When I was teaching English in Korea I used to play this game where I would ask my students to create a list of three things – typically jobs, but not necessarily. Two of these things were meant to be true and one had to be a lie. They would have to present their three things to the class then they would have to answer questions about each item. They would have to tell the truth about the two things that were true and they would have to continue to lie about the one that was a lie. Then the class voted on which one they thought was made up. It usually worked out splendidly. Occasionally I would get a student who was morally opposed to lying and sometimes I would get students who were just awful at lying but it was mostly fun.

By means of example I would go first. I would almost always use jobs.

When I was about 20, I worked in a factory. I would bicycle to the industrial part of town to go to work. I worked with three or four tough looking guys who talked about beer and girls and very little else. I think it was the only actual job that I had that had a time clock with a punch card and everything. The factory was steamy and smelled of burning plastic. And for good reason. We made plastic fences.

It was my job to dump rather heavy buckets of plastic pellets in a giant hopper which were melted and then squeezed out – not unlike a Playdo fun factory – variously colored plastic fences. I then had to run down the steps of this giant hopper, grab the lead of the rather hot plastic fence coming out and then attach it to a giant roller. I then had to set the roller to turn, rolling up the hopper’s giant plastic excrement. The fences were almost always orange. Sometimes they were garbage bag green. And every once in a splendid while, they were yellow. I also had to load the large bulky rolls onto skids and drive this tiny tractor around to unload the rolls in storage. Almost always I had to do all of these things at once. It was very tricky to time. It was also very tricky to take a break or to go to the bathroom.

Late one night, feeling equally reckless and trapped in my repetitive tasks, I dumped into the giant stinking steaming hopper a little of the orange pellets, and then, a little of the yellow, and then a little of the green. I wanted more colors. The result was not surprisingly horrible. We also had a machine that melted down mistakes. This garish roll of plastic fence was liquefied and then gratefully tossed. Unlike with Playdo, where, when you mix all the colors, you get a dull grey ball, this liquid plastic abortion was more akin to the color of cat sick. It was ghastly.

My coworkers were fairly congenial although somewhat surly-looking and quite often they would show up to work hung-over or drunk or hung-over and drunk. When I went home, my clothes, my hair, my skin smelled of plastic. It was nearly two weeks after finishing this job that I stopped smelling plastic.

SS