These women clamoring for equal pay — what’s their game? I mean, obviously they don’t want anything as straightforward as equal pay for equal work. What woman wants to work?
Happily, the smart lads in the Men’s Rights subreddit have it all figured out.
Clever girls!
I do feel bad for all the fellas in the Men’s Rights subreddit, none of whom presumably work in air-conditioned offices. They probably all have to wrestle lions for a living, with their bare hands, in coal mines, blindfolded. (Them, not the lions.) It’s kind of amazing they find time to post on the internet at all!
h/t to TheBluePill for pointing me towards this manly wisdom.
Generally true, but not universally. Rogan, remember where I worked before HMX? XD
Ah, for the good old days of the 1840s, when six and seven-year-old girls (and boys) were put to work in the tighter seams of the coal mines….
Bleh, I worked in a popcorn… I don’t know if it really qualified as a factory, since it was a pretty small operation, but we’ll call it a production and packing facility. At one point we kept finding weird slime on stuff, and eventually a dead snake fell out of the rafters. We think it had been puking from up in the ceiling because it had eaten mice that had eaten poison.
Also at one point we steamcleaned everything in order to qualify as a Kosher facility… Guess what, it what all more or less “sanitized,” but the bins we kept the popcorn in? Still encrusted with grime. Steam on its own doesn’t clean that off.
RE: inurashii
I personally think coffee should be used purely as a smell, rather than something you taste, but that’s just me.
Not gonna lie, my time in fast food cured me of soda for life.
Slightly off topic, I guess, but these food factory stories really make me sad. Sad, because out-of-home-made food ideally could have been a way to get women out of the kitchen, provide better variety to more people, free up more time for everyone instead of being tied to a farm/garden/canning/stockpiling. It could have had all the benefits of specialized labor, but instead it just became a way to put money in corporate pockets and actually make things worse for everyone, nutritionally, ecologically, labor-wise, etc.
… You know, I’m suddenly thinking about buying local.
This is like that thread with everyone listing the creatures inhabiting their food.
There’s a cat in my dog food!!
oh man, fast food put me off soda, too. it didn’t immediately turn me vegan, but it definitely paved the way for that change years later…
If it makes anybody feel better, Starbucks is actually pretty clean, has good food safety procedures, and it didn’t put me off of coffee.
Let me just say, there’s a REASON my ED chose to attach itself to ingredients and such.
You have no idea the work I had to do before I could go to my local deli and buy pepperoni. And I suspect if I knew how it was made, I’d be right back where I started.
I’ve mostly worked for pay in air conditioned locations that were reasonably sanitary, but I’ve volunteered a lot at places that were pretty crappy. Underfunded archives with mold issues for the win, there.
Anyway, that’s ‘cos I’m pretty lucky class- and education-wise, and I know it. It’s not ‘cos I’m a woman.
Right. Women don’t EVER do manual labor. Like, ever.
Except, they do. I am a union pipefitter. I served a 5yr apprenticeship. I was the only female in a class of 94 apprentices.
I started in 1989. I was one of 15 women in a local that had 15k members. That is one woman for every one thousand men.
I made it through my apprenticeship DESPITE getting lower grades for better work. Not only did I make it through my apprenticeship, 3yrs into it (2yrs before it was complete) I was left to run several multi-million dollar construction sites.
I carried 5″ pipe on my shoulder up a ladder, just like the guys. I moved stacks and stacks of material that weighed upwards of 40lbs a foot. I strapped on a safety belt and crawled out onto a 6in i-beam 35 stories up to weld pipe.
But, women just don’t WANT to do that kind of work. –eyeroll–
I loved my job. I miss it terribly since becoming disabled.
Oh man, cloudiah, moldy archives.
While I was doing research for Princess and Monster, I ended up digging up this ANCIENT tome on medieval fashion out of the archives. It’d been in the library for over a century, and I think the librarians actually thought I was hazing them, because its call number didn’t appear to exist. (It did, it was just, like, the sub-basement of the sub-basement section E or something.)
The librarian brought it up wearing gloves and a miffed expression, and offered me gloves. Good thing, too; it was NOT a book I would’ve wanted to touch bare-handed.
One archive I volunteered at was in a former jail that was in crappy condition. Their entire collection had been stored for years in the collector’s garage, so we moved it all over to the jail, and while it was still in boxes there it rained. Thanks to a leaky roof, most of their books were so water-damaged that we lost about 50%. Luckily the books were mostly from their reference collection, so easily replaceable. Their Phyllis Wheatley books weren’t harmed.
So mold, book dust, and spiders were my life for a while. Archivists/librarians lead very glamorous lives.
Okay, the fast-food/soda thing…
Is it just an overexposure-get-sick-of-it thing, or is there some new horror us casual customers are unaware of?
Also, I don’t think going vegan alone will save you from… stuff in your food. Anyone remember the e coli spinach scare a few years back?
At the newspaper, we have a stockpile of old glass-plate negatives from the 20s through the late 30s* The plates were… not well-stored. They were usually put into envelopes with hand-written labels, then stuck in a box to sit for the next 70+ years. Those envelopes were NOT acid-free paper. As a result, many times, you’d end up with a stack of glass negatives, and between each of them were two pieces of dry, crumbly paper–these were the back of one envelope, and the front of another, after all the edges had corroded into dust and little paper chads that mixed around the bottom of the box.
I was on the crew that was given the task of taking inventory of these for an ongoing project to digitize the photos. The room where they’re stored is kept at around 55 degrees, but it was the middle of summer, so no one really wanted to wear a coat to work… And yes, there was some mold down there, too, because of course rooms in a basement accumulate water from time to time.
The collection was actually mixed–we had acetate negatives, too, sometimes in the same box. Little-known fact outside the archivist community–acetate negatives can have their chemical compounds break down into vinegar, which becomes remarkably pungent as they sit in their box for 50 years. Sometimes opening a box was like grabbing a bottle of balsamic and snorting it like liquid cocaine.
*: Note to people who know about photography: yes, this was well after acetate film should have been available. Newspapers are notoriously slow in adopting new technology, because it’s expensive to upgrade for an entire department. Likewise, we had 4×5 acetates from well into the era when 35 mm was available.
RE: Freemage
Okay, the fast-food/soda thing…
Is it just an overexposure-get-sick-of-it thing, or is there some new horror us casual customers are unaware of?
I was thankfully in movie theatre and pizza delivery, so not directly involved with most of the food. But I know how movie theatres flavor their popcorn, and with how much. Never have I felt such dread at the sight of the words “butter-flavored topping.” (Also, there was a reason that when folks asked for “butter” in LAYERS in their big tub of popcorn, we called it a Heart Attack.)
As for soda… I don’t like most of it in general, but in the movie theatre, if we couldn’t get away to wash our hands, it wasn’t unknown to shove your hands in the ice bucket as a quick equivalent. Also, it’s just plain absurdly overpriced, especially in movie theatres. (This applies to all food you buy in the theatre.)
You guys are making me miss working in the actual archives instead of with nothing but data.
Foodwise, I think my takeaway from working minimum wage food-related jobs is “Never eat food bought around a boardwalk.” Seriously, I think the worst thing was maybe my first job, at a snowcone/hotdog stand when I was 15. Combination of horrible boss, really awful sexually-explicit crap from customers, tips mainly in Canadian quarters for some reason, and absolutely disgusting food hygiene practices.
Like, to the point where, when I was working on the 4th of July and the owner expected inspectors to be out in force, we were literally told that if one came and tried to ask us questions or inspect our carts, we were to pretend we couldn’t speak English and refuse to talk to them.
@freemage, I am weird enough that that sounds really cool. I worked with a collection of old nitrate negatives that were stored in a temperature-controlled underground because of their nasty habit of smoldering at room temperature.
One of the collections was photographs documenting an early (1890s) effort at ethnic cleansing of the Armenian population in Cilicia. The story of how the aftermath of the violence was bravely photographed by a British woman touring Asia, and then hidden by her guide and later smuggled to the US, is like an adventure novel.
Archives are evidence lockers.
@katz, Data is cool too. I work mostly with metadata, which is even more removed from the fun stuff. (Except that I think the metadata is the fun stuff.)
You guys are just making me sad for my days in library school. (I never finished–the money could either complete my education or get me surgery, and I chose the surgery. And… well, then things went bad and no way I could go back to school now.) I dreamed of being a librarian, back in the day…
I want to formally apologize for my previous comment. I don’t know what I was thinking and I wasn’t taking into consideration that not everyone has the same opportunities.
Thanks, Ashley.
And sorry to make you sad, LBT.
Cloudiah: Oh, there was a huge cool factor to it. I had a bad moment of ethical temptation when I came across the box of Houdini photos (some were from his touring days, but a lot were from when he was in town for a spiritualist debunking trial–he’s something of an icon in the skeptic community).
Ashley: Thanks for the apology; it means a lot, and I think most folks here will accept it. Sometimes we get sufficiently hyped up on mocking the misogynists that we accidentally cause splash damage.
And hell, Scalzi, who wrote one of the best ‘layman’ articles on privilege out there (the ‘lowest difficulty setting’ metaphor) still tends to deny that economic class is an angle of privilege. (He doesn’t seem to get that there’s a vast difference between ‘being wealthy/middle-class’ and ‘being born wealthy/middle-class’. The latter is absolutely a source of privilege, because it often produces a social safety net.)
LBT — what’ll M.D. art cost me? Cuz I haz money (and just bought myself Biff’s latest!)