David and Dominic

Not all of my teachers have had fancy degrees. David and Dominic were two of the greatest teachers I’ve ever met. They weren’t really teachers in any formal sense but they sure taught me.

I was managing a small plant making plastic bottles and filling them with glue. When the bottles came out of the molding machine, random lots of 100 or so would be set aside for close inspection. The sample bottles had extra plastic called tabs that had to be removed manually, then the bottles would be candled. That is, they’d be held up to a light to search for pinholes. The last thing you wanted in a bottle that would be filled with glue was a pinhole. We called this whole process “de-tabbing.”

We had trouble keeping employees de-tabbing because it was boring, thankless, repetitive work. Everyone thought the work was beneath them, that is, everyone but David and Dominic. David and Dominic had intellectual disabilities and they thought a job that allowed them to sit and shoot the bull inside out of the weather was just fine.  They’d set their chairs and bins and lamps up just inside the roll-up door and they’d talk and laugh and greet everyone arriving for work and watch the trucks unload and meanwhile, their hands never stopped moving.

One day as I walked by on my way to the warehouse, Dominic ducked my gaze while David beckoned me over with his face screwed up in a show of great urgency. I had a meeting to get to and I knew from experience that any time David wanted to have a little fun at my expense, I was going to burn at least five minutes or so. And anytime Dominic wouldn’t meet my gaze, I just knew I was in for it. These two were inveterate practical jokers. Still…

“Yeah, David, what can I do for you?”

David pulled out a bottle, tore off the excess plastic and eyeballed it over the candling lamp and tossed it into the ‘accept’ bin. Then, he looked up at me with the expression that I knew meant he thought he was about to ask me a trick question, trick questions being sort of a staple of David’s sense of humor.

“Why are we doing this?”

Trying to keep my exasperation from showing, I started to explain for about the nth time that when the machine formed the bottles, some extra plastic was caught and squeezed between the mold cavity and the blow pin…

“No, Mr. Mike!” he cried out his frustration. “Why do we do this?” and he popped the tab off another bottle as Dominic, hands still and head cocked, strained to catch every word. I thought I detected a giggle but I let it pass.

I counted to ten slowly before starting again. I’d been told that David had the mental capacity of a five-year-old so I tried to find a simpler way of explaining that would allow me to go on my way and get some work done. “You see, David, the hot plastic comes out in a tube and the clamp closes the mold around it, and…”

“Mr. Mike! I KNOW all that!” David gave me a look that left no doubt as to which of us he thought was the dumb guy. “What I mean is, why do we do this…” he tore off yet another tab…”when we could just do this?”  And with that, David grabbed a handful of bottles and flung them full force onto the floor, scattering them from the loading dock to the first high stack of finished goods. People on the other side of the production floor stopped their work to see how I would respond.

I was wondering whatever possessed him to make such a mess but David just smirked at me and pointed to the floor while Dominic collapsed in giggles behind him. Looking where David pointed, this time I saw more than the mess. Scattered around me were bottles and tabs but no bottle-and-tabs. Every tab had been wrenched lose by the impact. When I looked up again, David and Dominic were both laughing and so was I.

By the time the crew reported the next morning, we’d jury-rigged an air cannon and a metal screen and were blasting the tabs from hundreds of bottles at a time. We still had David and Dominic candle our sample lots but the dreariest and most time-consuming job in the plant was now accomplished by these same two guys using an air cannon in their free time between sample candling lots.

David received a big bonus for his idea that year. And I received a bonus, too. I learned something about listening to the idea before judging the person and that not all smart ideas come from people we think of as smart. I learned that I didn’t have a corner on the smarts market and mostly, I learned that a person who thinks outside the box can never really be put in one.