The Idler

Bandage Factory

I used to have this summer job as a student in a factory that made bandages and cotton wool products. It was an old rambling victorian mill which was now half empty and was boiling hot and humid, with steam sprayers, as the cotton wool had to be kept damp.

It was also hugely dusty - you would come out at the end of each shift with white hair and of course, nobody wore a mask. So there I was, employed as a bandage folder.

Now, large surgical bandages were folded by hand in this place. You got a large piece of lint fabric, cut to size and had to fold it so the edges were turned in and it was exactly square. You had to stand up and lean over a table to do this and had to make 30 an hour - one every 2 minutes. Then they would go off to be machined. For this back-breaking nit-picking work you got paid £3.11 ph. and I was shite at it, all my bandages got rejected and I had to refold them. I was so bad that I eventually got stuck on the string-cutting machine. This involved getting a huge roll of string, sticking the end into the machine, setting the ancient machine to cut a certain length of string (or sometimes just for a bit of excitement you’d get to cut elastic instead) and then putting a box underneath to catch the pieces of string as the came out of the machine. You’d have to change the roll of string/elastic about once an hour and the box would fill up about every half an hour, but that was it. You could happily sit behind this machine and sleep and read without anybody noticing you. I managed a whole 6 weeks of this and even got a bonus as I had managed to produce more string than the expected rate!

The next year I came back and spent 6 weeks sticking stickers for special offers on bags of cotton wool. I was so good at it that I got promoted to supervisor, which meant that I could decide which radio staion we listened to and didn’t have to make the tea anymore. The only perk of working in this place was unlimited free cotton wool and cheap plasters.

Fiona White