The Sock Factory Incident by Meg Groff

"But on one very hot, very humid summer night, my future came to a sudden end."

After graduating from high school, I swore off any more schooling. I thought graduating from high school was accomplishment enough when it came to a formal education, and given how many classes I had cut, it really was an accomplishment. With classrooms finally behind me, I just wanted to get a job.

Unfortunately, my efforts to remain gainfully employed were markedly ineffectual, likely due to the fact that I had no marketable skills. But I kept trying, and was gradually constructing a résumé of short-lived, low-paying, joy-killing jobs for which I failed to show even a glimmer of ability. I was, for example, the worst waitress that ever lived. Not that I was sullen or inattentive. It was just that I could never remember who ordered what, didn't know one salad dressing from another, and could somehow trip over a smudge on the floor.

During one inexplicable spurt of ill-placed ambition, I applied to be a taxicab driver. It was a venture doomed from the start because it was years before the miracle of GPS, and saying I have a poor sense of direction is a colossal understatement. I am directionally dyslexic. Faced with a choice, I never fail to turn left when I should turn right, or vice-versa. Maps can’t help me. They look to me like impenetrable mazes. Consequently, my career as a cab driver lasted exactly two days, both of which I spent getting hopelessly lost searching for my passengers' requested destinations. I still recall my last passenger, who sat patiently in the back seat as I drove down one road after another, looking in vain for any clue that would tell me where in the world we were going. When he finally fled from the cab, he gently suggested that I had not yet found my niche.

But nothing compared to my job at the sock factory.

I saw the Want Ad in the local newspaper, where a neighbor claimed it had appeared unfailingly for sixteen years. I probably should have pondered whether this was a bad sign, but I was in need of employment and saw no reason to rush to judgment. Maybe they got a discounted rate for a lifetime ad. Was that any business of mine?

I went to the factory and filled out an application. For my previous work experience, I put down “varied.” The boss raised an eyebrow at this. When he got to the part that asked why I wanted the job and saw my eloquent answer (“I’m virtually penniless”), he looked reassured and hired me on the spot.

He took me to the top floor of the three-story building, where, in a gray, cavernous room, the sock-making machines were making socks. The machines were large, ominous contraptions, crashing and bellowing and drilling out the most unattractive socks I had ever seen. The socks were white and stubby, with a tight band of elastic at the top. It was the day-shift, and the women employees all looked hunch-backed and in their late sixties. Each woman was in charge of a long line of machines, and went trudging up and down her line, turning the socks inside-out and trimming and stacking them. Bins beneath each machine caught the socks as they plopped out, and the women leaned over and grabbed them as they landed. Their hunches made the leaning seem almost effortless. It was all very tidy.

After one day of instruction and supervision on the day-shift, I was sent to work the graveyard shift from 10:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m. There were only three people on that shift, despite room for many more, and we were a motley crew. Two of us — a middle-aged co-worker named Bonny and I — had the task of trimming, folding, and stacking the socks as they coughed out of the formidable sock-making machines. Bonny and I, by coincidence, had applied for the job on the same day, so we were inexperienced together. The third worker, an eighteen-year-old boy, was supposed to keep the machines in a semblance of repair.

The teenaged mechanic was a slacker. He spent his nights in the basement, reading girly magazines or sleeping on a pile of rejected socks. We rarely saw him. Bonny was in the late stages of depression, so her name did not suit her much. Her work-record was spotty. She showed up only two or three nights a week and started crying about ten minutes into the shift. She was usually still crying when the bell rang for us to leave. She managed to combine working and weeping with a certain desperate flair.

Bonny and I each ran a row of twenty machines. The machines looked like hulking life-forms, with huge spools of cotton and elastic protruding from their torsos in sundry places. The slightest breeze could influence the tension on the threads, causing them to break, so despite the oppressive heat of summer we had to keep all the windows closed. The air was thick with lint and dense with humidity.

Each machine made a complete sock every 58 seconds. Each sock had to be turned inside out, trimmed at three places where the threads hung loose, and then folded and stacked into piles of two dozen. Each pile of two dozen socks had to be tied together with a string. Eight of those piles then had to be bundled securely with a rope, carried to a chute, and dropped through to an unseen place below. I often wondered, as I watched the bundles disappear, my hours of mindless toil plummeting forever out of sight, exactly where they went. I never did find out.

It was a harrowing job in many ways. The machines were dangerous, unbearably noisy, unceasingly productive. We had to lean over them periodically to add new spools of thread, and we heard horror-stories about people losing fingers. The factory was a fire-trap. The building, an old converted barn, stood by itself at the end of a dusty dirt road on the outskirts of town. There wasn’t a tree in sight. It was summertime and sizzling. But I was getting good at the job. I showed genuine promise, for a beginner, and the boss commended me on a number of occasions when he arrived with the dayshift at 6:00 a.m.

My only real problem was the cigarette habit I had at the time.

We were not allowed to smoke in the building. With all the lint in the air, a lit match might have set the place ablaze. To smoke a cigarette, you had to leave the building. To leave the building, you had to dash down three flights of stairs and out the door. It wasn’t the exercise I minded. It was the sock machines.

The sock machines could only be turned off at a certain cycle in their performance, or they would break. For all their imposing bulk, they were fragile (we were told) and broke easily. Each machine reached that cycle at a different time, and it took at least fifteen minutes to turn all of them off. There was an emergency switch, hidden away somewhere in the manager’s locked office, but neither Bonny nor I had access to it. So, the machines had to be left on, had to be churning out socks, had to be plopping them into their little bins every 58 seconds, while I ran down three flights of stairs and out of the building, smoked my cigarette, and ran back up.

It was not something one did idly.

No matter how rapidly the cigarette was inhaled, the socks always accumulated beyond all reason. But I was an addict and found it impossible to get through the long night without the comfort of at least one cigarette. I timed that cigarette to the minute, mid-way through the shift, and I spent half the night ruminating about the pleasure it would bring me. The night was thus broken up into two four-hour periods, with a cigarette in the middle, and the thought of that cigarette, the sweet promise of it, like a carrot before a donkey, kept my spirits alive.

Every night I took my cherished cigarette break, and every night I had a pile of untrimmed, unfolded, un-stacked (and unattractive) white socks waiting for me when I returned. A brief moment of bliss, and then reality. It took the afterglow out of that cigarette, you can believe.

The socks had to be dealt with, and there was no time to do it. I might have been inclined to stuff them in a trashcan or hurl them down the devouring chute, but management had a way of accounting for every sock (or so they said). So, I did the only thing I could do, under the dire circumstances. I stuffed them in my pocketbook and in my clothes, sneaking out bloated with socks every morning at the shift’s end. At home, I trimmed and folded and stacked, and I smuggled them back every night, in my pocketbook and in my clothes. I looked suspiciously malformed, both coming and going, but every sock was accounted for, and my lifesaving cigarette got to be smoked.

I had everything down to a system, and the boss was satisfied with my work. He even commented that I had a future with the factory, which was a frightening thought. But on one very hot, very humid summer night, my future came to a sudden end.

The shift began uneventfully. I punched my time-card at exactly 10:00 p.m. (I am a punctual person) and climbed the creaky stairs to the third floor. I did this clumsily, because underneath my shirt I was loaded with contraband socks, all neatly trimmed and folded. Bonny wasn’t there that night, as was often the case. I was always relieved when she didn’t come. Crying upsets me. One by one I turned on my row of twenty machines, while the mechanic made his way to the cellar, some Hustler magazines under his arm. It was a night like all other nights at the sock factory.

Now that I was alone, I quickly removed the socks from my pocketbook and from my plaid shirt, letting the shirt-tails hang loose, and began the tedious task of walking endlessly up and down my aisle, lifting the limp socks from the bins as they landed, trimming, and folding and piling.

I reached over a machine to change a spool of thread, a motion I had completed many times, when my shirt-tail got caught in its teeth. In an instant, I was sucked up against the clanking monster as it ripped past two buttons and came to a sudden impasse at my body. As I crashed into the machine, my small trimming scissors flew from my hand, landing out of reach on the floor. I tried desperately to rip myself loose, but I was held fast. The huge needle continued to pound up and down, inches from my rib cage.

I didn’t know what to do. I was ensnarled in such a fashion that I couldn’t reach the machine’s turn-off switch, and I knew the mechanic would never hear my shouts above the iron racket. He was in the basement, four flights below me, enveloped in adolescent fantasies. I struggled in vain to free myself, frantically observing that the machines were each methodically spitting out ugly white socks at the rate of one every 58 seconds. The bins filled quickly and began to overflow. I watched the scene helplessly, impaled to my machine. My prayers for the heroic return of the phantom mechanic went unanswered. Time passed, horribly. At last, I understood that there was only one thing I could do. I unbuttoned the remainder of my shirt, disentangling myself from it carefully, and jumped out of the way as it was snatched by the sock machine.

I never wore a bra to work because of the intense heat, so there I stood, nude from the waist up, surveying the situation. Socks were everywhere. They seemed to be cloning on the floor. The machines were undaunted; they pressed on. It would take at least fifteen minutes to turn them all off. The mechanic might return (all things are possible), and if he did, I would be standing there, like a three-dimensional girly picture. Naked on the job.

I hesitated another minute. Nineteen more socks plopped of out nineteen machines. I looked one last time at the machine that had eaten my shirt. A strange, plaid-colored mass was seeping slowly from its orifice. “Don't look back!” I thought to myself, as I fled down the three flights of stairs and raced out the door to my car.

Six and a half hours later, when the morning shift arrived, I was long gone.

My mother called me the next day to bug me about going to college. It was her practice to do this approximately once a week. “If you don’t get a higher education,” she warned, “you’ll be working in sock factories all your life.” Suspecting that such employment was no longer available to me, I applied to college immediately. And then to law school.

I never looked back.

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Meg Groff is a family law attorney and life-long hippie. Her memoir about the early years of her long career representing victims of domestic violence, children, and the poor (working title: Not If I Can Help It) is scheduled for publication in February 2025. Two of Meg’s children’s stories have been published in Highlights for Children Magazine and a story about one of her legal cases is in the January 2024 edition of After Dinner Conversations. Meg lives with her husband, a retired carpenter and leather craftsman, and their very good dog. Their daughter, Ruth Groff (the brains of the family), is an Associate Professor of Political Science at St. Louis University.

Photo by cottonbro studio.