What I Did:
As a college student, I worked in a mushroom packing plant over the summer. This was in Santa Cruz, California.
How I Did It:
Jobs were hard to come by in Santa Cruz, so I took a job working in a mushroom packing plant. I was probably 19 or 20 at the time. You know those nice little packages of mushrooms, all crowns up? I was so naive that it never occurred to me that those packages are all packed by hand. (I guess I just assumed that there was a machine that took care of sorting and packing them so they looked nice in the packages.) It was HARD work. The mushrooms came from the growing room in big crates on carts. I had to lift the crates off the cart and put them on the conveyor belt -- all day long. When I first was told what to do, I said I couldn't, that it was too much. The boss basically said, "You don't do it, there's the door." So I did it. I later got a "promotion" (no additional money, but a better position on the line) to grading mushrooms. The bad ones went to one belt, where they were packaged up for a major supermarket chain. The good ones went to another belt, where they were packaged up for specialty grocery stores. I never got promoted to packing the mushrooms in the packages. I just wasn't fast enough.
Advice
- This was hard physical labor and the bosses were tough and mean. They played favorites and expected to be treated like queens. I had no idea what a factory job could be like, so this was an eye-opener. It showed me what many people have to put up with to earn a living.
- GET AN EDUCATION OR A SKILL! Learn a skill so you don't have to work in a job like this. It's hard enough to do when you're 20, but imagine doing this job as a 40 or 50 years old!Take a look at what you buy. Think about the people who grew it, packed it, and got it to the store. Machines don't do everything!
