Sweatshop

For those of you who don't know, I abandoned my soul-numbing role as a cafe assistant and spent a couple of weeks sponging off Chris while I looked for another job. And boy, did I hit the jackpot! Most would find my new job abhorrent. I consider it freeing.

For three or four days a week--or more or less depending on my desire, and their need--I am on-call at a kiwifruit packhouse. Don't know what to do with your degree? Get a job rolling little brown fruits into boxes and trays for ten hours a day.

It sounds like we're in a bowl of rice krispies. The main conveyor belt carries the fruit in cups which snap and flip the fruit into the appropriate lane. A rapid increase in snaps alerts the packer to an imminent load of fruit--magically the system sorts the fruit by size and dumps the correct number into each lane. Then the hard brown fruits rumble en-mass along a mini conveyor belt and fall a few inches into a waiting tray. We have control over the trays' conveyor belt, but not the fruits'. So if the tray-prep boys are too slow, or too overwhelmed, and a gap appears, all of the fruit will frantically tumble to the floor.

A sheet of thin molded plastic lines the tray and crackles with each deposit of fruit. By manipulating the tray belt, you can get the fruit to fall in place, mostly. If the fruit's coming really quickly no manipulations will help and you're forced to push tray after tray of mounded fruit down to the wrapping ladies. Ha, the idea of rapping ladies is much more fun, I love silent letters.

The packhouse is loud, not in a permanently damaging way, but in a memorable way. To understand the sound, close your eyes--but squint through them to continue reading--and imagine the sounds from a bowl of rice krispies, an enormous vacuum and a bowling alley. The fruit is all hard because it's export quality--they'll be systematically sprayed with ripening agents on the way over and appear perfectly ripe in your supermarket. We pack boxes as well as trays, and as the fruit cascades into the cardboard box it sounds just like a strike in a bowling alley.

Most of the time the fruit comes too quickly to be bored with the repetition, it's like a game to try and keep up. We have two fifteen minute breaks and one half-hour lunch, which help divide up the day. Apparently MPAC is a small packhouse, and so the employees all get to know each other quickly, during breaks, or in the baptizing fires of the job.

Forklift drivers and floor supervisors wear florescent vests, the rest of us don green aprons--a la Starbucks--and disposable red hair nets. Sometimes I forget and think I'm working in a High School cafeteria.

Though it takes a toll on the feet, back, shoulders, neck and knees, ten hour days mean I can spend only a few days a week at work, and the rest of the time on the beach.