Another new job

I've been at my new job at American Color Graphics for about a week now, and here are some factoids, observations, concerns, et cetera, about what I've witnessed thus far.

• 80% of what I do is the same thing - feeding papers into a machine - over and over and over and over and over and over. The almost unbearable repetitiveness leaves a lot of time for spacing out and thinking off-the-wall thoughts, some of which will appear in my next blog entry.
• I give myself about three months on the "How long until he snaps and jams his hands into a moving machine just so he never has to handle another Sun Newspaper?" office pool. When I worked at Target, I took four months on the "How long until he snaps and swan dives off the top shelf?" office pool - but, alas, I only worked there for three.
• Why can't they have robots that stack the papers and feed the pockets? Then I could just operate one with a little joystick. That would be easier.
• In China, this kind of job is done by hundreds of child laborers, rather than a few uneducated stiffs and many large pieces of machinery.
• My co-workers are impressed by things that should not be impressive and attribute all of my intelligence to me having gone to college. When I happen to know something that they don't, they will call me "college boy," even when the thing in question was not learned in college and should be known to anyone.
• I have only been called "hun" once thus far, and by a woman significantly older than myself. That is actually very impressive considering the, ehrm, quality of the workforce.
• On my first night, the guy who was training me asked me if I smoked. When I told him no, he told me that I should start. Actually what he said was that smoking was "something to consider" if I'm going to be working the 6 pm to 6 am shift. What that has to do with smoking, I have no idea. HOWEVER, it must have something to do with it because EVERYBODY smokes. When I was at Target, I put my co-worker smoke rate at around 70-75%. At ACG, it has got to be pushing 90%.
• Everyone there calls it the "backbone" of the paper instead of the "spine." Am I missing something? Isn't spine the more appropriate/common word to use? I have heard backbone said there probably fifty times by 7 or 8 different people, and not a single mention of spine. I didn't realize that anatomical terms for things were replaceable with other, less scientific and less appropriate words for the same piece of anatomy.
  
• There is a large, man-like rat that walks around. He's covered in tattoos, and he never really does a whole lot. He just wanders around, very slowly. Every once in a while you'll see him pushing a paper bin or something. And every once in a while he'll come close to getting run over by one of the many tow motors driving around the place. Every break, he goes up and sits in the break room in the same spot in the same position - one leg on the floor and the other one up on the bench. There is one thing that this man-like rat does a lot of - nose picking. He picks his nose all the time. The first time I saw him pick his nose, I thought it was just by chance - but then I saw him do it again . . . and again. I think he spends more time picking his nose than doing any real, actual work. Hell, I spend more time picking MY nose than he does doing any real, actual work. Also, I hear from a co-worker that he has a blow-up doll that he's pretty fond of. Not sure how people know that - either he brought it to work or he talks about it at work. My question is, is it a blow-up human or a blow-up rat?