The Worst Job EVER!

I have held many jobs in my life, from dishwasher to major gift fundraiser to managing a bookstore. I have worked in conditions ranging from a state of the art electronics manufacturing plant to an Amish barnyard. Yet of all my different jobs, there is one that stands out as the worst job I have ever had.

t was the summer of 1986. Reagan was still in the White House, but the Iran Contra scandal seemed to have the administration on the ropes. I had just finished the eighth grade, and while I still preferred to watch cartoons over the constant news coverage, I was feeling pretty good about myself as a soon to be high schooler.

My older sister and I had flown up from our home in Texas to stay with my mom in Lancaster, Pennsylvania for the summer. My mom was a Nurse Midwife for the Amish and, in the years past, she had taken it upon herself to line up summer jobs with some of the Amish fathers for me. As we drove to her house from the airport, Mom told me she had, once again, found a job for me. This one paid a nice seven-fifty an hour - big money back then. The job was catching chickens.

I had grown up in the relatively good sized city of Austin, TX, and the only thing I knew about chickens was what I had seen on Warner Brothers cartoons, and that they tasted good fried. So when I found out I was going to be catching these fowls, I pictured myself running around after Foghorn Leghorn in a cartoon chicken yard for Colonel Sanders. Actually, this did not sound too bad to me. Go in, grab the ten or twenty chickens in the yard, and call it a day. For seven-fifty a hour, which was two dollars more per hour than I had ever made, I thought I could handle it. I was wrong.

Two weeks later, my first day on the job arrived. That summer seemed destined to be one of the hottest on record. Because of the heat they had us working overnight, so it was four in the afternoon when I stepped out on our driveway to wait for the van that was supposed to pick me up. Within moments the heat plastered my hair against my head. As I waited with sweat trickling down my face and my Converse high-tops sticking to the melting asphalt, I wondered why they would need ten guys for this job. Lightly swinging my new Rubbermaid lunchbox against my leg, I tried to picture a chicken yard with enough chickens to warrant that many people.

Finally a black Chevy van pulled up at a quarter past and waited at the end of the considerably long driveway, forcing me to run to it. As I came along side the van, the passenger side door opened and a lanky Amish man stepped out. His blue eyes were level with the top of the van as he reached his slight arm out to shake my hand with a grip of steel. He introduced himself as Sam Nolt, the manager of the operation, and told me to hop in back of the van with the rest of the men.

I climbed in the rear of the sweltering van among the six other guys who had already been picked up. The driver was a "black bumper" Mennonite. Their religion allowed them to drive black cars, but that allowance apparently did not leave room for air conditioning. Everyone else in the van was either Mennonite or Amish, and the ages ran from sixteen to sixty. I was by far the youngest in the van, but according to Sam not the youngest to ever work for him. While we drove around picking up the other three people, Sam told us new guys about the job. His description was still vague, and the only thing made clear was that the chickens would be in cages and there would be an awful smell.

After almost two hours in the broiling van, we finally arrived at our destination. Instead of a farm with a chicken wire enclosed yard, we were in the middle of a corn field next to an oversized hut about a football field long that had a cargo bay on one end and a small door at the other. The outside was your standard gray metal siding with large vertical slits in the sides to allow air in. We pulled up to the end with the small door and everyone fell out of the van that now smelled heavily of BO. The six experienced workers went inside and immediately set to work. Sam and the rest of us stayed outside while he pulled out gloves for those of us who did not bring them.

While we waited, I listened to the sound of the chickens. It was like the noise at a rock concert between bands accompanied by continual feedback over the sound system. From the racket, I thought there must have been hundreds of birds inside, but I was wrong, there were thousands of chickens in the building.

As we walked in, I saw the sign over the door which read "Stolsfos Eggs" and the purpose of the building finally dawned on me. The realization did not have time to settle in as I crossed the threshold and a putrid smell broke upon me. There is no way to really describe the smell of an egg factory, except it is worse than anything you have smelled before. It is a combination of chickens, rotten eggs, years of shit piled up beneath the floor boards, and decaying birds. Even at six o'clock the building was hotter than the van had been, which did not help the smell one bit.

Once I made sure I was not going to toss my lunch or faint from the waves of heat and stench that broke over us, I looked around. It was much darker in the building than it was outside. Bars of light streamed from the openings in the walls and light blossomed from uncovered bulbs in the high ceiling. The inside of the structure was made of bare wood and reminded me of the last scene in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark.' Only instead of endless aisles of boxes, this building contained eight endless aisles of cages. Each row was made of column after column of four one-and-a-half foot by one-and-a-half foot cages rising from the wooden floor. The cages were wire mesh and each one was only big enough to squeeze in three or four healthy chickens. Instead most of these cages were stuffed with five or six birds to a cage. Conveyor belts ran the length of the aisles carrying food and water to the imprisoned birds and catching any eggs that were laid. Waiting for us in each aisle stood several metal racks.

Sam brought the new guys over to one of these racks standing in an aisle no one was working yet and started to demonstrate how to "catch" chickens. First he reached into one of the cages through a small door, just big enough for his fist. He grabbed hold of one of the chickens and yanked it out by the leg, and then hung it from a two-prong hook on the rack upside down by its leg. You could fit about a hundred chickens on a rack. He told us once it was full someone would wheel it all the way down to the cargo bay and then they would be loaded on trucks and shipped off to a slaughter house.

Mr. Nolt had each of us give it a try. I pushed my hand into the mass of white birds scrambling around the little cage and was reminded by a sharp peck that chickens were not entirely defenseless. After a few attempts I managed to grab a leg and pulled it to the front of the cage. As the fowl passed through the hole I had to tug hard because it almost stuck, and I felt the leg dislocate from its socket. I hung the chicken on the rack and Sam commented nonchalantly that they usually had lost enough weight so that would not happen.

After each of us newbies had a turn, Sam took me and another man to the next aisle and left us. Then we joined the slow process of emptying the building. After I had cleaned out ten or eleven cages, my hand was aching. The gloves I was given were white cotton knit you would wear to keep out the cold. They definitely were not meant for the kind of work we were doing now. Grabbing the chicken's legs was like grabbing a stick and having it whip around in your hand until you put it down. Along with the sharp beaks, boredom was also gnawing at me, but the repetitive act for which I was being paid left no room for deep thought.

I tried to start a conversation with my co-worker, but all he told me was his name was William and he was working as a favor to Sam in exchange for the use of Sam's horses. With no common ground to continue our discussions, I rapidly settled into a mind-numbing rhythm of grab and pull, grab and pull.

That day, almost everything that could happen in the job did. Birds pecked and scratched me, leaving scars I wear today. They were so terrified that most of them lost bodily functions and released the content of their bladders and bowels on my hands and feet. One chicken even laid an egg as I wrenched the bird out of its cage, only to have the egg shatter on the boards beneath us. Several cages, when emptied, still sheltered the carcasses of chickens. And even at the princely sum of seven-fifty an hour, I would not touch those bodies, not that I had been asked to. The deafening noise and the sickening smell were ever-present, but changed just enough so they would not fade to the background. But my biggest problem was the heat that stuck around well after sunset.

Sam finally told me to break for dinner around ten. I almost fell to the ground where I was, but instead I stumbled out to the van and grabbed my new lunch box. Sitting down on a strip of grass, I stared at a lunch that would have been a sick joke if I had not packed it myself - warm turkey sandwich and salty chips. After eating what I could, I refilled my water jug from the community cooler and went back to work.

When I walked back in I was able to see how much we had accomplished so far. Over half the chickens were already loaded on trucks. But somehow the building was only slightly quieter and no less reeking. For the next hour I continued to empty cage after cage in the aisle. I was working by myself for awhile and my mind was finally numb to the outside world. All I was thinking about was the rhythm of the work - grab and pull, grab and pull.

The next cage had only three birds in it, but I hardly noticed as I started to pull them out like I had countless ones before. The first two came out easy, but when I grabbed the last and largest one, it would not fit. I tugged and yanked on its leg trying to force it out. I pulled. I tugged. Finally I mustered my strength and braced myself with a foot against the cages. With a Hurculean effort I pulled as hard as I could I was left standing like Henry VIII - sans wives - with an uncooked leg in my hand and the bird bleeding within its cage. That is when a new smell erupted in the building as I loosened my dinner on the boards and cages beside me.

For awhile I just stood there looking at the chicken going wild in its cage. Then I reached back in and grabbed the bird, pulling it out and hung it next to its severed leg. Leaving my puke and the bird's blood behind, I wheeled my half full cart down to the cargo bay and told Sam I could not do any more. He looked at me, then at the blood spattered chickens I was bringing down, and just nodded his head. Sam gave me a choice of taking a break and then finishing the night loading trucks, or calling a ride to take me home. With the relatively fresh air helping revive me, I decide to stay on so I would not feel like a quitter.

The next three hours were spent among the welcome smell of corn and diesel exhaust as three others and I took the chickens off the racks and threw them in cages on trucks. When the last bird had been loaded we called it a night. The drive back was both cooler and quieter since no one had energy left to talk, although there were more that a few snores. When they let me off at the end of our driveway, Sam stepped out of the van and gave me an envelope with that days pay and told me not to feel bad, not many people stayed on for long. He gave me his card and said to call him in a few years and possibly try it again.

I remember walking slowly back to my Mom's house. I smelled like the chicken house and was covered with remnants of it. The night was cool with a warm breeze blowing across the nearby fields and the horizon brightening with a hint of the dawn to come. Under the stars and surrounded gentle wind I vowed never, ever, to do that job again.

As I walked up our porch stairs I looked again at my pay under the orange light, three tattered twenties. And safely under the porch roof with my memories starting to already fade, I realized that never could be a very long time.

Phil Payne is a full time RVer traveling the U.S. with his wife, Sue, cats, Barnum and Bailey, and pugs, Willoughby and Xander.  With years of therapy, he is happily eating chicken once again.