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English 0950-05
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The High School Drama of HTI

"First you put on your facemask, your bouffant, your smock, and last but not least your rubber gloves." I did that everyday for three months alongside 4,000 other HTI employees. My job title was Trace Operator or machine operator. In the beginning I worked on a machine called VD8. I would pull sheets of Mylar off 0.2 mm thick pieces of stainless steel sheets plated with gold. The panels would then be put onto metal frames and then be put through the developer. I would then go down to the end of the machine and catch the frames as they came out. They would then get loaded into a large oven and they would be baked for two hours. Once an oven was done the panels would be put back into a tote and move onto the next operation. Among the monotony of the job was overcome by the diversity of the workplace.

Like any other corporation HTI has a CEO, the stereotypical white, middle-aged man who founded the company.  It has a board of directors and a host of other highly educated people which again a majority of them are males that work in a corporate office, which is located at another plant.  The plant in Hutchinson is broken up into multiple areas.  There are five different areas in HTI, each of them have the same management structure.  HTI is a plant running 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.  So there is a shift change every twelve hours.  There is one supervisor in charge.  Next is the lead and each area has a different lead, the lead is the management right under the supervisor.  There are several leads under one supervisor.  A lead would be considered like a secondary supervisor.  My lead Kathy was a good lead.  She was firm when she had to be, but most of the time she was very laidback.  Surprisingly a vast majority of the leads were females.  This surprises me because, considering the bad habit of stereotyping, most management is men.  Under the leads were the machine operators, me and the rest of the employees.

Among the regular employees there was mix of classes.  Mostly separated by age and race.  The average HTI employee could range in age from 18 to 60.  There was mostly Hispanics and Caucasians employed at HTI.  There were more and more Somalian that were being hired everyday.  There was a big mix of people that worked there, and it was always changing.  HTI has a high turn over rate as far as large companies go.

Most of the time there is a cohesive work environment between ethnic groups, but every once in a while there is a scuffle between employees.  One night there was a fight between a group of Hispanic women; the verbal fight itself was started at work, but the actual fist fight took place at a gas station on a work break.  One of the women was jumped by a larger group, she was hospitalized as a result of the fight.  Another moment of non-cohesiveness took place when a female coworker of mine was confronted by a Somalian man.  He told her that she offended him by her loudness and her attitude.  He told her that if she were in his country she would be beaten or even shot.  He told her that she shouldn't be talking at all.  He was uncouth about the whole thing.  She responded by telling the man, "Well if you don't like it here, you can go back to your own fucking country!"  I think she had the right to respond to him in the way she did, but I don't think I would have done it that way.  More often then not I see an occurrence where cultural ideas clash.

Each area has a trainer, someone who trains the new employees.  One evening after I had been there a week and my trainer, Amy had moved on and was training someone else; she had begun training a Somalian man.  During a break we had begun talking and she said he was missing a thumb and that his product handling was horrible.  She said that she had told him over and over how to things and he just wasn't listening.  I asked her if it was that he didn't understand what she was saying, she said that wasn't it.  It ended up being that he refused to listen to a woman.  He lasted about four days before he was fired.  The more I think about it it seems that age could have played a large role in his attitude, my trainer Amy was about 25 years old and this guy was older than she was.

Many of my coworkers were middle aged adults.  I had expected segregation by age at lunch and during breaks, but to my surprise most of the people that I talked to at work were over the age of 30.  I was surprised at this because I don't quite see myself as an adult yet, but in the eyes of others I am.  HTI is made up of many different classes of people but a majority of them are middle class laborers, who have nothing more than a high school diploma.

There are the people who will work 15 days in a row to make ends meet in their homes.  While employed at HTI I worked with many younger Hispanics who were working to support their entire family.  Not their children but their parents, brothers and sisters.  For many this was the only source of income for the family, often because their parents did not speak English.  I think that it is unfair that these young people are in a way losing their innocence.  I became friends with a young Hispanic man named Jesus, he was 20, living on his own, while his brothers and his mom lived in Iowa.  He would do nothing but work, he would work enough to pay for his car payment and then send the rest of his money to his mom and brothers.  There are some who are struggling to make ends meet.  The pay is too high for public assistance, but hardly enough to make it through the month.

There was young woman, not any older than I am.  She was four months pregnant when I started working there.  Here boyfriend kicked her out, and she hadn't spoken to her parents in almost two years.  She had to find her own apartment.  She moved in with nothing but a bed.  I was talking with her one night, she was complaining that her eyes hurt and her contacts were bothering her.  She was wearing two-week disposable contacts, and she was on her third month on that pair.  I told her to change them.  She then told me it was her last pair and she couldn't afford new ones and she was using water as contact solution. I then told her to wear her glasses, she didn't have any.  I told her she could probably go on public assistance.  She said she had tried but, now that she worked at HTI she made too much money, and didn't qualify until the baby was born.  That is no way a 19 year old girl should live.

All in all, it was good place to work.  It made me open my eyes to what a college education really has to offer me.  My older coworkers would say, "Good, keep going to school, so you're not stuck here like me."  I was exposed to different types of people; it taught me not to judge a person until I get to know them.  Diversity is a natural part of our society.  We need to embrace others and their differences.  I would like to finish up by saying that no matter where a person goes, they are exposed to new ideas and situations, and that a person should learn all they can from them.