From Women in Machining :
     Copyright © Jocelyn Riley

“It’s important to do something that you’re going to enjoy if you’re going to do it for a long amount of time. But yeah, I like it a lot. And I don’t mind getting dirty. It makes me feel more like a machinist.”

“For fourteen years I waitressed. I needed to do something I could make more money at and be a little more independent. . . . Waitressing--there’s a lot of hard work in that. . . . Well, I baked, too. I mean we had one-hundred pound bags of flour and sugar. And I could lift them and carry them up. I probably lift less now than I did then.”

“I like keeping busy and I like learning different things. I love math and it’s a lot of gauging and sizes and I love the physical aspects of it. You’re using more skills. You have more of a challenge and you’re using your own mental ability to solve different situations and to make the part.”

“I like the physical labor. I like taking machines apart and putting them back together. I like seeing the finished product and thinking, ‘I made this.’”

“The reason I took this opportunity to become a machinist is because of the challenge of the job, and I like working with my hands. . . .”

“My daddy, he says he knew I was going to be in something like this because I’ve always liked to mess with stuff--always caught myself trying to fix things.”

“The longer I was in it, the more I saw and the more I learned about the culture and learned about the way things were done. I felt less and less like a woman in a nontraditional and more and more like a machinist.”