Letter To Mr. Hodkin's 'Life In A Factory'

I was rarely called Olivia as a child, it was often “Natalie and Olivia” or “the twins.” It has been tough striving to be an individual when you have involuntarily been given a second name to be called by. My entire life has consisted of my identity being mistaken, mixed up, and misguided. As I reached my teenage years, I wanted more and more to be known as myself and not just a package deal. I joined clubs. I participated in sports. I made new friends. I tried anything I could to stand out as myself. From bickering over wearing “too similar” outfits to dying my hair a shockingly bright pink(with some regrets), I made desperate attempts throughout my years of middle and high school to be different from my sister. And in the end, hardly any of it ever prevented getting a painful “Hey Natalie” in the hallway.

Emily’s upbringing is plagued with difficulties. She is the first-born of a young mother and the eldest of five brothers and sisters. As a baby, she is

Most of our lives we have been called a certain name, whether it was given to us by birth or a nickname that friends have called us, but each of us has a meaning behind our names and I am going to talk about mine. My first name is Jacob, which is a very common boy’s name in this current period of time. I have known Dumont, my last name, to be a French surname because of my father’s side coming from France and Italy. Furthermore, both my first name and last name have meaning of some sort and that is what I will go over in my essay.

The factory is a deafening cacophony of machinery. The air around you is smothering and dusty. Diligent workers handle the looms—1, 2, even 3 machines, beads of sweat dripping down their concentrated faces. The work is exhausting; however, you manage to survive a 13 hour shift, as the benefits are a decent bundle of cash, far more than you could ever earn anywhere else. On the other hand, some workers are dissatisfied with the conditions they must work in—going as far to sign a petition. In “Lyddie” by Katherine Patterson, Lyddie, a hardworking13 year-old factory worker, contemplates on whether or not she should sign said petition. She is confronted with the challenge of determining which means more to her--her job or the safety of her and

I was given the name Chase Andrew Miner. My mom had liked the name Chase and Chance, but she finally decided on Chase. While that decision wasn’t too hard for her to make, (at least she said it wasn’t) my last name, Miner, was an even easier decision. My mom was married to my dad and she took his last name, so the obvious last name would be Miner. My mom told me she had a really difficult time figuring out a middle name for me. She couldn’t find a name that fit in well. One day my aunt, Lori, called my mom and asked about the name Andrew. My mom had thought about it and she decided that that name fit. So from that day I was Chase Andrew Miner. The joke my mom says now is if she knew she’d have to chase me so much, she would have named me Slow. But word got around of what

The author gives us an insight into how his "time is spent stamping, cutting, welding, moving or assembling parts" when he is working in the factories. (Braaksma, 2005). He then goes on to explain how he must wake up early and work long hours for a paycheck that seems not to be near enough what was worked for. Braaksma also touches on how some factory jobs may not be a secure place to work because of downsizing or relocating to another country. The fear of not knowing when a factory working might lose his or her job is terrifying.

The beautiful rich county, Prince’s Georges, is where I grew up in a blended family in the city of Hyattsville, Maryland, raised there by my mother, step-father and grandmother. The ethnic composition of my family is African-American also known as “black”. On a bright sunny day in the city of Langley Park, Maryland, my parents met at a shopping center. The two of them emigrated from Africa to the United States; my biological father was born in Ogun State, Nigeria and my mother was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone. In addition, I was given my first name after my late grandfather and middle name after my late great-grandmother. Even though I’m half Nigerian, however, I was mostly raised on the maternal side of the family. My mother’s side of the

After moving out of her parents' house, she suddenly found herself free of all the restrictions and lectures. She quickly settled into kickboxing lessons and cut her hair short, but she still had one more thing to deal with. Her name. Oh, how she loathed her name. It was a reminder of the past, of how her mother would force her into dresses and how the only toys she had were Barbies.

Growing up in a dominantly hispanic family, I had many family members, yet few names. So, it’s a wonder in my own mind, how I wound up with the name Tiffany. Built into the strong family oriented atmosphere that I still live in today, yet still sticking out of my family like a sore thumb. Worse than that, I was not even awarded the liberty of a middle name to fall back on, or for the sake of having a traditionally long name like everyone else. Yet, even though the odds were against me in this case, I still learned to appreciate my own name.

My first entry in this journal. I figured if I must be forced to leave the farm to work in a factory all day under another man’s will, working hours in a closed up shanny with tight walls and little breathing room, I may as well document it. If I don’t write, I fear that I may go insane in the tight little space, everyone breathing on each other and working on top of eachother. I have heard of many people moving to the city, excited to make more money and to be inside rather than laboring in the sun for hours, but I do not trust the machines. I fear that my wife’s skirt may be caught while spinning thread, to be torn off her dress or to drag her into the machine with it. My boys aren’t used to machinery either, and they are naive and stupid

A name is not just what you’re called, it is who you are. It is what you stand for and ultimately defines you as a person. Growing up, I used to think my name did not fit me and that nothing that my name stood for had anything to do with me. Now that I am older, I understand the real meaning of my name and how the traits that are connected with my name relate to the person that I have become and continue to develop into. My name represents who I am and who I plan to be.

But beyond making the families dependent on the machine and its masters for food, the machine has also forced the men to rely upon the machine for their sense of purpose. Without the sound of the factory and the schedule of maintaining the train, the men feel a temporary emptiness.

    Names are a terrible way to understand someone’s identity because names are regularly replicated. In my sixth grade class, there were three Mollys. We all had different backgrounds, different religious affiliations, and different personalities. If our names displayed who we are, wouldn’t our identities all be the same? Instead of staring at names and trying to understand their meaning, one should focus on a person’s personality, for personality depicts our identity. In fact, I have learned from experience to not infer one’s identity based on their name. For instance, in middle school, I was mutual friends with a girl named Kassidy. One Tuesday afternoon, my friend, Katy told me that Kassidy was going to sit with us at lunch that day. I shrugged my shoulders and replied with a casual “okay”. Before Kassidy walked in, I had a whole image of her in my mind: blonde hair, cute pastel colored clothes, and religious, all stereotypes that I thought a person with an innocent name like Kassidy

Factories turn human beings into machines. This is the perspective of the narrator in the short story “The Sandwich Factory” by Jason Kennedy. When mechanization is utilized to increase efficiency, factory employees become monotone working machines and individuals become just one of many - a crowd of insignificant people.