Why chickens can fuck off.

So, you know how, last time I updated, I was still pissed off about being fired one hour into a job? Well, I'm still pissed off. However, I didn't want to waste all of my moaning for one shoddy employer. I'd like to have some whinginess left for old age, assuming I'm not too busy secretly taking great pleasure in telling long-winded pointless stories that go nowhere, safe in the knowledge that no-one's heartless enough to kick an old lady under a bus (obvious exception made for the case of Margaret Thatcher).
In the meantime, I've acquired a job working in a chicken processing plant. Good to see my degree wasn't a complete waste of time, eh? Anyway, have a re-cap of the first day:

03:30 Alarm goes off. Briefly consider suicide as an alternative to leaving the nice comfy bed I only managed to get to sleep in twenty minutes ago.

03:35 Stagger around flat. Body appears to be going into shock. Can early starts cause that?

04:20 Shuffle out of building, armed with just enough money for the bus, and a bag of sandwiches. Eyes blur in retaliation to my opening them before midday.

04:50 Arrive at bus stop to see my future colleagues; a miserable group of ne'er-do-wells who all look like I feel (like they've been recently dug up from the crypt). Everyone is alternating between smoking, coughing like a dinosaur in a tarpit, and gobbing on the floor.

05:00 A bloke with a clipboard tries to write my name down on the register ten times before I grab the clipboard and do it for him (my name is not Helennawrs).

05:10 The bus turns up. I squeeze myself into a seat next to the lankiest man I've ever clapped eyes on and guzzle Red Bull whilst internally bemoaning the fact that I don't have access to crystal meth or something.

05:45 Arrive at work. Everyone jumps off the bus and vanishes, leaving me to bimble around, looking for the entrance. I eventually find my agency's on-site caravan thing, and a sullen bloke called something like Grumph or Yurg shows me the way in. I'm kitted out with the following:

• Wellies (not mine; you have to basically make a mad dash for the welly rack and hope they have your size. Turns out that I should have brought extra socks, because I ended up with a size eight and a size nine, despite being a size seven).
• Overalls
• Apron
• Hairnet (all hair has to be covered, for obvious reasons; even if you have a beard, you have to wear another hairnet over your face)
• Helmet (not sure what for)
• Ear defenders (which come in an ear-shaped box, and do very little to block out the sound of machines grinding away)
• Gloves (the factory is kept as cold as possible because of food hygiene laws, and you have to handle a lot of cold, raw meat)
• Latex gloves to go over the other gloves
• Weird stretchy things that go over your sleeves to stop you from pilfering the produce (because who doesn't like working for eight hours with your sleeves filled with raw chicken?)

06:00 Walk through what looks like one of the footbath things at the swimming pool, and get my first look at my new workplace.
Have you ever played Abe's Oddysee on Playstation? It's a platform game about an ugly bastard slave thing called Abe who works at the Rupture Farms Meat Processing Plant.



Yeah. My workplace looks like a cross between that, and somewhere you'd wake up if you were a character in a Saw movie. It's a windowless, neon-lit room, with a monorail-like track running around the perimeter that has chicken corpses dangling from it. Every few feet, another bit gets chopped off the chicken corpses, sort of like a chicken corpse-whittling operation. There are loud machines with scary-looking cogs and blades pretty much everywhere. And I got started on de-boning, where seemingly the only person at the factory who speaks any English explains what I have to do.
De-boning involves being given a massive heavy pallet of chunks of chicken, and fondling each piece to check for bones. If you find a bone, you dig it out. All bone-free meat gets put on a tray in front of you. Fair enough. So, I get started.

06:20 I notice that there's a window afterall. It doesn't let any natural light in, it just looks in on the manager's office. Like most managers, he doesn't actually seem to do any of the hard work, he just sits there, looking out of the window, and timing people with a stopwatch.

06:30 The manager sends a man to shout at me in Turkish. I don't speak Turkish so I stand there gawping at him, which doesn't help matters. Eventually, he pokes at his watch repeatedly, which I take to mean "You're not going fast enough". Turns out, they want one bit of chicken de-boned and de-skinned per second, roughly. With no knife to help. And two pairs of gloves on. Makes sense.....

06:35 The bloke who told me how to do it informs me that management are "little Hitlers". I nod in agreement, and want to scratch my nose, but am not allowed to because then I'd have to waste valuable time by changing my gloves and disinfecting myself again. I carry on for what seems like three hours or so.

06:40 Thank Christ, there appears to be a clock. Sadly, this only shows me that what I thought was three hours was actually more like three minutes. Shit.

07:30 I've had Tik Tok by Ke$ha stuck in my head for a while, and I'm exhausted. As a result, I'm incredibly dazed, and keep mumbling something about feeling like P Diddy without realising I'm doing it.

08:15 My colleagues stop shouting at me to go faster for five minutes when they're impressed by my ability to lug heavy stuff around.

10:00 Lunchtime. Thank Christ. I go upstairs, strip off my several metric tonnes of protective gear, and take my humble bag of sandwiches to the canteen. There are no seats in the canteen, and I don't feel hungry anyway, having spent a few minutes washing chicken blood off me.

10:15 Go outside, just to see sunlight, and sit on a post near the steps. Grumph comes up and "has words"....
"You smoke over there."
"I'm not smoking, I'm sitting."
"You eat in canteen."
"I'm not eating either, I'm just sitting down."
"Go over there."
"Am I not allowed to sit here?"
"No. You sit in canteen or over there."
"There are no seats in the canteen. Can I just eat my lunch on the toilet?"
"No, no eating or mobile phones in toilets. Just toilet business."

10:20 Sit on toilet (without sandwiches). Consider crying, but have sweated so much under the overalls that I can't spare the moisture. Eventually, trudge back to the locker room, and start putting my textile suit of armour back on.

10:30 Back on the factory floor. Someone throws a chicken foot at my head. Guess that's what the helmet's for.

11:00 Some people are singing Happy Birthday in what I think is Russian. I'm reminded that it's my birthday soon, and I'll be spending it here. This thought makes me sad, so I think of something happier. Like cooking Jamie Oliver and feeding him to starving children.

12:00 I get a tap on the shoulder, and am told to shift over to a different department. I'm lead to a conveyer belt with a load of chicken wings and drumsticks on it. The bloke with the knife and the chainmail gloves points at the conveyer belt.
"Er.... sorry, what am I supposed to do?"
"This."
He picks up a drumstick, and puts it on the other side of the conveyer belt.
"Oh, right."
I do the same thing. He grabs it, puts it back where it was, and starts shouting in Polish whilst waggling a chainmail-clad finger at me.
Eventually, I deduce that I'm supposed to rip the remaining feathers off them, so I do. And get yelled at again. This continues for a while.

13:30 The machine gets jammed briefly. Eventually, it un-jams itself, resulting in it firing several drumsticks at my head. Thankyou, helmet.

14:00 Time to go home. Thanks Christ. Walking back to the locker room, someone steals my helmet. I hope it's not something I'm meant to keep hold of and look after. I pilfer the gloves and ear defenders (the gloves because they'll be useful, the ear defenders because I now have to go to bed at about eight o'clock at night, and need to block out as much sound as possible so I can sleep).

Conclusion? I'm going to keep looking for work.



.....yeah.

I've since worked on various different aspects of chicken processing. Including:

Cleaning
Otherwise known as gut-scraping. You get given what resembles a squeegee on the end of a very long handle. Your job is to spend your day running around, cleaning up after your colleagues by scraping innards into the drain. You also pick up any bits of chicken that fell on the floor and put it in the appropriate bin. Oh, and clean the machines. Management don't turn the machines off whilst you clean them, you understand, that's just a waste of time. So it involves frantically washing bits of poultry off something that looks like it could easily rip your hand off and convert it into nuggets.

Trussing
This one is in a seperate building, and is what I've mostly been doing. Basically, you stand next to a massive tray of dead chickens. And you truss them. And put them on a conveyer belt. That's it. It's boring and knackering, and sometimes you have to rip the innards out of the chicken when the machine has been unsuccessful, but at least you can generally switch off and daydream for the entirity of the shift.

Neck-cutting duty
Sometimes, the machines don't cut the necks off the chickens properly. You're given chainmail gloves and a sharp knife and stand in front of a conveyer belt which moves way too fast, frantically swinging the knife at the chickens. Incidentally, I accidentally stabbed my supervisor in the arm the first time I did this.

Bobbing for corpses
In one part of the factory, there is a room where the chicken corpses are scalded and defeathered in a machine. Needless to say, this room, unlike the rest of the factory, is ridiculously hot. Unfortunately, I was not told about this, and went in wearing my usual metric fucktonne of clothes necessary for preventing hypothermia in the other parts of the factory. The result? Sweating so much that my hair dye started running down my face, turning me orange, like some sort of disgusting bogbeast glamour model from the crypt.
The actual corpse-bobbing part involves standing next to a massive trench of blood running throughout the building. If I see a chicken corpse floating in it at any point, I have to hop in and fish it out. This is comedically revolting, but it gets worse; at one point, the trench started to overflow, meaning that everyone in the room ended up knee-deep in blood. Great.

Metal detection
To ensure that people don't have to eat bionic chicken, each one has to go through a metal detector. Occasionally, I oversee this by removing chickens from the machine that coats them in some dextrose mixture or other, popping them on the conveyer belt, and shitting several bricks every time the obnoxiously loud alarm goes off. Bizarrely, no-one removes the chicken from the line if this happens, so next time you find a screw/wrench/tank in your chicken, you'll know why.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm 25 tomorrow (I wasn't planning on living particularly long, so I feel I've earned the right to a mid-life crisis). If you'll excuse me, I'm going to drink turps and sob about the sad state of my life.