"A Life's Changing Experience?"

 What would you do if you were at work one morning, and you were hurt severely? How would you handle your child, who was still in diapers, and was still soley dependant on you to feed her, change her, bathe her and take care of her, not to mention having to take care of yourself?

In these next few hubs of mine, I will share with you what I did to survive. I will give you all the details of my accident, and I gaurantee you, that by the end of my final hub you will have a visual on everything that happened to me that day, and all the years that followed, including the present.

For legal purposes that I am under, I am not aloud to disclose what company I worked for, and names of anyone I worked with.

I was a Machine Operator for a well known company, and I was in charge of three to four other employees, including myself. My job was to accept orders, train my employees, meet my quota for the day, and make sure the finished product was at its best, before the product was loaded onto trucks for the client. I operated a hot glue Laminator. I was hired in July of 2000, and almost a year later was promoted to machine operator of the laminator. It wasn't a hard job. When you came in the morning all you had to do was pick up your orders, turn the machine on, so it would get hot, get the roles of film loaded, and when the red light turned off on the machine, we knew it was time to begin our day. Nothing to it. I respected my co-workers. I treated them the way I wanted to be treated. When you have respect for your team, you get respect back and things get done and they get done on time.

We laminated silver film onto foam sheets that were cut by another part of the plant, at the exact specifications as the client ordered. These laminated sheets are used for insulation for newly built homes, and/or, insulation used by homeowners to keep the heat in and cold out. My crew and I always met our quota, every day. I had a very good crew. Nobody else in the plant would come over to help us when we needed it, because I had an all girl crew. Immediately everyone thought the laminating/fan-fold area was a "girly" job. Plus, I was in charge of anyone who came to my area. I know men don't like to take orders from a women, so no one would come and help. But that was okay, because we were good, and we knew it and we didn't need their help.

One month before my injury, we were told another piece of machinery was going to be added to our laminator. We were all excited, and the following day we were distributed all through the plant to do other tasks, because our machine was getting the new ink laminator. Maintenance could not connect the two machines together without downtime, so there was no work that day on the laminator, instead of taking the day off, we worked in other areas of the plant. Work resumed the following day on the laminator and we were very busy with our back-orders, as well as, our quota for the day.  

As the days passed all we did was laminate sheets, fan-fold the sheets, and meet our quota. We still did not know how to run our newly added ink laminator. My crew and I would always wonder when we were going to be taught to run the ink laminator, and learn the procedures. We knew every machine that we had in this plant, had steps to follow, to safely run the machines. We didn't see any for the ink laminator. This topic was brought up everyday. They would ask me if I had heard anything, and my answer would always be no. Maintenance was able to alter some things on the ink laminator, I guess for the machine to work properly with the laminator.  By altering the machine, It had me worried. We were kept in the dark about it, and safety was always our number one priority. 

On June 11, 2001 our plant manager came in our area to tell us we had our first order for the new machine, that we were to produce the finished product and put the order on the truck by the end of the day on June 13, 2001. He explained a little about how the ink laminator would work with the hot glue laminator. He told us a specialist who knew this machine, was coming out June 12, 2001, to train us on it, in the morning. We were all excited to finally learn this machine.

The following day , once again our plant manager came to our area, and told us the specialist wasn't coming to show us the "ropes" for the machine. Instead he handed me this see-through folder with some kind of steps on it. There were a total of seven steps. They ranged from changing the logo, to adding the ink. The steps never showed us exactly how to do this or that. It was like we had to guess on what to do. The plant manager was making it look like he knew what he was doing, when in fact he didn't. He would tell us one thing, and then turn around and tell us something different. That day was a nightmare. We did, at the end of the day, get the machines to work but it took us all day. We had an order the next day, and we really didn't know what we were doing. I was very concerned about the situation. I was very nervous. I usually am very confident in my work, but I wasn't feeling it that day.

Come back to see my next hub, and to find out what happened.

Have a wonderful day...........Thank you...............Patti