My 15-year-old wants a job. She’s tired of asking for spending money and wants to earn her own, which certainly gets my hearty endorsement.
This has led to some conversations about my teenage jobs. She’s always interested in what I earned, so I try to explain that the most important thing you get from a first job isn’t always as tangible as the greenbacks in your palm. The things that you learn can be worth much more in the long run.
For example, I tell her, I mowed yards, cleaned floors and built barns. Cut hay, raked hay, baled hay, hauled hay, fed hay. Combined oats, turned boar pigs into barrows, loaded feed, cleaned out silos, sprigged bermuda grass, picked up pecans, hauled trash, picked up pop bottles, built fence, sanded cars and debeaked chickens.
They all paid about the same, but those last three taught me, oh, so much more.
I built fence for Joe Morrow. That was a good job for developing muscles at a buck and a quarter an hour. A deacon in our small Baptist church, Mr. Morrow took the Lord’s work seriously and built fence as if He Himself might some day come down to inspect the workmanship.
No man ever walked the earth who wanted postholes dug deeper than Mr. Morrow. And he didn’t make allowances for 102-degree August days when it hadn’t rained in weeks and the ground was as hard as a jet runway. If a posthole needed to be three feet deep, then it needed to be three feet deep. Period.
Once you finished your three-foot hole and got the post lined up and plumb, you would tamp the dirt back around the post. Mr. Morrow didn’t make allowances for the post itself taking up space – all the dirt went back in the hole.
When you finished, you had some seriously compressed dirt and you had a post that was set as if in concrete. Once set, Mr. Morrow’s fence posts never moved, ever, which was a good thing because he strung a five-strand barbed wire fence with enough tension to tune it like a banjo.
Building fence with Mr. Morrow taught me what it meant to be tired. Muscle-aching, foot-shuffling tired.
If it rained and we couldn’t work outside, my dad would sometimes take me to his body shop to sand and mask cars in preparation for painting.
The masking wasn’t so bad – kind of fun, in fact, and I got pretty good at it -- but, man, wet-sanding cars all day long. That’s not something you want to remember very often. In fact, my right hand is getting pruny just typing about it.
I have told people that sanding cars may have been the best job I ever had because it taught me I needed to do something else for a living.
And that brings me to the time I de-beaked chickens.
Unfortunately, de-beaking chickens is pretty much just what it sounds like. You remove part of the hens’ beaks so they won’t peck each other to death in the crowded commercial laying houses.
The de-beaking machine has a treadle and two razor blades that are heated by electricity until they glow. One of the catchers hands you a hen, you stick a finger in its mouth to keep from burning its tongue, insert a beak about a quarter of an inch and push the treadle to close the razor blades. Ssszzt. Insert the other beak and push the treadle. Ssszzt again. Exiting stage left, one de-beaked leghorn.
As explained to us, chickens’ beaks are much like your toenails or hair. No nerves or pain receptors. The chickens didn’t feel any more pain than you would from, say, trimming a toenail or getting a hair cut.
In retrospect, I hope this was true. The chickens didn’t show any after-effects from de-beaking and I’m sure they would have agreed that there could be worse things, such as becoming a nine-piece dinner.
Problem was, the burned beaks smelled worse, much worse, than burned hair and toenails. Let your senses imagine a hen house the size of a football field with stirred-up dust and dried chicken litter filling the air along with the stench of 10,000 burned chicken beaks. The chickens may not have suffered, but, boy, we sure did. My sinuses have never fully recovered.
And what lesson did this job teach me, asks the 15-year-old?
That’s easy. The lesson is this: if anyone ever offers you a job de-beaking chickens, turn it down.
|
|
|
My 15-year-old wants a job. She’s tired of asking for spending money and wants to earn her own, which certainly gets my hearty endorsement.
This has led to some conversations about my teenage jobs. She’s always interested in what I earned, so I try to explain that the most important thing you get from a first job isn’t always as tangible as the greenbacks in your palm. The things that you learn can be worth much more in the long run.
For example, I tell her, I mowed yards, cleaned floors and built barns. Cut hay, raked hay, baled hay, hauled hay, fed hay. Combined oats, turned boar pigs into barrows, loaded feed, cleaned out silos, sprigged bermuda grass, picked up pecans, hauled trash, picked up pop bottles, built fence, sanded cars and debeaked chickens.
They all paid about the same, but those last three taught me, oh, so much more.
I built fence for Joe Morrow. That was a good job for developing muscles at a buck and a quarter an hour. A deacon in our small Baptist church, Mr. Morrow took the Lord’s work seriously and built fence as if He Himself might some day come down to inspect the workmanship.
No man ever walked the earth who wanted postholes dug deeper than Mr. Morrow. And he didn’t make allowances for 102-degree August days when it hadn’t rained in weeks and the ground was as hard as a jet runway. If a posthole needed to be three feet deep, then it needed to be three feet deep. Period.
Once you finished your three-foot hole and got the post lined up and plumb, you would tamp the dirt back around the post. Mr. Morrow didn’t make allowances for the post itself taking up space – all the dirt went back in the hole.
When you finished, you had some seriously compressed dirt and you had a post that was set as if in concrete. Once set, Mr. Morrow’s fence posts never moved, ever, which was a good thing because he strung a five-strand barbed wire fence with enough tension to tune it like a banjo.
Building fence with Mr. Morrow taught me what it meant to be tired. Muscle-aching, foot-shuffling tired.
If it rained and we couldn’t work outside, my dad would sometimes take me to his body shop to sand and mask cars in preparation for painting.
The masking wasn’t so bad – kind of fun, in fact, and I got pretty good at it -- but, man, wet-sanding cars all day long. That’s not something you want to remember very often. In fact, my right hand is getting pruny just typing about it.
I have told people that sanding cars may have been the best job I ever had because it taught me I needed to do something else for a living.
And that brings me to the time I de-beaked chickens.
Unfortunately, de-beaking chickens is pretty much just what it sounds like. You remove part of the hens’ beaks so they won’t peck each other to death in the crowded commercial laying houses.
The de-beaking machine has a treadle and two razor blades that are heated by electricity until they glow. One of the catchers hands you a hen, you stick a finger in its mouth to keep from burning its tongue, insert a beak about a quarter of an inch and push the treadle to close the razor blades. Ssszzt. Insert the other beak and push the treadle. Ssszzt again. Exiting stage left, one de-beaked leghorn.
As explained to us, chickens’ beaks are much like your toenails or hair. No nerves or pain receptors. The chickens didn’t feel any more pain than you would from, say, trimming a toenail or getting a hair cut.
In retrospect, I hope this was true. The chickens didn’t show any after-effects from de-beaking and I’m sure they would have agreed that there could be worse things, such as becoming a nine-piece dinner.
Problem was, the burned beaks smelled worse, much worse, than burned hair and toenails. Let your senses imagine a hen house the size of a football field with stirred-up dust and dried chicken litter filling the air along with the stench of 10,000 burned chicken beaks. The chickens may not have suffered, but, boy, we sure did. My sinuses have never fully recovered.
And what lesson did this job teach me, asks the 15-year-old?
That’s easy. The lesson is this: if anyone ever offers you a job de-beaking chickens, turn it down.
