It's been 30 years!

In the fall of this year it is going to be thirty years since I started at Farmer John. My first thought is thank goodness I do not work there anymore! I was just a green naive 21 year old when I started. I was hired for a new shift which was made up of a bunch of meat cutters who had learned their craft at Chino men’s prison. The parolees were also all living in halfway houses. My other fellow employees were recent refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia. It was quite an eye opener for white bread kid from the suburbs!
Mike also worked at Farmer John, he was the one who got me the job. He pretty much worked in the same department all the time, ham slicing. I was all over the place in that job. I think I just about worked in every department.
Looking back I just can’t believe how dangerous that place was. I saw a guy get his hand caught in a ham skinner. I saw whole rails that the hog were strung up on tear from the ceiling and come crashing down. I remember ammonia leaks (used for refrigeration) in which they had us put on gas masks so we could continue working. I worked on the kill floor in which the temperature was always pushing 100 degrees with steam every where, then pushing the hogs into coolers with temperatures in the low forties. I worked an elevator in which the chilled hogs would be taken downstairs to be cut up. We would load 30 hogs on to the elevator, the hogs would be hanging from a rail as we descended to the next floor. One day I was running the controls when all of a sudden the elevator goes into a free fall. I started hitting the up button as we were going down and it slowed us down till we hit bottom with a big thud. There were just so many ways you could get hurt there.
After six years of escaping injury I went to work for the Post office. I remember when I left I was making 10.25 an hour and I was taking a pay cut at the post office at 9.37 an hour. I was really concerned at the time about the pay cut The one thing that made the decision easier is that we went on strike on October 1st of 1985 and I knew that I was due to report for work at the post office November 4th. For about 10 years after working there I used to have dreams all the time that I was late for work there. Leaving there was one of the better decisions I ever made in my life!
The reason I thought of this, I found a picture of me working there. You will notice I had more hair in those days, and I was quite youthful! I would be eligible for my pension now if I continued working there, I'm just not sure if I would have had all my limbs!