A lot has changed in the paper industry - and for the better. My first job was for the summer as a paper tester. At the time, it was one of the very few jobs which had air conditioning - not to mention you could stay relatively clean - also unusual for the industry.
With 3 days training, I was ready to go. No orientation about safety programs, about where the cafeteria was, or that there was a nurse 24/7 (common then, but not today). I quickly found out the "training way" was not the operating way. Machine foremen had a lot of power with their own way of doing paper testing. You learned pretty quick not to rock the boat - at least on nights and weekends. A good number of the machine foremen were missing arms (or parts there of) because of incidents on the machine (threading the machine was very dangerous in those days - still is today - but with a lot of safety improvements). As a consequence, they took a very personal approach to my safety - even if the formal approach was some what lacking.
There were a lot of great people working on the shift and we had some pretty good times. My lessons forward were don't jump to conclusions based on shift tests and never assume an employee knows the organization or the safe way to do the job.
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