The One About the Chip Factory

When driving into Beloit, Wisconsin along I-43 on a warm summer night, you might be tempted to roll your window down to enjoy the warm weather. You would be met with an almost immediate sensation of walking into a hot fast food fart cloud. You'd look around in disgust and assume it was coming from the many surrounding fast food restaurants, but you'd be wrong. The pungent scent is pumping into the night air by the local chip factory, Frito Lay. Maybe you've heard of it. Frito Lay, where I was employed for my summer & winter breaks in college and where I learned the ins & outs of factory life.

Let me start out by saying, this job paid a lot. At least a lot for a 20-something year old girl whose only bill was her cell phone. And sometimes I didn't even pay that. It's been like 13 years so I honestly don't remember how much and it could be anywhere from $13 to $43 per hour and it's really all the same to me. I have no concept of money and although my dad expected me to save for tuition, I blew it all on bar tabs and slutty Wet Seal clothes and one memorable-ish spring break trip to Florida with my friends. And it contributed to my 401K account (whatever the fuck that is) for like $300, bringing my total 401K to approximately $1300, give or take.

Since it paid well, it was rather competitive to get this gig at this fart factory, but my boyfriend at the time had a sister-in-law who worked there and she was apparently a good reference because I got an interview and a scheduled drug test. I have absolutely no memory of the interview, but I do remember the drug test pretty vividly. It was my very first drug test, although it would be far from the last. And it happened to be administered by my high school boyfriend's mother who I hadn't seen in years; we were forced into a small room where we made small talk while she plucked bleached blonde hairs from my stupid head. Yeah! It was a hair drug test which I've been told can show drug activity for years back. This just seems rather nosey of Frito Lay. Like, what college student isn't occasionally smoking a joint and partaking in some very very very small doses of recreational cocaine? I wanted to ask Gloria that question, but instead I played it cool. I think all the bleach in my hair must have played some miracle catalyst, because I passed! And I was officially hired.

Between my drug test and my appointed start date, my boyfriend dumped me. I was depressed and I didn't want to move back to my stupid hometown where I would see him all the goddamn time and I certainly didn't want to work at Frito Lay and see his sister-in-law. I fought it, I threw fits, I made threats- but in the end it was my dad who made me take the job. He said something to me that I won't ever forget: working in a factory will make me realize that I never want to work in a factory again and I'll work harder in school. Tough love, am I right?

Training was fully paid and lasted about 3 weeks. I secretly planned to quit once training was done. And it wasn't bad, just sitting in an air conditioned conference room with like 6 other college kids learning about chip making and chip bagging and.... other shit. I'm really struggling to remember the Frito Lay lingo, I guess I have successfully blocked out this time in my life. Basically, my job was to take bags of chips off an assembly line and pack them into boxes and then stack the boxes onto a pallet. Repeat 5-800 times per hour. Each hour you rotate to a different assembly line, I guess to make it less mundane. Part of training was to shadow Frito Lay employees on the 'line, which was not fun. The majority of these Frito Lay lifers were stand-offish and although it is hard to hold any sort of conversation over the loud & steady stream of Wavy Lays- I got the sense they didn't like this young college girl shadowing their every move. If we could've talked, I'm sure I could have won them over with my wit and new found knowledge of the history of the Cheeto, but instead they had nothing to judge me on but my bleached out cocaine hair and my x-small Frito Lay t-shirt that I requested when I very clearly would've been more comfortable in a M/L. That was the uniform: Frito Lay t-shirt, scrub pants, hairnet, goggles, ear plugs, steel toed shoes covered in medical booties. All soaked in a putrid potato chip oil stench that you can never wash out.

Besides shadowing fellow co-workers who had a CHIP on their shoulder, I liked training. It was basically like college, sitting in a classroom with your peers struggling to stay awake through a power point presentations. But when training was coming to a close, I started to plan on quitting. I started to look for my "out". I've always been bad with confrontation and even well into my 30's, when it comes time to quit a job I will avoid it until the last possible minute. Here's your "two" weeks notice, I have literally known for thirty two weeks that I'm leaving. Good luck trying to replace this wildly professional employee! But the thing about Frito Lay is, I didn't even really know who my boss was? Like I had trainers and I had shift managers, but nobody had officially come forward and said "I'm your boss, come to me if you want to quit". And so... I just kept going. For the rest of the summer. My dad was so proud of me. He thought I had a good work ethic, and I didn't have the heart to tell him that I just don't know how to quit.

As if it wasn't depressing enough working in a chip factory and strategically avoiding my ex's sister-in-law, I was assigned to 3rd shift. Now I was on the exact opposite schedule of all my friends, working all night and sleeping all day. Working 3rd shift is fucking insane and I hope I never have to do it again. Sometimes after a shift ended at 7 am, I would peel off my Frito Lay uniform and hairnet, heavily spray on some Victoria Secret body spray from head to toe, and then head down to the Turtle Tap- which is the only bar in the stateline area open at 8 fucking a.m. When I walked in, all the fellow 3rd shifter drunks would squint up from their morning cocktail and wonder what I was doing there. Not because I didn't fit in (because I did, a fellow blue collar line worker, complaining about a boss I'd never met). But, because, I smelled like a constant fast food fart. The stench was soaked down to my skin.

The work was very physically hard. I was lifting, I was throwing boxes, I was squatting thousands of times a day. I was speed walking around. I was making boxes in 2.5 seconds or less. (Folding boxes in rapid succession is still one of my favorite party tricks, but guests rarely request it.) It was like some sort of junk food circuit training class from hell. All this strenuous work combined with my crippling depression over being recently dumped (I never eat when I'm sad)- somehow morphed me into the best shape of my life. After 3 months, I rose like some beautiful phoenix out of the Cheeto cheese dust ashes. I've considered setting up a factory assembly line in my garage and use it to replicate a work-out. But part of the regime is that I MUST eat a small bag of chips every 30-60 minutes. What they don't tell you in training is, you can eat chips right off the line! They say you can't, but who is really going to stop you? The answer is, not my boss.

I didn't really bother getting to know any of my co-workers. I can't stress enough how LOUD it was in the factory and how constantly my mouth was full of chips- too hard to talk. And I honestly thought I would quit any day, as soon as I found out who my boss was. I talked to a couple other college girls, a couple trainers, and a couple black guys on my shift. They were two of the only Frito Lay Lifers who were fun and nice to me, everyone else was so goddamn grumpy (and I do NOT blame them). Their names were Marcus & Johnny and I really can't talk about Frito Lay without thinking of them fondly.

It was 2007 and the height of shitty reality television shows on VH1. (Do you remember that???) It was Flavor of Love, Rock of Love, and Hogan Knows Best. Probably my second or third week on the 'line, Johnny was like, "Do you know who you look like?" I already knew what was coming so I dead-faced said "Hulk Hogan?" And his smile slipped a little but he said "Nah... his daughter, Brooke!" I got this comparison all the time during this particular time of my life, mostly from well-intentioned black guys. It's like black people can't even tell extremely tan, extremely bleach blonde white girls apart! We don't all look the same!

2008, with my beloved beer bong and beloved Molly, and my favorite bag of Tostitos

Sometime in early 2000s with my Dad and his beloved do-rag

From then on, every time I walked down the assembly lines I would hear over the chatter of the potato chip rumbling, "YOOOOOOOOOOOO, Brooke!" and "Broooooooke, what's good?" It caught on, and everyone on my shift started calling me Brooke Hogan. Factory workers really love VH1. At the end of the summer after one particularly miserable shift, I was punching out, and Johnny came up behind me and softly said "Yo, have a good weekend, Bef". Maybe it was the exhaustion, maybe it was the disbelief that he didn't call me Brooke, but I couldn't stop myself when I said "Did you just call me Bef?" And he was just like, "Yeah, I thought I'd use your real name for once."

I would go on to work at Frito Lay my senior winter break and again my senior summer. I'd try to use this "internship" (nobody called it that) as a foot in the door into corporate Pepsi Co once I graduated but I never heard back. Maybe it's because "packaging chips" had no relevance to "advertising" (which was my utterly useless degree). Or maybe it's because Marcus & Johnny had never heard of a "Bethany" before and were just waiting on a reference call for "Brooke Hogan".

Towards the end of my first summer at the end of a very sweaty shift, I got called back to have a meeting with a guy named Mike, who was in charge of college hires. He lead me down a trail of different hallways and through many doors into a cubicled air-conditioned office that I never even knew existed. Maybe I missed this elite section on the factory tour. My perpetual Pigpen cloud of potato chip stench infiltrated their clean, crisp office air. I self consciously peeled back my hair net as people peeked around their cubicle walls, nostrils flared.

To be honest, I was so pissed to find this other side of Frito Lay. Why couldn't I work on the corporate side? They were wearing ties! I could wear all my slutty business casual Wet Seal office clothes. I could send faxes. I could refill their Dorito trough. I kind of hopefully thought maybe I was being lead into a new job offer. Mike sat me down in his dingy office, and it turns out he had graduated from Eau Claire! So we talked about Water Street and the Hill to the dorms, and probably Haas before he was like "Listen, Brooke, you're doing a good job and we'd like you to come back over your winter break". And I thought about the hot factory, and the endless bags of chips, and Johnny & Marcus, but all I said out loud was, "Mike....are you my boss?"