Me and Em got almost to the office when I realized I hadn't given the girls their morning meds, so we had to turn around and take Mo her meds at school. She was in the midst of dissecting a frog when I got to her, and appeared to be having the time of her life doing it. So that was cool.
The whole class was doing it, she didn't just catch herself a frog and start cutting. Just thought I should clarify, this is the kid that once bit a possum.
Anyway, we got to the office at ten and I proceeded to train her on bits and pieces of my job.
Some of the stuff doesn't translate well, but she had her MP3 player and her cell phone (until she killed the battery texting).
She did get to make some plates. A lot of what we do goes direct to polyester plates, and I was hoping that device would run out of media or chemistry so I could walk her through loading it with plate material or even better yet the mixing of noxious chemicals. No such luck.
We also have a metal plate maker that's not as automated as the poly machine. A long run, an item that's likely to be reordered over and over without changes, something with critical registration, or anything that's going on the big press, these are the things we make metal plates for. I'm pretty sure my explanation went right out the other ear if it even got into her head, she was surprised that what I referred to as 'plates' were big rectangles instead of little circles.
I tried to get into the history of lithography a little bit but I might as well have been telling her about the last time I got stuck in the Inner Circle of Fault.
She had fun making plates, though. There's not a lot to it, and at one point she asked me dubiously if this was what I did all day. It's one of the things I do all day, my job (thankfully) has quite a bit of variety in it. I do prepress, I design, I rescue 'art' from word files, I do Photoshop surgery, etc.
But as with most jobs, it's not much to watch. I remember reading in 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published and 14 Reasons Why It Just Might, a section about the fatal error of including way too many details of an author's day job, about Pat Walsh meeting a woman who worked for a circus. When he eagerly asked her what that's like, she answered that it was a lot of paperwork.
So Em made a lot of paper cranes. We had our brown bag lunches, we met the other kids who were on hand, etc. It surprised me she didn't want to work the bindery with the two other teenage girls, but the two of them were already friends, and I think Em felt the outsider when introduced.
Then my boss' kid entered the mix. (Well, one of my bosses, describing what to expect at work I had to admit I had more than one boss. Two, in some ways three or four of them, kinda like Office Space except it's such a tiny company it kind of beggars the meaning of hierarchy. If I'd thought of it, my answer would have been really that there is only one boss, the customer. Whatever I do, if anyone from the owners on down question it, as long as the honest answer is 'Because that's what the customer wanted or needed,' it's all good.)
My boss' daughter is less than half Em's age, which means she was instantly drawn to her. My kid says she wants a career on Broadway, and I know she loves the stage and musicals, but even money she ends up in Elementary Ed and happy as a clam.
She taught the little one to make paper cranes, they played hide and seek, they hid each others shoes, they played cards, they ate Dum Dums, etc.
It was super-enjoyable. I know my last employer, when asked about 'take your daughter to work' scoffed at it. Yes, it's a formal way for my kid to play hooky for a day, no it's not a big deal. But it's not devoid of value, and you have to be dead inside to not see the fun of it. I learned when part of 'management' at that former employer that you could screw around and pretend it was legitimate as 'team building' or a 'morale booster.'
Much more than the things that flew under radar in that environment, I think a bunch of us bringing our honyocks to the shop was legitimate team building and a real morale booster.
For true, our kids are why we do what we do. It's not like any shop went out of business because it shut those kids out for the sake of a 5% productivity drop for one day of the year.
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