Why I Hate Pickles

Once upon a time, I was driven mad by pickles.  You scoff and ask “how can a man be driven insane by pickles?”  In my defense, it wasn’t just pickles, but hundreds of thousands of pickles.

The summer after I graduated from high school, I was confronted with a harsh reality.  It had always been assumed that I would go to college and that time was approaching and in order to pay my tuition I needed to get a job.  The plan, such as it existed, was that I would go to the local branch of the University of Wisconsin for my first year and then transfer to Madison the following year.

Fortunately, this was a time when the country valued education and had policies in place to help everyone who wanted to pursue an education to be able to do so without having to incur a huge debt.  The tuition at that time was $365 a semester and books were probably another $100.  With my parents allowing me to live and eat at home I needed roughly $1000 for my first year.

Unfortunately, that summer the country was in a deep recession and summer jobs had dried up.  My father had been able to get my older brother a job in the office he worked at but one job was all he could help provide and my brother had college costs to cover for two years before I graduated from high school. 

 I had no marketable skills to offer, and without any connections to people that could provide a job, my search was proving to be difficult.  After exploring all other avenues, I submitted my application to the ‘pickle factory.’ The pickle factory was probably a notch higher than the local “packing house” and had the advantage of being relatively close to my parent’s home.  Complicating matters was the full employment plan Uncle Sam was running for those of us that didn’t go to school.  So, reluctantly, I went to work at the pickle factory.

My fun new job was packed full of perks.  Just to give you a feel for the place, here are a few of the most outstanding features:

• Pay:  I was paid the minimum wage of $1.70 an hour.  Just to put that into perspective, that totaled $68 for a forty-hour week before taxes and deductions.
• Hours:  Fortunately I didn’t have to rely on just forty hours a week, because we started work at 4:30 pm and worked till 4:30 in the morning 6 days a week.
• Safety:  The factory itself was old and the various pieces of machinery had long ago been stripped of anything that had been designed to prevent the loss of fingers and limbs. Many of the regular employees (we called them “lifers”) had contributed digits to the production of pickles.  An alarming number of them were able to give the famous University of Texas “hook ‘em horns” hand sign without really trying.
• The corporate attitude toward safety was interesting.  When you entered the factory there was a sign announcing the number of consecutive days with out a reportable injury.  The sign boasted that it had been over 250 days since the last injury.  On my first day I remember walking past that sign and just a few steps further seeing a fellow sitting on a stool with a fresh plaster cast on his leg.  Later I found out he had broken his leg at work, but had been required to come every day and sit on the stool and do nothing to prevent the company from having to “report” an injury.
• Noise:  The machinery produced, in certain areas of the factory, a constant roar.  I discovered you don’t miss quiet until it disappears.
• Smell:  Every day, free of charge, the factory provided each employee with a free spritz  of “Eau de Gherkin.”  I remember going with a couple of co-workers to an all night greasy spoon for breakfast at 5:00am, and having the entire, mostly drunk, clientele look up and sniff disapprovingly.   I remember the waitress being not exactly rude, but leaving little doubt she didn’t want to see (or for that matter smell) us again.  As a result, our breakfast get-togethers ended.

Pickles:  An often overlooked cause of mental illness

My first night on the job I was required to load over 6 thousand cases of pickles on pallets that were picked up by forklift and stacked in piles to the ceiling in the storage area of the factory.  By about the three thousandth case my arms felt like spaghetti and my shoulders and back ached.  Little did I know that this was one of the best jobs I would be asked to do and I had been assigned there in the hope I wouldn’t quit my first night, as many did.

The next couple of nights I was assigned various dirty, dangerous, noisy and backbreaking tasks.  They must have concluded I wasn’t going anywhere (I needed the income) so I was given the opportunity to savor all of the variety the factory had to offer.

The morale of the seasonal workers was comparable to what I imagine a fairly well run prison experiences.  There was a sense of inevitability and, while no one was happy to be there, the crew was mostly cooperative and the work was getting done.

Then an incident involving an American Nazi changed everything almost over night.  BOOM, you didn’t see that one coming, did you?  What a story – pickles and Nazis – oh my.

One night during our lunch break, that would come about four and a half hours after we had started the shift, one of our co-workers told us he was a card-carrying member of the American Nazi Party.  We were stunned because every one liked this guy.  He was a good guy to be teamed with because he pulled his weight and could carry on a conversation, which helped to while away the long hours.  He had never spouted any Nazi party bullshit and had never denigrated minority people or ever given any indication of his horrible political leanings.  I remember being stunned by his announcement and telling him he was full of shit, but there wasn’t much we could do and he remained the same guy we had liked before we knew he was a Nazi.

One of the jobs we did involved packing cases of pickles as they game through the oven, up to the factory floor, through the labeling machine and then to a row of four employees who hand packed the cases and sent them down through the machine that sealed the cases.  The four packers, stood with a conveyor between them and where the pickles would arrive and would grab boxes and put them on the conveyor and then reach across and hand pack the cases.  Try this for 10 to 12 hours and you will find out what a real backache feels like.

Another delightful feature of this job, was that at least once a night, and often times more, you would grab the still hot jars and go to lift them, to put them in the case, and all you would get was a jagged shard of glass.  Apparently the cooking process weakened a certain percentage of the jars and hair line cracks developed and when the worker grabbed them by the top, expecting the full weight of the jar, all he got was the top half of the jar.

One night our Nazi was working this job and he must have been leaning a certain way when he grabbed a jar that came apart and he dragged the jagged edge across his wrist.  The foreman was called and he took the Nazi to the office where they punched him out on the time clock and drove him to the emergency room to be sewn up.  I was pulled off the job I was doing and replaced my injured co-worker on the packing line.

About two hours later, the newly sewn up Nazi was brought back to the factory, punched in on the time clock and sent back to the packing line.  When he showed up on the floor he was whiter than even a Nazi should ever be and told us the doctor told him if the cut had been a millimeter to one side of the other he would have slit a major artery and he probably wouldn’t have made it to the ER.

Word spread like wild fire among the crew that the company had punched him out to go to the ER and had punched him back in so he could finish his shift so no injury report would need to be filed with the insurance company.  It’s kind of funny that no one objected to the dangerous conditions of the job.  That was a given.  What really set people off was that they had in effect docked him for the time he spent being sewn up. 

The Nazi had also overheard a conversation while he was waiting in the office for some one to take him to the ER.   Apparently, in the middle of a deep recession, the pickle factory had no job applications on file.  You have to understand how tenuous a position that put the factory in because when the cucumbers arrive you have to make pickles.  You can’t slow down or things literally rot.

This incident coupled with the bit of job application intelligence radically changed the morale in the factory almost overnight.  What happened next is the subject for another blog post but I wanted to mention the shift in attitude here in order to help put into context my own experience.

One night our foreman came and got me at the beginning of the shift.  He told me he had a job for me and I followed him to a part of the factory I had never been in before.  He brought me to a small space in front of a very large oven where they baked the pickles.  The mouth of the oven was about 20 feet wide and the temperature, according to a nearby thermometer, was well above 100 degrees.  The job was to make sure that the pickle jars were guided to a single conveyor at one end of the oven, so the jars would proceed single file up to the factory floor where they would go through the labeler. The foreman showed me a red button that would shut down the track that brought the pickles through the oven and told me that I could shut down the oven track for a total of two minutes a night.  So, if I shut it down to clear a log jam at the conveyor leading upstairs I was to keep track and make sure it was not shut down for more than two minutes during the shift.  He told me that shutting it down for more than two minutes could lead to an explosion.  He also told me that due to the nature of this job he would come and get me after four hours and reassign me to some other job for the remainder of the shift.  Then he left and before long I could see the pickle jars making their way through the oven toward me.

As I watched I saw thousands of quart jars of pickles heading my way slowly but surely.  When they started to arrive the job required you to run back and forth in front of the oven mouth making sure they lined up in single file so they could proceed upstairs. 

The pickles came relentlessly and after a couple of hours I was really looking forward to the passing of the next couple hours when the foreman would reassign me to another job.  Around my third hour in front of the oven, the pickles were changed to 12 oz. jars.  At first I thought this was a good thing because the jars were smaller and lighter.  What I didn’t take into consideration was that because they were smaller there was a hell of a lot more of them.  The job actually got harder as the greater number of jars caused greater numbers of jam-ups to clear.  The relentless march of pickles would go on and on and breaking up the jams required pushing jars back so you could sort them back into single file.  Meanwhile they were jamming up at the other end of the oven mouth.

At about the three and half hour mark I was really glad I only had thirty minutes to go.  I was drenched in sweat, tired, hot and beginning to hate pickles.  As the four-hour mark came, the foreman was nowhere to be seen.  As my normal lunch break came and went I started to get angry.  Now on top of the general misery, I was getting hungry.  

I would classify my mood as foul at this time.

Around the sixth hour in front of the oven, much to my horror, the pickles switched to 8 oz. jars.  It was like staring at a Chinese army of pickles bearing down on me.  At this point I had a real healthy amount of self-pity and rage that only the teenage mind can generate.  The 8 oz. jars caused so many jam-ups that I was running full speed in front of the oven from end to end trying to keep them in single file.

At about the seventh hour I completely lost it.  I had shut down the oven a total of one minute and fifty seconds.  I had believed the foreman about possible explosions and had visions of a giant fireball and millions of pieces of pickle shrapnel slamming into me if I exceeded the two-minute mark.  I could see my mother explaining to my father at the funeral home that it would have to be a closed casket affair because all that was left of their second born was a green glob emitting a horrible briny stench.

I looked around and my eyes fell on an ax handle propped up in one corner.  I grabbed the ax handle, now completely out of my mind, and started wailing away at the conveyor and the jamming up pickle jars.  My training as a baseball player came in handy as I was used to swinging a bat and was driving pickle jars to all fields.  And the pickles kept coming.

At the seven and half hour mark I spotted the foreman strolling toward the oven.  I dropped the ax handle and charged him.  This was the first time I had experience what a pure, massive dose of adrenalin does to you.  When I got to the foreman I grabbed him by the front of his shirt and literally picked him up off the floor and pinned him against the wall.  I told him if he didn’t relieve me I was going to kill him.  He apparently believed me because he squealed he had forgot I was down here and if I let him go he would go get someone to take my place.  I let him go and he left at a run.

In a couple of minutes he was back with my replacement.  He then gave me the easiest job on the floor for the last couple of hours of the shift.  The job consisted of sitting on a stool and watching the pickle jars go through the labeling machine to make sure they all got a label. I sat there as the sea of pickles passed me by.  While I was there I saw a miracle of biblical proportions.  At one point the line was stopped and a worker put new labels in the machine and the line was turned back on.  But now, the pickles had become kosher.

And that’s how I was driven mad by pickles.  Nothing was ever said to me about the carnage I had wrought with the ax handle and the fact that I had threatened the life of the foreman.  I think it might have had something to do with the lack of job applications on file in the office.