Summer In The Sweatshop

Tom,

Please do not print my name, and please do not identify the name of my project.

To put it quite simply, I just completed the project from hell. There were 12 of us, and on the first day, we were corralled into a small (15' x 20') windowless "conference" room, which in all likelihood previously served as a janitor's supply closet.

There was no AC, and one weekend, during a particularly brutal heatwave, things got particularly dicey. The air became thick, sticky, smelly, and downright unbreathable. One older gentleman began to perspire, and suddenly became pale. I literally thought he was going to keel over and have a heart attack. It didn't help that our slavedriver of a boss made us work 14 hrs. that day, and would only bother to buzz us off the floor for our regimented, required half an hour break.

As I said before, getting off the floor on the weekend was nearly impossible without the master's buzz key. In a fire, the place would have lit up like a tinder box, because as the above picture illustrates, trash was literally strewn across the room. Navigating around the room necessitated the use of skillful body contortions and limber bodies.

7 years of higher education to be treated like a penned up farm animal.