

  All of the workers were particularly adroit at each of their individual tasks. Their hands simply flew around them, tossing and turning the parts of the shoe; stitching, gluing or fitting them together. My engineering side quickly got the better of me and, after twenty minutes of watching the ladies do their jobs, I was able to surmise that there were actually four parallel production lines within Line Number Six instead of just one.

  The sixty-three women of Line Number Six were actually four teams of fifteen women, with the three extra workers acting as flow control for all four teams. Essentially, Line Number Six had fifteen unique stations with four women working at each station. Theoretically, I suppose, any of the four women at each station could have taken a partially assembled shoe from any of the four women working at the station before her. But they seemed to have worked out a natural rhythm where one worker at a given station fed her completed step to a particular worker at the next station whose pace of production was similar to hers. You could watch, if you paid attention, a single shoe work its way down the line – from disassembled components, to finished shoe – and then watch the next shoe follow the exact same path through the exact same collection of hands without any change in course.

  I had Barry's watch and I could time it. One of the four parallel production lines – I decided to dub it Team A – was finishing a shoe in seven and a half minutes. Another, Team B, was taking eight and three quarters. Teams C and D were lagging well behind the others, both taking over ten minutes to finish their task.

  Of course, what was truly amazing was that a pair of finished shoes – two of the same size – made it to the end of this parallel, and disparately timed, process at roughly the same time. They had to, otherwise the whole production line, parallelized or not, would have come to a screeching halt. The last step was boxing – putting the pair of shoes in its box – and then adding the box to the crate that I was to inspect. If the partner to a particular shoe didn't make it to the end of the production line at the same time as its mate, there was the potential that the women working the last station might have been left holding a useless, unboxable single shoe. But this never happened. It was the job of the three extra women, those who worked on no particular team, to keep the shoes moving along the line in essentially the correct order. If a shoe, perhaps on team C or D, was lagging behind, they'd hold up its partner that had been moving through either team A or B, and slip a couple other-sized shoes ahead of it in the queue. This way, the boxers and the stackers at the last station were always kept busy. I marveled at it all as I watched.

  Back at school we'd have called the whole thing a natural efficiency. There was no need for management at all. I was able to watch and study it that first day, but not once did anyone ask me for even the simplest form of direction. I was the Foreman of the line, but there was precious little Foremaning that needed to be done.

  After half an hour of watching the production line in action, I could instantly see the advantages to separating out the four parallel production lines into discrete teams. What difficulties they had in working together was caused by friction between the four teams working within the limited space. If each team could work on a conveyor of its own... But handed limited resources, the women had worked out a system that allowed them to do their job competently, if not optimally. It was impressive.

  So impressive, in fact, that I soon realized my total irrelevancy.

  In retrospect, I can't exactly remember what expectations I'd had for my father's life-long profession. If you'd asked me when I was younger what I thought a Foreman did all day, I doubt I'd have been able to tell you anything concrete. I remember my father coming home tired from work and talking to my mother about the events of his day, and that had instilled in me the idea that Foremen actually did something. What, perhaps I couldn't say, but something.

  But as I looked around The Shop floor that first day of my working life, it became obvious to me that there was actually very little work involved in being a shop Foreman. It smelled to me to be a serious case of too few Indians and far too many chiefs.

  Each production line had a Foreman, doing as little as I was doing. Some of the bigger lines had two. How two Foremen could possibly be needed to fill out a four-boxed form I couldn't comprehend, but I wasn't really trying. I remembered the going-away party for Barry, and that's when I realized that all two hundred people crowded into that room were all Foremen like me. Now The Shop was a large outfit, but two hundred... More people than could comfortably fit simultaneously into the space that served as their break room...

  Suddenly, all those shirtsleeves and ties, and the thirteen thousand names read at my graduation coalesced into a clearer picture. Perhaps it was what some people call an epiphany, I don't know. I looked down at Barry's watch and watched the second hand spin slowly around the dial.