NO SLEEPING IN THE PLANT!

by: Jim Nagel

It was my first day at Inland. Was I a little scared, intimidated? You bet. I didn’t know what to expect. I had never been in the mills before, even though I had lived in Northwest Indiana all my life. There were guards at the mill gates, traffic and people scurrying everywhere. It was definitely a lively area.

One of the stories you always heard about the mills was how everybody always slept out there. I figured it couldn’t be true because if even half the guys slept out here nothing would ever get done. Unless, steelworkers had this special flair for working in their sleep or something.

I arrived at the personnel office at 6:45 a.m. and there were already about forty broken English, a little bit of everything. A few minutes after 7:00 a guy came out and started calling out names. When your name was called you were given a file card and told to go across the street and get a new pair of safety shoes. After we got our shoes we were told to get on a blue bus with an Inland Steel sign on the side. At this point, I kind of felt like I was being inducted into the army.

So off we went over an overpass to a place that was called Plant 2. We drove through the gate, wow! The size of the buildings! I remember thinking, “This is Plant 2, what about Plant 1, 3 and 4? This place is gigantic!”

Some hokey guy named Clarence was our tour guide for the day. He didn’t seems to be the type to be working in a steel mill, he smiled way too much. He as wearing a clean, white hard hat with all these stickers on it, #2 BOF, #3 Open Hearth”, “Tops.” When the bus got to the Plant 2 gate you could tell that the guards, Clarence and the bus driver all knew each other well by the way they talked to each other. It was just like a big family.

As we were riding around the mill, some of the guys were taking it all in and a few of them started to nod out. I guess some people don’t waste much time with this sleeping-in-the-mill thing. When Clarence saw these guys were sleeping, he politely yelled, “Wake-up, we don’t allow sleeping in the mill!”

Finally we ended up at what was called the Orientation Center; it was located in this massive place called Plant 2. We got off the bus and strolled inside. There was another guy at the Orientation Center named Charlie who walked with a limp. He seemed to be Clarence’s sidekick. He had us sit down and he and Clarence proceeded to tell us all about Inland and how steel was made. We watched a few film that Charlie ran for us.

After about an hour of watching films we were each issued a yellow hard hat with a white X on the top. Clarence said the X symbolized new hires in the mill so everyone would watch out for us. I later learned that the X more accurately meant that everyone would screw around with us in the mill until we knew better.

We got back on the bus and headed out to a few of the places we saw in the film. Clarence was trying to explain the steel making process but half of us couldn’t care less and the other half didn’t fully understand him. I think that most of us wanted to go and have lunch. So we headed back to the Orientation Center for lunch. We were give ARA gourmet specials; one good thing about it was it was free.

After lunch, Clarence started telling us about all the rules of conduct in the plant.

He said, “There’s no gambling, no guns, no alcohol, no drugs and no sleeping!” He tried to act serious when saying this. “You could get fired for any of these things!”

The agenda for the rest of the day was to watch another film and then we were taken into the mill where we were assigned to work. The room where Charlie was running the projector was separate from us, only connected by a shoe box sized hole in the wall. When Clarence was ready to start the next film he yelled, “Roll it, Charlie!”

Nothing happened. “Charlie, roll it!”

Nothing happened. He tried a third time, but still nothing happened.

Finally Clarence went back to where Charlie was sitting, opened the door on Charlie who was snoring away, sound asleep. Clarence had to wake up his good friend Charlie so we could watch the next film. So when Clarence came back, we were all laughing at him about the “no sleeping in the plant rule”. You could tell Clarence felt like a real idiot. That first day incident I’ll always remember. The lesson I learned was not to take anything too seriously here.