Memoir 0002

Facts about me that surprise people who know me #78:

I have practical knowledge about how to dissassemble a corpse to its vital components.

Thanks to Fletchers meat packing plant I have skills that could come in handy after a storm that cuts me off from civilization or in the event you all start to really piss me off. I even have a pair of boning knives that I liberated from the factory floor, and I know how to sharpen them.

I can describe the entire process from the barns to the kill; from the hanging, to the evisceration and dismantling to composite parts. I know the ‘pop’ of removing still warm kidneys and the ‘ick’ of making sausage casings with the help of an electric razor and a pair of poo-squeezing wheels.

I started where they start everyone green off the street; on an elevated platform with no guardrail keeping you from falling 5 feet down to a rotating auger. You stand on the platform, shoulder to shoulder with 6 or 8 other people who may be lucky enough to have a future in Porcine Deconstruction and alternately pray for death and safety from death. The platform is where you ‘pull fat’; this is not a euphemism but as descriptive as the job needs to be to ellicit a smile of pity from the lifers.

What differentiated the good and bad jobs was hard to understand. Some people ranked them by pay rate, putting sausage casing room and stunner at the top of the list. More pay means more discomfort; be it pain or smell or otherwise. Other people put the jobs with the least difficult work at the top. Some would include cleanup crew, warehouse, and casing room in the list of least strenuous. Nobody lists the fat puller’s job far from the bottom of the heap; I would list it above the kidney removal guy’s job, but only just.

At least the fat pullers didn’t stand like movie zombies all day with arms straight out in front. The fat pullers mostly did bicep curls all day every day with about 5-10 pounds of resistance. A busy puller might deal with a thousand or more hogs on a daily basis, depending on production levels.

The process was simple; reach into the open, empty carcass and look for the forward end of hog’s rib cage. At the tip, you can just hook your bare fingers under a half-inch layer of fat that lines the inner side of the ribs. Work your fingers in there, and pull up quickly and firmly, removing a pound or so of warm blubber. Slap this sticky mess onto the conveyor belt behind you to send it to lard processing and return for another handful from the other half of the speeding pig.

I was not cut out for life on the kill floor, and they let me go before my 90 days were complete. Considering the oddities of humanity that I worked with, I think they did me a huge favour in letting me go.