A bite of New Zealand apples

A Bite of New Zealand Apples

Let me tell you about my latest adventure here on middle earth. It’s not the kind of adventure though that would require me to climb mountains or shoot deerin the wilderness. It’s equally exciting, if I may say so, but something newer and more productive than that. Well, it’s working in an orchard--packing and occasionally, grading apples--for three months. That “adventure” meant many things to me. 

    First, it was a wish of long ago granted. Some years back, it was saturation point for me because of all the pressures and stresses of an overly demanding job--that of editing a weekly women’s magazine. While slaving Friday nights with the rest of the staff (On days nearing holidays, we would stay till the wee hours), to finish our deadline, I would always exclaim, "I wish for my next job to be a manual one! " believing that manual jobs were not at all stressful.
    

    True, people working in the publishing industry thrive on pressure, and beating deadlines has become a way of life. But chasing it has always been physically and mentally exhausting. What made it more unbearablefor me, was the fact that pressure mounted on a weekly basis and yes, it came pouring--from the management, advertisers, printers, marketing, etc.Don’t get me wrong, I loved my previous job and I enjoyed doing it. It was self-fulfilling too, no matter that it was not as financially rewarding as some people thought it was. But the pressure was just too much at times! Given this sad plight, would you not wish for a more relaxed and less mentally draining job?

    Anyway, that job of packing apples was also a humbling experience for me. Perhaps, too confident of what I thought were my tickets to any kind of job (my education and more than 20 years of work experience!), I 

regarded manual work as anything but hard. Well, this work was not at all hard! But that was only after I had committed all the major errors while doing the job and learning it in the process. It was in a way enriching too, in the sense that it exposed me to an entirely different culture of work and the dignity of labor. It was a cent for a cent’s worth of work--no mucking around, no short- changing.

Did I enjoy it? Yes, I did. Was I happy? Indeed, I was. But I must confess, the first few days were a baptism of fire. Day one, I met John Van Vliet, who, together with his wife, Jamiee owns and manage the pack house. Since I was inexperienced, he assigned me and three others to the pre-sorting table. That meant, standing before a conveyor belt that tossed and turned the apples after being washed for us, sorters to see any defective fruit. The job required the clarity of an eagle’s eyes and the swift hands of a magician to quickly spot and grab the rotten and unsuitable apples before they could march any further and reach another area, which was the grading table. For eight and a half hours, I felt like I was mixing mahjong chips non-stop, that at the end of the day, my shoulders were so stiff that moving them was a struggle.
      Day two, I was “promoted” to packing. I was just too glad to accept, relieved that I could at least flex my legs and do other things while packing apples. Problem was, the supervisor who was supposed to show me the ropes, was too busy herself and forgot about me.

    So there I was, standing on my lane waiting for the apples to drop on my table, confident that the job was so simple I could handle it without supervision. Luckily, there was this beautiful lady (a New Zealander of European descent), on the table next to mine, who I found out was hard at hearing and speaking, but caring enough to motion for me to pick up one from the stack of corrugated boxes underneath my table, fold it to make a box and write my name on the bottom right hand side of it. Because she did it partly by sign language and partly with words I could hardly comprehend, I understood only part of what she told me. So I looked around and observed what everybody else was doing--they were grabbing the apples as the fruits were directed to their table, arranging them on a blue paper tray and putting them all inside the box they made. Four trays of apples would fill the box and the fifth empty tray placed upside down would cover the apples and make the box ready for sealing. That was easy! Or so I thought! Until I finished my first box and the cover would not fit! I was on the edge of panicking, because as soon as the blue covering is put on top of the box, the stackers would pick it up and shift it to another machine that would label and seal it. A man named Curly, who was about to lift the box, noticed the cover that wouldn’t fit. I bet he was a bit annoyed that his job was delayed. “You did not stack the trays in their right order,” he told me. I felt embarrassed. Then he proceeded to unpack the box and showed me how the trays should be stacked up inside it--A trays first, B trays next.

     “A trays have three holes on the first row to hold apples, B trays have only two," he further explained. That helped a lot. I did right with my next boxes. I was so engrossed with what I was doing when a New Zealand Maori woman, in her mid 40s, working on the lane fronting mine yelled alluding to me, “Somebody should tell that lady that she should not just stay on her lane! She should be going around helping others, too!” I turned to see her table flooding with apples and she was finding it hard to cope. I did come to help her but she was too angry to stay in the same lane with me, so she left and moved to the next lane leaving me alone to do her job. There was no time to protest. I had to move fast, lest the apples would fall on the ground. That was then when John, the owner of the pack house, noticed what I was doing.
       

     “Hey! You’re not doing it right! You’re supposed to put them on the tray, red side up!” he said in a voice loud enough for anyone standing within ten or so meters away to hear. My heart skipped a beat. What followed was an instant one-on-one tutorial on how to properly arrange apples on a tray from the boss himself. With his brows in a knit, he swiftly did the apples--facing the same direction with the reddest part facing up.

     “See? They look nice and red?” he said, and I nodded. But I tell you, when your table is overflowing with apples, you wouldn’t notice which side of the fruit is red. All that you’d be thinking of would be to grab as many as you could and put them all on the tray as quickly as your hands could manage. And you would wish you had at least six more hands to keep the fruits from falling on the ground! With difficulty, I managed to sort out the apples until there was only a few pieces left and the machine stopped directing them to that table. I ventured to leave my lane and moved around. I chanced upon another lane overflowing with apples and nobody in attendance. I grabbed the chance to apply what I just learned and turned the switch on to free the chute (pronounced as shoot)--the entrance of the lane where the fruits roll out that was choking with apples. And then disaster happened--the apples blocking the chute rolled out, but the conveyor belt pushed the stacked trays of apples at the end of the lane (which I did not notice, of course), and spilled a tray of fruits on the ground! Klutz!
        To complete the heartbreak, at least at the start of the season, was when the Quality Control people would inform you that “your box was out of grade,” meaning, a random check was done and they found your box containing more than four apples with any of the defects they didn’t want to see, like, insect bites, bird peck, rot, hail marks and/or with more than the allowed size of bruising. In effect, they were telling you off for not doing your job right.
        Oh well, nothing in this world is so easy and simple after all.

          This adventure to be continued folks!