Tamilnad Cartons

Down at New No. 19 in the SIDCO Industrial Estate, you’ll find us working away at Tamilnad Cartons. Kodungaiyur can get incredibly hot, so the fans in the factory are always spinning at full speed. We deal with a lot of cardboard and paper, which means there’s a dry, dusty smell in the air all the time. The space is filled with big stacks of flat boxes waiting to be shaped or shipped out. We have these large machines that cut and crease the material, and they make a rhythmic thumping sound that you start to ignore after an hour. The SIDCO estate is a busy place with lots of small manufacturing units, so there’s always a truck backing in or someone loading a pallet nearby. Our floor is usually covered in small scraps of paper by the end of the shift. We aren’t really set up for visitors, it’s a working floor through and through. We have a small desk near the entrance where we keep the logs and the delivery notes. Most of our days are spent checking the quality of the cardboard or making sure the sizes are exactly right. It’s a lot of manual labor, moving stacks from the machines to the loading dock. We take our breaks in the shade when we can. It’s just how things go in the industrial side of the city. We keep the machines running and the boxes moving every day without much fuss.