The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker
This adequately describes my life and job, except I stare at invoices all day entering similar information day in, day out, submittimg electronic data to a handful of government agencies for twelve and a half years now. I&#x27;m basically a piece of OCR software that&#x27;s told to sit there, be quiet, be perfect, if you call in sick we&#x27;re holding it against you, no you can&#x27;t take time off that month is blacked out, no you don&#x27;t need a cost of living raise, produce produce produce! I&#x27;ll regularly just zone out for who knows how long, usually snapping back to the world when my head starts to dip or my eyes go unfocused enough to start to cause discomfort. Realizing, this is my &#x27;life&#x27; and likely will be until I die.<p>--<p>《我就那样站着入睡》
&quot;I Fall Asleep, Just Standing Like That&quot;<p>and<p>&quot;My Life’s Journey is Still Far from Complete&quot;<p>hit way too close to home. You&#x27;d think my life would be drastically different in midwest America. I&#x27;m not standing at an assembly line, I didn&#x27;t have to leave my home town to go far away to a factory, but I really am expected to be more machine than man. I&#x27;m expected to sit at a desk, not talk, limit my trips to the bathroom, limit getting up with the exception of the 2 daily parades of 2 laps around the office that are done as a group, if you&#x27;re sick you&#x27;re expected to be at work unless dying although every cold and flu season corporate stressed &quot;if you&#x27;re sick stay home&quot; ha! Everything is about efficiency and production, merit-based increases rarely cover cost of living increases, I get 5 weeks of vacation a year but blocks of time get blacked out and we work any holiday that&#x27;s on a weekday while local management (and most definitely corporate) is at home with their families.<p>I saw Office Space in theaters when I was 14. I thought it was satire. Oh how wrong I was. It is life. Actually, it&#x27;s better than life.<p>While I enjoy the luxuries of sitting and, sometimes working HVAC (it was in the 80&#x27;s in my office most of the summer), I do highly repetitive work that is effectively data entry that in 5, 10, 15 years OCR software will do the bulk of. Want to advance? Well, you better have a 4-6 year degree and be willing to move to other states multiple times to earn an extra 10-20%. Want to get sick? Do it on your own time. Want to take a vacation with your family? Ehhhh we&#x27;ll see but don&#x27;t count on it. Want to enjoy a holiday away from work? Hahahaha better be one of the few people that get drawn to have it off. Want a raise? Ok you can have a merit based increase once a year, if you were sick you get less, if you made a few errors each month while trying to make unrealistic production standards you get less, weren&#x27;t cheerful enough based on your manager&#x27;s arbitrary determination you get a little less...<p>I come on sites like HN, Reddit, even Facebook. I hear people talk about their jobs. I hear people bitch that the company retreat wasn&#x27;t at some place cool this year, I hear people complain they only get 2 months of maternity&#x2F;paternity leave, I hear them whine how oh boo hoo they have to work 4 more years at their job to be able to be FIRE (ha, I will have to work until the day I die, cry me a river), I hear that tens of thousands had the luxury of walking out of work to protest sexual harassment policy when I can&#x27;t call in without a doctor&#x27;s note or it counts against me and even with a doctor&#x27;s note I know it&#x27;s going to shave several tenths of a percent off of my MAYBE 2.6% merit-based increase on my annual review.<p>Damn Foxconn employees, I feel you. Oh how I feel you.