20
The Chopper
Today I found myself working in something they called a shear gang. It was four staff who work a big uninteresting machine that slices steel. You might have thought that all this stuff we use comes made to order. However, I was beginning to understand that little of what was made to order actually comes that way; someone, or something has to make it that way. Today our job was to take flat sheets of steel and cut them into thin strips so they could be loaded up onto a pallet and driven someplace else in the factory and turned into something else.
Two of us were to stand behind the machine and pick up the parts as they fell. One of those two would feed large sheets of steel onto the shear, and I was one of the two staff who would center it and start chopping it into little
