NYU graduate student Dejian Zeng pulled back the curtain on Apple’s factories in a tell-all that details his six-week stint working on an iPhone assembly line in China.

Zeng’s lengthy interview reveals details on everything from conditions inside the dormitories to how Apple slowly shifts production to unreleased iPhones. Some of the most interesting bits though are in the tiny details that show how working in an Apple factory could drive you crazy.

Here are the wildest details Zeng revealed:

The food sucks

“We get charged for it, and it depends on what kind of food you choose. There are 5-yuan meals, 8-yuan meals. But that was inside the factories.

“I wouldn’t say that [the food was high quality]. The chicken that I get … I never see the breasts or thigh. It’s always the neck or certain parts that you can’t identify. So I wouldn’t say that’s a very good meal. But it keeps you full, and you’re very hungry so it keeps you full anyway. It’s reasonable. Not very good, but you have no other choice.”

Security is insane

“[When producing an unreleased iPhone] the controls gets more strict. They increased the sensitivity of the metal detectors. So you know some girls have bras? They couldn’t pass the door because they had the metal in the bra, so a lot of the girls had to change all of a sudden that day because they increased the sensitivity. And then you passed two security checks. There’s a lot of security checks.”

Dorms are cramped

“I wake up in a dorm shared by eight people. The dorm is not on the factory campus — it’s in a place about 10 minutes’ drive, and they have a shuttle bus for us.”

The work is monotonous

“What I did is that I put the speaker on the case, and I put a screw on it. The [iPhone] housing — we call it the back case — is moving on the assembly line, and that’s when we pick it up, and now we get one screw from the screw feeder, and then we put it on the iPhone and then put it back, and it goes to the next station.

“After awhile, you get more familiar with it, and in the end I can even do this screw by closing my eyes. It is just like that. So after that, you get a lot of time that you have nothing to do. That’s when people feel very annoyed.”

Overtime is mandatory

“You can’t leave easily. And then every time you ask ‘can I leave’ they would just say ‘you have to work on the assembly line.’ And so you know that every station needs to have somebody doing it. And if you leave, who is going to do it?

“It’s not easy to ask to not do overtime. It’s involuntary. I would say that’s the issue. Workers don’t have a choice. If I don’t want to work, if I’m really tired today and I don’t want to work, I can’t do that.”

Getting Wi-Fi is a hassle

“The dorms provide Wi-Fi. But to access the Wi-Fi, you need to do something. You need to either download some apps for them or click something — comments or something — to earn some virtual coins.

“You use the coins to get on the Wi-Fi. Twenty-four hours is 20 coins. And then downloading apps sometimes are like 20 to 30 coins or something. So is it you can buy coins — like I remember it’s like 100 coins about 5 yuan, something like that. But a lot of people just keep downloading. It’s like a business. You need to need to do that to get access to Wi-Fi.”

Forced reviews

“They gave us an evaluation: ‘How did you feel about the training?’ They are very careful with that piece of paper. They said ‘Don’t make any mistakes. We need this paper to be very clean with no modifications on it.’

“It was a scale where 1 was the worst and 5 was the best. They said we could do 4 or 5. And so everybody did 4 and 5 and they submitted it.”

Source: Business Insider

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