The Infamous Pickle Incident of 1990

Michael and I met with Jon and Jodi for drinks last night and somehow the conversation turned to the time I had to work the relish line at the pickle factory as punishment for starting a pickle fight. It is a story that is decidedly bloggable, so here goes!
Now, I've had my share of shit jobs in the past. I was a school janitor, I was a house-cleaning lady, I flipped burgers, I took care of old people and invalids, I even tried my hand at telemarketing, but the worst job I ever had was when I worked on the assembly line at the pickle factory.

It was a minimum wage job but my step-sister and I (both aged 16) needed a job for the summer. We were hired through a temp agency as seasonal help. One could smell the place miles away, but nothing compared to the wretched dill fumes that hit you in the face the instant you stepped through the doors of the factory. The smell permeated not only the air, but quickly tainted my clothing, skin and hair as well. After working an entire second shift, which didn't end until the early morning hours, we smelled so bad, my stepmother made us take our clothes off outside on the back porch before we came in the house and woke everyone up with our stench.

While step-sis sat comfortably on a stool, pouring pickle seasonings by the scoop into jar lids, I stood miserably on the assembly line, hour after hour, where I would pull the cucumbers that came down the line into a basin of sudsy water, wash them, and push them into jars. I believe my official title was “pickle packer”. Anyway, back to the pickle fight. It was a hot summer's eve and I caught myself drifting in and out of conscious thought. What can I say, I was bored, and this girl was just… well, prissy; the kind that would snub her nose at the idea of having fun no matter what form it manifested itself in. So I threw a cuke at her in an attempt to liven things up a bit. It landed soundly in her slimy washing water and splashed her. She wiped the scummy soapsuds from her face, then looked down at her soaked shirt… then she slowly looked over at me with this incredulous look on her face. I smirked (and I might have peed myself a little in the sheer exhilaration of triumph). Enraged, she drew back and threw a cucumber back at me, though I saw it coming and dodged just in time. And so it started… the infamous pickle fight of 1990! Soon others joined in. Yes ladies and gents, yours truly had inspired a free-for-all pickle and scummy suds battle! It climaxed when the nastiest, most rotten and grossly bloated cucumber conveniently came down the conveyor belt, right to me. I snagged it, threw it, and wham! Right in the face! It exploded like a watermelon that had been dropped from the top of a 30-story building. Of course, my supervisor just happened to come around the corner right then. What to do with an insufferable teenage rebel in the middle of the busiest season of the year? Move her to the relish line as punishment!

The relish line truly was the nightmare everyone painted it out to be. It was high above the rest of the assembly lines on a platform large enough for only 2 people to stand. In the middle of the summer, it was terribly, terribly hot. I've never been fond of heights either, but with the earplugs we had to wear because of the extreme noise of the machinery and fans, I lost my sense of equilibrium and felt on the verge of upchucking every time I moved. It certainly didn't help that the metal conveyor shook constantly, jostling the contents to and fro as they quickly passed our inspection. This caused much discomfort in the midsection if one were to accidentally lean upon it. Relish, as most of you know, is made of finely chopped cucumbers, lots and lots of sugar and pickle seasonings. In actuality, the cucumbers used for making relish are not the nice ones that go in the pickle jars, but the nasty, rotten, squashed, deformed, stepped-on, even moldy cucumbers that are tossed into bins by the pickle packers who sort them from the good ones. My job on the relish line was to catch anything that was not a cucumber and toss it into the trash. During my short penance, I removed the following items from the abundance of disgusting things that eventually made it to the relish bin: stones, twigs, Twinky wrappers, rubber pickle packer gloves, leaves, candy wrappers, an item that looked strangely of feces, bugs and other such oddities.

One day, the old crotchety lady I worked with (always wondered what she did so horrible that she was appointed relish duty every single day ) nudged me and pointed to something she'd missed that was coming my way. I couldn’t hear her over the noise but she nudged me again and shouted “GET THAT!!” I turned to look toward where she was pointing and felt that familiar nausea wash over me when I saw what it was. By then it was too late. It had already passed me and continued to make it's way toward the relish bin. It was a dead and bloated frog that looked eerily similar to the rotten cukes that shared it's fate. I threw caution to the wind and stretched my body across the shaking metal conveyor in a last ditch effort to reach it. The jostling it gave me, combined with the extreme heat, the smell of decayed cucumbers up close and personal, mixed with the pungent fumes of dill, the height, and the dizzy feeling I got when I moved too quickly (thanks to the earplugs) finally caused me to vomit all over the assembly line.

Sorry to have to relate it that way to you. Needless to say, I will never be able to eat relish again. Ever.

I hated that job. I truly truly hated it.