Day By Day
Written and Performed by Doug & The Slugs
Bad new don't ruin my appetite
Don't let the papers tell me if it's wrong or right
I just do what I do and I do it
Day by day by day by day by day
Live a life and I take it slow
Made mistakes but oh that's the way it goes
I just know what I know it
Day by day by day by day by day
Day by day I'm feeling stronger
Day by day I'm lasting longer
Day by day you help me make my way
I speak up when I feel it's right
I jump up when I know that I got to fight
Until then I just take it
Day by day by day by day by day
Day by day I'm feeling stronger
Day by day I'm lasting longer
Day by day you help me make my way
With you don't worry 'bout it
With you don't worry 'bout it
With you don't worry 'bout it
Day by day by day by day by day
Sometimes they deny it and I
I feel strangely blue?
Sometimes they deny it and I
Like the evil I get from you
Day by day you show me a better way
Day by day you help me to find a place
Day by day you help me make it
Day by day by day by day by day
Day by day I'm feeling stronger
Day by day I'm lasting longer
Day by day you help me make it
Day by day by day by day by day
Day by day I'm feeling stronger
Day by day I'm lasting longer
Day by day you help me make it
Day by day by day by day by day
Day by day I'm feeling stronger
Day by day I'm lasting longer
Day by day you help me make my way
Well, after ten Tunesday posts on my high school years, I really feel like I've said it all, while still feeling a bit dissatisfied with the overall effect; it's just so funny to me that my younger years felt more emotionally charged under examination, and I wouldn't have guessed that before writing about them. But, that is what that is.
Like I said last week, by the time I was done high school, I felt done with book learnin. And although I had already been accepted to the university in town, I decided to delay starting for a semester; to make some money and to have a break. My Dad made a phone call and set up a job for me at Lilydale, the local chicken processing plant.
The job was mostly not too bad. My primary position was on the bagging line: the chickens would be removed from the line by two women with knives -- whose job it was to look for defects (which they cut off) and then grade between "A" and "utility" -- and then the rest of us would slide the chickens into the appropriately graded bag, which were then put onto a cryovac machine (which removed all the air from the bag), and then they were popped into the flash freezer. I'd say a chicken was bagged every five seconds, and the job was monotonous but not strenuous, and the only drawbacks were that we seemed to be always standing in cold water (which was uncomfortable even in rubber boots) and the machines were so loud that conversation was difficult. Standing in one position for hours with only the company of my own head was the hardest part of the job.
Because I was summer help, and maybe because I was young and trainable, I was often sent to other lines when they needed help. Sometimes I was on the giblet line, which wasn't very nice. The chickens would come along the line, hung from the leg as in the picture above, with all their innards hanging down outside their bodies. Our job here was to grab and snip off the organs that go into a giblet package -- the heart, liver, and gizzard -- which were dropped into a water-streamed trough that whisked them away for cleaning and packaging. This was a finicky bit of work: if you snipped the bowel by mistake, you get sprayed with poop; if you snipped the bile sac, the chicken would get sprayed yellow (and that was the primary defect that the graders on the packing line were checking for and removing; I was well aware that that mistake would result in a lower-valued utility bird); and because the tips of the fingers of my gloves were always being snipped off, the workers on this line usually did the job bare handed (which was an unpleasant feeling, grabbing the still warm guts). This wasn't my favourite job, but it was quiet enough on that line for conversations, and I enjoyed the break in routine.
Sometimes, when we were processing cornish hens, I'd be sent behind the freezer to help the women there sort these little birds -- which came out of the freezer so fast -- into the two general sizes we sold (over and under three pounds, maybe?) I liked it back there: it was quiet enough and the women there were jokey and friendly and they loved to play words games (I went on a picnic and I brought an apple, a banana, a cobbler...) and sing camp songs (down by the baaaaaay, where the watermelons grooooow). I liked the sorting and the packing and using the scale, but the only downside was handling the frozen birds as we were only using rubber gloves and my fingers would get so cold.
Sometimes, I'd be sent to the saw line (where chickens were cut into pieces for KFC and other food service), where my job was simply to hang the birds on the line. Very easy job that. And sometimes I'd be sent to the breast deboning area, which was done entirely by hand by one old woman, and although we didn't often get orders that were large enough for her to need help, sometimes we did, and that was not an easy job. On my first day at Lilydale, when I first entered the cafeteria at lunch, I had sat down at this old woman's table because there was no one else there. I should have realised that that meant that most people knew to avoid her, because she was very prickly, but we eventually got along pretty well (mostly because I would listen to her and agree with whatever she said). I remember that more than once she -- with a face like a well-worn baseball mitt -- explained to me that her skin was so youthful looking because she never used face powder in her life. She was satisfied that I was taking her advice when she would routinely note that I wasn't coming to work with face powder on (but who would have gone to a chicken processing plant in full makeup anyway?) I remember once that I was very embarrassed when she looked at me in all seriousness and said, "You're sitting on gold there. You'll be treated like a queen for so long as you don't give it away". Yikes. So, she did think of me as a bit of a pet, and when a couple of us would be sent to her deboning table on big order days, I generally escaped the bitching that the others suffered.
When we would do turkeys, it was often my job to use a big hydraulic cutting machine to remove the necks as they came along the line (which I then handed to my partner to stick into the body cavity), and while that job might sound ghoulish, I kind of liked the feeling; the power behind pulling the trigger. That machine was so heavy that it hung from a cable from the ceiling and I was constantly pulling down on it instead of propping it up, and that could get tiring, but turkeys never lasted long.
That was basically the extent of the job, and I liked it well enough. It was definitely worth the pay -- at $10/hr, that was three times the minimum wage at the time, which makes it far more lucrative than the wages my own girls have been getting from the pork plant where they've been spending their summers -- and as it was a union job, there were lots of rules about breaks, and overtime (which happened a lot in the summertime), and when we worked past ten hours on a shift, they provided dinner (which was, often and unfortunately, KFC). When I started making money, I became a regular at the food truck that came every day: it was just sandwiches and cold drinks, but I loved the luxury of going out there every day and picking whatever looked good. Lilydale at the time was also a cooperative, and I didn't know what that meant until I received a cheque the following spring for my small share in the company's profits that year. Yep, so far as the money went, this job was ideal; working for six months not only completely paid for starting university, but it paid for my trip to Europe the following summer, too.
I remember before I started that my Dad said I should probably not let people know who my father was if I wanted to get along. So when a woman asked me one day where my father worked, I said "Canada Packers" without saying "and he's the boss". As that company was in the process of shutting down one of their two plants, I felt terrible as this woman offered me real empathy, hoping my Dad wouldn't be one of the ones laid off, like her husband. Yeah, that made me feel icky.
So, that was the job. I would be so tired after a day of work that I usually went right home afterwards. As I wrote about before, my best friendships blew up before the end of grade twelve, but I did have some pals I could have hung out with: Nancy was also working full time this year (soldering early cell phones together at Nortel), so we mostly hung out on the weekends and compared stories about the crazy old ladies we worked with (as her workplace was much quieter than mine, those ladies gabbed nonstop, and as Nancy told it, they were pretty salty). I also hung out with Curtis (who was in his last year of high school) and Kevin (who had started university on time and was getting me prepared for what to expect). As I also wrote about before, my boyfriend at the time was from Winnipeg, and after going back home for the summer (and despite having driven overnight to come to Lethbridge for my Prom), Doug ignored me when he came back in the fall, so I had no male companionship the entire time I worked at Lilydale. As the winter approached, I would often leave the house in the dark in the morning and it would be dark again as I drove home at night. I found that to be very depressing; especially after standing all day in cold water and then emerging to cold weather; I remember writing some self-pitying poetry about that.
Plenty of people joke that with the girls working at a plant, they'll learn the value of higher education, but that's a little condescending: I always knew that I'd be going to university, I just hadn't been ready to take the leap right away; I'm sure my own girls don't need a hard lesson in why they shouldn't settle for a low-paying plant job (and especially since their job is, compared to my experience thirty years ago, not as lucrative).
That's enough for today, but I do want to make a note on this week's song choice. Doug & The Slugs were on an oldies station last week and I thought at the time that I should really make sure to put them in a Tunesday post; I loved them all through high school and they probably didn't get as big as they deserved. As I was looking for the perfect song this morning, I enjoyed watching the videos for Makin' It Work and Too Bad, and when I saw Day By Day, I figured it was more or less on theme (it could be the soundtrack to my self-pitying poetry); and it was especially appropriate because it was from 1985, the year I'm writing about. But then I saw the video for Tom Cat Prowl, and while I don't remember that song at all -- and it was released later, in 1988, so not as timely -- it is so much more on theme: it even has a brief scene in a chicken processing plant! I should also add a small note here that even though the drinking age in Alberta is 18, I didn't come of age until December, at nearly the end of my working stint. And yet...it was so easy to go drinking in a bar underage back then, and even though I was too worn out to go out dancing during the week, my friends and I would often go drinking and dancing on the weekends. We always went to the same bar, and after pleading to the bouncer to let me in with my slightly older friends once because "I forgot my ID at home", once I became a regular face, no one ever asked me for ID again. So on theme with the working at a menial job and going out to drink with my friends, I'm including a second video this week, and here's Tom Cat Prowl:
*****
And just because this happened yesterday and it made me laugh, I'm going to add one last story. Rudy texted me in the afternoon to say that she had told her Dad to check out a dog named Penny on the website animalalert.ca. I was curious, but when I went to that website, I was shocked to see pictures of half naked women with buttons saying "Click Here For Live Sex" and "Click Here For Chat". I texted her back saying, "Thanks for sending me to a porn site", and she immediately replied, "WHAT?!?!??". When I googled animal alert, I easily found the website animalert.ca -- which is, indeed, a pet rescue site -- and I saw that this Penny is a Bischon-Poo, just like Libby, the dog we lost going on a year ago (could it really have been that long?)
When I told this story to Mal, she asked why we couldn't have this Penny, or any new dog for that matter, and I didn't really have a good answer. When I later told the story to Dave on the phone as he was driving home, he had a huge laugh at the idea of me being sent to a porn site, and wondered if his sister had gotten the name of it correct when she was directing their Dad there. When I got to the point in the story where I had found the right site and saw that this Penny looked just like Libby -- and since she's five-years-old, she's already at the mellowed age where Libby became a great dog -- Dave asked why we weren't applying for Penny. Somewhere in my mind I was thinking that Dave is the reason why we don't have another dog, and here he was talking about giving away our hearts again. I spent the next few hours thinking about how we'd need to change the dog's name (there are and have been too many Penny dogs in our lives) and I was wondering if she would respond to "Betty"; would that sound close enough? Is it even fair to change a five-year-old doggy's name?
The good news/bad news is that when I eventually asked Rudy if her Dad was interested in Penny, she said that he had both called animalert and filled out an online application. Bad news is that I guess we missed out on adding a new doggy to our home just yet, but the good news is that the inlaws ought to have a new doggy of their own and at least we'd get to visit her.
