My Second Job: In a Pickle Vat

What is the strangest job you've ever had?

I don't know how strange it is, but it was the farthest out of character from the way most people view me now.

I spent two summers working at a Vlasic's Pickle Plant in Bridgeport, Michigan.

As usual, it wasn't my 'pounding the pavement' or brilliant interview skills that got me the job.  It was my Dad.  He used his community connections (he was principal of the high school) to get me in the door.  Ever heard of white privilege?  Yeah, something like that.

It may have been connections that got me there, but it wasn't like it was a plum job.  It was night shift.  It was hard work.  It was for very little pay.  It qualified as farm labor, and at that time, that meant you could pay lower than minimum wage.  My best memory of the wage was $2.15 an hour.  But that was a long time ago, and my memory might be faulty.  It certainly was below what many of my other high school compatriots were being paid.

Early on, I got assigned the job of cleaning out a relish vat.  It was extraordinarily dirty and messy, and I would scrape it with a shovel.  I could hear the sound of forklifts while I was down in it.  I feared that they would forget that I was inside the vat and that they would dump a fresh batch of pickles and whatever other ingredients they used to make the relish.  I don't think I would have improved the flavor of it.

Some days I would help with the assembly line.  Some of the jars would not seal right, and it was my job to take them off the line and set aside to be rerun through.  One time I did that when they were processing jars of hot peppers.  We were a home of non-spicy bland diets, so I had no idea of the properties of hot peppers, or more importantly, hot pepper juice.  To grip the jars, my hands got into the hot pepper juice.  Here's a special thing that I later came to understand about hot pepper juice - IT BURNS!  OMG, IT BURNS!  I had to sleep that night with my hands in a bowl of water. 

Sleeping during the day was difficult, but I slowly got adjusted.  It got to be that the highlight of my day was waking up in time to watch Match Game at 3 PM.  Between that and a meal, I was usually soon out the door for another 12-hour shift.

Sometimes I had sweeping duties in the warehouse.  Sound like light work?  Not when you uncover a broken jar of pickles that may have been lying there for days, maybe months or years.  You haven't lived until you experience the look and smell of what appears to be an 87-year-old pickle.

Most nights I worked at the line end, where cartons of pickle jars would come down the line, and we would take them off and palletize them.  At first, I was slow and clumsy, barely able to keep up and hold my own weight.  But gradually I got better, good enough that our four-person team could let two people do the job while two others rested.  We had about fifteen to twenty-minute shifts, trading back and forth.  Yes, that gave me a little time to read, which I thought was absolutely awesome.

I got to know many of the people there, at least as well as an introvert knows anybody.  I was well-liked, by the workers and management. 

I worked there for two summers.  At the end of the second, the management asked me to come back as a supervisor.  That did not happen.  I was a college student and had other plans besides working at a pickle plant.

No, I should not have taken their offer.  But...I was young and did not know how rare that would be in my life.  To be brutally honest, until Higginson & Paulk where I will have been employed 20 years this June, about one-third of my jobs I quit for other things, and about two-thirds of my jobs I was either fired or given the slow nudge out the door.  Only one of my jobs did the employer make an offer to keep me, and that was from a man whose moral compass would give Trump a run for his money.

Job success has been hard to come by in my life.  Part of that is natural incompetence, and part is an innate lack of confidence.

But the pickle factory?  That was a hard experience, but a successful one.  I didn't realize at the time how rare that would be.