My history of manual labor
Here is another request:
What is the hardest manual labor you’ve ever done? I love intellectual policy wonk commentary, but I can’t help but feel some small amount of disdain for people who SEEM (a possibly faulty assumption) to have never really suffered trying to solve problems in the physical realm. There’s so much abstract data/policy up for debate, but how many talking heads have even replaced a toilet or turned a wrench in their lives?
From ages 16 through 18 I worked in the produce department of a supermarket, and that involved a fair amount of lifting of heavy boxes and additional physical labor, though nothing as hard as digging ditches or as unpleasant as cleaning toilets. My first job was at Hillsdale Valley Fair, where at the same time James Gandolfini (Sopranos star) was a shopping cart fetch boy. My second job was at Hillsdale Stop & Shop, again in the produce department.
These were fundamental experiences for my core outlook, for these reasons and more:
1. I learned that earning money is very good for people’s psyches. No amount of money, neither large nor small, ever should be taken for granted because somewhere along the way someone earned it. At the time I felt very rich.
2. The people slated to fail in life might be just as intelligent as those set to succeed. And often they are funnier and more fun to hang around with and sometimes in these kinds of jobs more productive as well. Yet somehow they do not have the conceptual frameworks that might put them on the road to success, nor could they acquire such frameworks easily.
3. It is not that easy to find a good produce department manager. Really quite a few skills are required, not the least of which is the ability to handle and motivate the junior staff. The most difficult quality to find in the produce managers, however, was the discipline to avoid saying “**** you” to the store bosses, who were always busting their chops.
4. They all thought I was weird. It was periodically remarked that I didn’t smile very much. Yet most of the time I was having a blast. I was producing stuff.
4b. I learned that being called “****head” a few times a week is not such a terrible thing. Sometimes it made me smile.
4c. I had to wear a tie or they would send me home. That seemed just to me.
5. I continued working several nights a week for the first half of my freshman year at Rutgers Newark. After I got back from the long drive to classes (I lived at home still), accompanied by Bruce Springsteen music, I would either wrap lettuce or go read Nassau Senior and Malthus.
6. Back then they did not hire women to work in the backrooms of the produce department, so it was quite a “guys club” in terms of rhetoric and ethos. I remained polite.
7. It was stupid that they ever wrapped bananas in clear wrap in the first place, and I was relieved when they stopped the practice. Plums were by far the most fun fruit to wrap into packages.