From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 1, January 2019.
I think all of us have had a job or two when we were younger that sticks with us because of some lesson or lessons that we learned. I had my share of odd jobs in high school and college. Nothing particularly inspirational, motivational or instructive. Certainly nothing that hinted at my present career. I mowed lawns, painted houses, delivered prescriptions for a drugstore, washed dishes, stocked shelves in a warehouse, worked on a bookmobile, and clerked for a grain company. Some jobs I enjoyed more than others. The job I detested and quit after a few days was conducting marketing surveys. I was expected to stop people on the street in downtown Boston, people minding their own business, and try to get them to answer a series of questions about their use or familiarity with certain commercial products. The information was preliminary to an advertising campaign. It took me almost no time to realize that marketing and sales would not be my future.
The job I took the summer after my first year in college had an unusually strong impact on me because it showed me how very hard people could work when they have goals. I bottled milk for a dairy. It required an odd combination of stamina (standing for long periods), boredom (watching endless gallons of milk move down a conveyor belt), and agility (reaching in to fix something quickly before the stacking machine could crush my hand). (OHSHA was in its infancy). Not only did the machines I operated fill the milk bottles, but they also placed them in crates, stacked the crates, and carried the stacked crates into an industrial size cooler where someone else loaded them onto tractor-trailers. The job also required an ability to ignore unpleasant odors, a useful adaptation because milk was constantly spilled on the floor and there was no time to mop it up until the end of a shift.
My coworkers were almost all immigrants from the Cape Verde Islands. I was the chance replacement for a machine operator who had saved enough money to take the summer off to return to Africa to marry. The foreman was tough. In theory, he held his position because he was the only employee who spoke both Portuguese, or Creole, and English. In reality, I think he held his position because he could be intimidating. He was, as best I could tell, the only employee who was a veteran of the Portuguese Colonial War and he told me stories about combat in Angola. He kept order in the dairy even though I noticed that he initiated most of the roughhousing.
I worked a swing shift. I went to work at four each afternoon and worked until at least eleven when I was required to disassemble and clean the bottling machine at the end of my shift. If the last truck from Vermont with raw milk ran late I would stay until the milk was processed, bottled, and the equipment taken apart and cleaned, which meant sometimes I did not head home until five or six in the morning. I was paid $2.10 an hour, which I thought was great. I also worked six days a week, which might seem a lot except that several of my coworkers (and the person I had temporarily replaced) routinely worked seven days a week.
No one in the dairy, except possibly the chemist who checked the milk after it was pasteurized, thought of his or her job as a career. In southern New England and on Cape Cod, Cape Verdeans traditionally provided a cheap source of labor, a mean tradition going back to whaling ship days. Working long hours gave each of the men (they were all men) in the dairy a chance to save and possibly start a family. Alternatively, if they were raising or had raised a family, the goal was to retire and purchase a farm in the Cape Verde Islands. I hope they all did well. I never saw a single one of my co-workers after that summer and there was certainly no easy way to communicate. Apart from the supervisor, no one spoke English and my Portuguese was limited to a few choice swear words.
Is there a moral to my story other than that it is a long-winded explanation as to why I am not terribly fond of milk? I think there are several. A number of us working in this department are lucky. We get to pursue ideas for a living and if our job is physically challenging it is only because we opt to head into the field to hunt for plants in exotic locations. Some (but not all) of us are empathetic and appreciate how much our privilege is built on the work of others who deal with support activities: housekeeping, maintenance, security, finance, and administration. I try not to forget this and although I am not demonstrative (reticent Yankee that I am), I do appreciate all the hard work done by staff that lets us turn objects into wonder.
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