OP
OP
It’s nice to see this thread I started almost 5 years ago still gets the occasional attention. When it comes to stories about working the labs, I have a few.
It was 1975 and I had just exited my time in the military having spent the past 14 months guarding nukes in Europe, working 24 on/24 off with no breaks. I’d picked up the photography/darkroom passion in the service and when I saw the ad for this lab I figured it was perfect.
I showed up at the camera store that fronted the place and met the color lab manager. He explained that the job was for a film cutter on the midnight shift. That suited me because it was a steady shift as opposed to what I had been working and I could go to school during the day. I said that it sounded good to me and I wanted the job. He sighed and motioned me to follow him into a back hallway.
When we were out of earshot of anyone else, he said “Look, you don’t want this job. It’s boring. It’s just cutting strips of film and putting them into envelopes for 8 hours per night. You’ll hate it and in a few weeks you’ll quit and I’ll have to go through the hiring process again. It’s really a job for a woman because they don’t mind boring jobs but I can’t run an ad that says that.”
I told him that I can do boring because I’d just spent that last 14 months doing boring guarding nukes, either on a gate or in a guard tower. I eventually convinced him and got the job. I cut film for about 8 months and then moved up to a printer position. I was the best film cutter they ever had. They had me on the midnight shift and a young woman on the day shift who would cut what didn’t get finished during the night. I cut everything and she had nothing to do and happily got trained to do color spotting and retouching.
We were a “Kodak Lab” in that we used only Kodak chemicals, paper, and machines. The manager of the lab, the one who had hired me but worked days, had been there for years and ran it like a fiefdom and nepotism abounded. The business had been started years ago and the origainal own had passed away and left it to his daughter. She worked in an office and just let each department manager do their own thing.
Kodak showed up and offered to do an audit to measure what our waste was with the further offer to show us, for free, how to improve our quality and timing. The 24-hours service feature was just starting. She agreed and they came in with special trash cans and all scrap prints and rejects were to be placed in them so Kodak could weigh them and compare that to the paper we bought from them. During those days, individual printer operators would set up their machines and errors abounded. Sometimes entire rolls of paper would come out of the processor completely off in color or exposure or some other avoidable problem.
Near the end of the audit period, the manager got caught hauling the waste paper out to the dumpster to avoid it being weighed. Between that and the results of the audit, which were terrible, I couldn’t believe it, but the owner fired him. There was a big shake up in the lab as his wife left and took a bunch of her friends. My friend who ran the print processor was promoted to manager and I was sent to Kodak school to learn how to do quality control. From then on I came in ahead of the shift (actually they had their hours moved back two hours) and I set up all the machines, ran QC on the processors, and then took over lots of other tasks related to that. In the next year I heard we had reduce the cost of running the lab by over 1 million dollars.
So, I was making $5/hour and I’d talked to my counterparts in other labs and heard they were making $8.50. I asked for a raise to $6.50 and, considering how much we had saved, they could afford it. She gave me a 25 cent/hour hour raise and her reasoning was that some people had worked there longer than I had and they’d be upset if they found out I made more than they did.
Of course, I quit.
I then went and moonlighted for a month at another lab, a new one, set them up on the Kodak QC system and their sales people went after the other lab’s accounts which was easy since they were missing their 24-hour deadlines and the quality had gone down the drain.
I had just finished some schooling then so after that month I left that lab, put my camping gear on my motorcycle and roamed the US and Canada for a few months until I was out of money and returned to start a new career in a completely different area, a career path that took me to retirement.
Ah, those were the days.
It was 1975 and I had just exited my time in the military having spent the past 14 months guarding nukes in Europe, working 24 on/24 off with no breaks. I’d picked up the photography/darkroom passion in the service and when I saw the ad for this lab I figured it was perfect.
I showed up at the camera store that fronted the place and met the color lab manager. He explained that the job was for a film cutter on the midnight shift. That suited me because it was a steady shift as opposed to what I had been working and I could go to school during the day. I said that it sounded good to me and I wanted the job. He sighed and motioned me to follow him into a back hallway.
When we were out of earshot of anyone else, he said “Look, you don’t want this job. It’s boring. It’s just cutting strips of film and putting them into envelopes for 8 hours per night. You’ll hate it and in a few weeks you’ll quit and I’ll have to go through the hiring process again. It’s really a job for a woman because they don’t mind boring jobs but I can’t run an ad that says that.”
I told him that I can do boring because I’d just spent that last 14 months doing boring guarding nukes, either on a gate or in a guard tower. I eventually convinced him and got the job. I cut film for about 8 months and then moved up to a printer position. I was the best film cutter they ever had. They had me on the midnight shift and a young woman on the day shift who would cut what didn’t get finished during the night. I cut everything and she had nothing to do and happily got trained to do color spotting and retouching.
We were a “Kodak Lab” in that we used only Kodak chemicals, paper, and machines. The manager of the lab, the one who had hired me but worked days, had been there for years and ran it like a fiefdom and nepotism abounded. The business had been started years ago and the origainal own had passed away and left it to his daughter. She worked in an office and just let each department manager do their own thing.
Kodak showed up and offered to do an audit to measure what our waste was with the further offer to show us, for free, how to improve our quality and timing. The 24-hours service feature was just starting. She agreed and they came in with special trash cans and all scrap prints and rejects were to be placed in them so Kodak could weigh them and compare that to the paper we bought from them. During those days, individual printer operators would set up their machines and errors abounded. Sometimes entire rolls of paper would come out of the processor completely off in color or exposure or some other avoidable problem.
Near the end of the audit period, the manager got caught hauling the waste paper out to the dumpster to avoid it being weighed. Between that and the results of the audit, which were terrible, I couldn’t believe it, but the owner fired him. There was a big shake up in the lab as his wife left and took a bunch of her friends. My friend who ran the print processor was promoted to manager and I was sent to Kodak school to learn how to do quality control. From then on I came in ahead of the shift (actually they had their hours moved back two hours) and I set up all the machines, ran QC on the processors, and then took over lots of other tasks related to that. In the next year I heard we had reduce the cost of running the lab by over 1 million dollars.
So, I was making $5/hour and I’d talked to my counterparts in other labs and heard they were making $8.50. I asked for a raise to $6.50 and, considering how much we had saved, they could afford it. She gave me a 25 cent/hour hour raise and her reasoning was that some people had worked there longer than I had and they’d be upset if they found out I made more than they did.
Of course, I quit.
I then went and moonlighted for a month at another lab, a new one, set them up on the Kodak QC system and their sales people went after the other lab’s accounts which was easy since they were missing their 24-hour deadlines and the quality had gone down the drain.
I had just finished some schooling then so after that month I left that lab, put my camping gear on my motorcycle and roamed the US and Canada for a few months until I was out of money and returned to start a new career in a completely different area, a career path that took me to retirement.
Ah, those were the days.
