Finally, second try, the boss glued his eye on me.
“Come in here.” A white door closed behind us, and we stood in a little room which looked as if a small boy of twelve had knocked it together out of old scraps and odds and ends, unpainted.
He was a nice-looking, fairly young Jew, who spoke with a considerable German accent.
“None in a dress factory, but ...” and I regaled him with the vast amount of experience in other lines that was mine, adding that I had done a good deal of “private dressmaking” off and on, and also assuring him, almost tremblingly, I did so want to land a job—that I was the most willing of workers.
“No, I'm asking you. What do you expect to get?”
If the room where the boss had received me could have been the work of a twelve-year-old, the rest of the factory must have been designed and executed by a boy of eight, or a lame, halt, and blind carpenter just tottering to his grave. There was not a straight shelf. There was not a straight partition. Boards of various woods and sizes had been used and nothing had ever been painted. Such doors as existed had odd ways of opening and closing. The whole place looked as if it had cost about seven dollars and twenty-nine cents to throw together. But, ah! the white and pale blue of the show rooms!
The dress factory job was like another world compared with candy, brass, and the laundry. In each of those places I had worked on one floor of a big plant, doing one subdivided piece of labor among equally low-paid workers busy at the same sort of job as myself. Of what went on in the processes before and after the work we did, I knew and saw nothing. We packed finished chocolates; we punched slots in already-made lamp cones; we ironed already washed, starched, and dampened clothes. Such work as we did took no particular skill, though a certain improvement in speed and quality of work came with practice. One's eyes could wander now and then, one's thoughts could wander often, and conversation with one's neighbors was always possible.
Behold the dress factory, a little complete world of its own on one small floor where every process of manufacture, and all of it skilled work, could be viewed from any spot. Not quite every process—the designer had a room of her own up front nearer where the woodwork was white.