Made In China


Tuesday marked my first overnight visit to a Chinese factory. My company had a 10,000pc order that had to ship Thursday and the factory was not going to get it done. My office head found out and gathered anyone who could help. Naturally, I offered my services...little did I know, I would be working in a factory on the assembly line. We pile into a taxi at 1pm and arrive at the factory an hour later. The order is for notepads and we start doing QC on the 2,000 pcs that have already been made. Once those were finished, I found out that we needed to help manufacture the remaining 8,000 pcs! Say WHAT!? Its now 5pm and we have to make these note pads from the cutting of the paper, to the QC on the pieces, to the pasting together, to the packaging, shrinking wrapping, stickering, and then packing. Yes, I did it all, through out the entire night...come 3 am, I needed to rest and fell asleep for a few hours. Around 5 am, I got back up and got back to work. Around 7 am, I had a melt down and by 8am I was crying (though I told everyone I was getting a cold). Finally 11 am I returned back to my house, showered and crawled into bed.

I'll tell you something you probably don't know...all those 'made in china' stickers that you see on the back of EVERYTHING are manually applied. There is no machine that puts them on...some poor person has to place those stickers on back of every single piece...and tuesday night, that poor person was me. I probably pasted 5,000 f-ing stickers on the back of those note pads. Going forward, don't simply disregard those sitckers...take a moment and appreciate the work that went into getting that sticker into place.

Overall, it was certainly an experience. I now have a greater appreciation of what it means to be a factory worker. Granted I only did it for about 15 hours...but trust me, that was enough. I'm so lucky to be where I am and it took a full day of rest and a 3 hour full body massage to get back on track.