Via inteawetrust, et al.
My first day of proper work, other than paper rounds or washing cars, was quite literally the day after my final exam at school at the age of 16. I signed up with an employment agency in the morning, and at 1pm that afternoon I was on my way to a factory for my first ever full day’s work.
It was a factory that produced packets of sliced meat, the kind you put in sandwiches: wafer thin ham, chicken roll, etc. Not the ideal place to start my working life. As it happens, I’ve actually worked in worse places since then.
As I was new, and didn’t know any better, I ended up in the “high-risk” area, which was the section in which you actually handled the meat and so had to be thoroughly disinfected. The low-risk section only dealt with the packets of meat, already sealed, and was an all-round nicer place to work.
The meat comes into the factory in what I can only call logs, around four inches square and about 4 feet long, vacuum sealed in a plastic covering. I spent pretty much the entire day taking the plastic off these logs and putting the four-foot long meat onto one end of a huge machine which sliced it up and put it into packets.
No music, no-one around to talk to, nothing. Good God it was boring. And wet. And smelly. And cold.
I did the shift, went home, but still came back the next day. This time, however, I made the point of getting into the “low-risk” section, which is where I spent most of that summer. It was much better, just a case of putting the packets of meat into boxes and stacking them up on pallets. You could chat to the people around you (mostly other students), listen to the radio and have a bit of a laugh.
It wasn’t that bad a job, to be honest, but it was a shock to the system on my first day. I’ve spent a lot of time in a lot of factories since, both food and non-food, but I look back on that job as quite the character-builder.
I still eat that kind of processed sliced meat, since you asked.
Reblogged from: inteawetrust
Originally posted on: bite of Pythias...
