04/18/2024
Chickens, Jobs & Cousins
When I was 15 years old, my dad suggested that I get a summer job and it sounded like a good idea to me. Four of my cousins were working for a chicken farm and offered to get me a job with their crew, so I joined the team the next Monday.
The first shift began at 2:00 AM that day, and that may be the first time in my life that I ever got up that early.
The chicken supervisor picked up all of us cousins in a large truck and took us to the farm to catch chickens. The process went something like this, once we were all inside the chicken barn, someone turned out all of the lights and the chickens, not being very smart, lay down to go to sleep, and that’s where me and my cousins went to work. The division of labor was something like this: there were catchers, packers and stickers.
Some of the cousins ‘caught’ the birds, some of us ‘packed’ the poultry to the big truck waiting outside and the rest of us ‘placed’ the chickens in coops on back of the truck. That night we moved hundreds or maybe thousands of chickens to the processing plant.
It was a tough summer job that I did not like, although the money was good for a fifteen year old boy. I think that was the summer that I decided that I wanted to go to college.
So, I guess I owe my career to a summer job catching chickens at 2:00 AM.
