Smell-o-vision (My Fun Jobs)

My hiking boots were covered with fish entrails, sudsy water, iodine, and fish scales. I smelled of salmon guts and sweat. My fellow co-workers and I reeked and none of us were very popular as we crammed ourselves onto the bus. No one wanted to let us sit next to them and I can't say I blamed them. We were a weary, stinky crew. Too tired to joke or talk, I stared out the bus windows, not really seeing anything as the bus rolled past the factories and foundries of the industrial section of South Seattle. This was my third week working at this particular seafood processing plant. I was making  great wages! Ha! Yeah, right! After the temp. agency took their cut, we got $6.00 per hour. For the back-breaking work that the seafood company was making us do, we should've been getting at least $7.25 an hour. We griped about this every day during our measly 30 minute lunch break. A bunch of us were talking to the rest of the crew about asking the temp. agency for higher wages. We ran into lots of resistance from the Asian women, though. For them, $6.00 an hour was a king's ransom. They had moved to Seattle from China or Taiwan or some other Asian country; it was hard to understand them as their English wasn't very good. They refused to rock the boat, though. Where they had come from, $6.00 was a weeks' wages! They were living high on the hog in Seattle and couldn't understand why the rest of us were so unhappy with this job. Times were tough in Seattle in the early 1990's. The big internet boom was several years away. Working for a temporary staffing company was supposed to be much better than having a job in the fast food industry.

The woman who owned the seafood processing plant with her husband and family worked us very hard. She was always barking orders like a drill sergeant. "Hurry up with those hot cans! They have to be stacked on those trays before they can be cooled! Step it up! C'mon! Time is money!", she would yell at us first thing in the morning as we stumbled in from the street. Sometimes there wouldn't be enough oven-mitt things for everyone and she'd give the unlucky few old t-shirts to wrap around their hands as we grabbed the burning hot metal cans off the stacks coming from the sterilizer or the oven or whatever it was that sanitized them. After an hour of rushing around, crashing into other co-workers and burning our fingers, elbows, and various other upper body parts, Sheila the drill sergeant, would pull some of us off to help with the beheading of the salmon, or canning the chopped seafood. The smell of raw fish was overpowering and the concrete floor of the processing room was a slippery hazard of cold running water, suds, fish guts, and all sorts of other unsavory detritus. It was loud in there and boiling hot. There was a big conveyer belt that brought in the seafood that the men would grab and commence to gutting. They would fling the guts onto the floor and the cold rushing water would carry everything to huge drains in the center of the floor. It was easy to stumble or slip and fall on discarded fish guts. There wasn't anything to grab onto if this happened. I nearly fell every time I shifted position at the canning machine. It was impossible to hear Sheila or her husband, Dave when they were yelling at us to get us to do something. I just kept my head down and slammed the lids on the filled cans as they trundled down the line of the canning machine. I got a rhythm going after a while. Grab a can, slam the lid onto it, press the handle down, eject the can and repeat. Slam, press, eject. Slam, press, eject. I was a robot, mindlessly slamming, pressing, and ejecting.

Somebody figured out a way to discreetly throw a can lid in the canning contraption in such a way as to make the machine jam. When this occurred, the entire line ground to a dead stop so that the machine could be shut off and fixed. You couldn't throw a can lid in the machine too many times without Sheila and Dave becoming suspicious so we sort of timed our rebellions. It was wonderful to get a break from the noise and soul-crushing labor. We'd all stumble outside and have a smoke or a quick cat nap. The Asian ladies always clucked their tongues at us in disapproval. They loved to work! They couldn't get enough of the seafood plant and had to forced out the door at 5 p.m. They probably would have stayed all night if allowed to. God, no. Sheila and Dave were extremely careful never to have anyone work more than forty hours a week. No overtime for us peons!

One day I was rushing around helping this tiny Asian girl who looked like she was twelve years old. We were on can cleaning duty. We were washing out all the recycled cans that were going to be re-sterilized. Sheila and Dave were yelling at us but as usual it was too noisy in the main processing room to hear anything so I was nodding and smiling and ignoring them as usual. The young Asian girl did something with a can I didn't see because I was busy with my own can, and then she dropped it on my hand and it cut me. It must've been very sharp because then my hand started to gush blood, dramatically. I freaked out and Sheila sloshed over to see what had happened. She made me soak my hand in a vat of iodine which stung like hell. I had to stand there for twenty minutes with my hand submerged to the wrist, feeling foolish. The little Asian girl was nearly in tears as she repeated something over and over to me. It was probably an apology. Either that or she was telling me about a great recipe for canned salmon. Anyway, Sheila grudgingly gave me a bandage to put on my wound and sent me home. 

I decided  that weekend that the fish processing plant would get along fine without me and asked for another assignment. I got a new job... at a certain Seattle coffee company's warehouse, a few blocks north of the seafood plant. Oh, what fun I had there, working on the production line, bagging coffee beans for all the major airlines and some hoity-toity  hotels. It was interesting to see what some of the disgruntled employees did to those bags of coffee! I'll "spill the beans" in my next scintillating blog! Until then, my dears, goodnight!