The Summer I Spent Working in a Factory...

And learning as much as I did in my first year of college.

This summer I worked at Pepperidge Farm (famous for Goldfish, Milanos, and various other types of cookies).  It was second shift, which if anyone has ever worked second shift, it is from three in the afternoon until 11 at night so imagine shifting a day based on nine to five hours and transposing them into my hours.  As a college student, I went in thinking I "deserved" a good job for having gone out and begun an education for myself. I thought maybe they would have me be an office assistant or work in the computer department helping out with menial tasks.  Unfortunately, I was not given a "glitzy" job, or even a white colar one at that; for 8 or more hours a day, I stood in line with people twice my age and did various jobs from assorting and packing cookies, to stacking boxes, sometimes well over two thousand 15 pound boxes.  Some days, I would lay on my stomach underneath a four hundred degree oven cleaning out the grease pools and cookie crumbs that come out the bottom of said oven.  Other days, I would receive verbal assaults from women, who had been working there since before I was born, in more than five different languages for not doing a job that met up to their "standards".   If you've ever worked in a factory you'd know, no one is anyones friend, everyone will cut you down to get ahead and get a better pay for themselves and their family.  I found myself coming home at night emotional and physically drained.  My back felt like that of a 50 year olds and my soul and my will was being ripped and torn apart.  Most of the days, we stood for 8 hours at a time or sat on stools with no seat backs in the least ergonomically sound positions imaginable.

Once I began the job though and saw all of the hardships, lousy pay, lousy work, and lack of future in the job, I started thinking.  I thought about how fortunate I was.  Some of the people that I worked with and shared the exact same job with were parents of kids I graduated high school with.  While my parents always worked in cushy Management level jobs with more than adequate pay grades, my friends and their families lived off of pay that I made as a "summer job".  It also made me feel guilty for ever questioning not going to college.  Growing up, I was always told by parents that I would go to college, that I would do more than what they did when they graduated high school so it would be easier for me than what they had to go through.  I was ignorant back in those days and felt the need to be different, against the grain, but I was really just a spoiled kid from the suburbs who never had to really work.  Sure I worked a summer retail job in high school 20 hours a week and thought I was awesome because I had $100 more than what I had before, but I never gained anything from those jobs.  I was never pushed, never required to try hard or to be taught any lessons on hard work.  In a retail setting, everything is wait until something happens.  When you work in a factory, it's don't stop and be the reason that everything gets messed up. There's a lot of pressure in that philosophy; you screwing up can cause the whole line to go down, to lose product, lose revenue, and possibly affect not only your own job, but someone else's.  There's also this sense of hopelessness when working in a factory; you leave a sunny world to a building the size of football stadium with no windows, hot, thick, heavy, dense air that doesn't move, and smell of anger, frustration, lack of hope, and cookies.  Every single time I walked into the production floor, I began to notice that I just began to lose hope, as if it sucked you and would never let you back out into the real world.

Now the fortunate end of the story for me is, that I got to leave.  It was only a summer job.  It was only 3 months of my summer so I could make extra money for school.  I felt as if I was above everyone there solely because I didn't have to stay there.  As time progressed though, I began to have the utmost respect for the people that went there.  They gave there lives up everyday from three in the afternoon until eleven at night for the sole purpose of feeding America's fat stomach.  For them, this job was their purpose in life, it put food on the table for their family and a rough over their heads; it was their version of the American Dream.  With the cards they were dealt in life, they made the best of there situations and did the best possible job they could knowing that there was no room for them to grow, to move up and better themselves.  That was the end of the line for them, and they knew it.  But, for whatever reason, that didn't stop them, that didn't deter them from coming in everyday and working hard.  I learned that you can never stop, because you can easily be replaced, that you have to be what you say you are and back it up.  I learned to appreciate what I was given in life and that I was able to leave that voluntary prison camp to come to a place of knowledge and do something that I love for the rest of my life.  I learned that at the end of the day, we are all equals, not one person is better than the next person because of their earthly status and wealth; that what truly matters in life is to find a life that makes you happy, whether it be working a crappy job so you can support a family that you love, or doing something that you love even though you aren't getting paid a ton of money, or even making no money and spending your life as a missionary to improve others situations.

The experiences I gained working this summer were experiences that I never would have learned anywhere else.  I realized that even when I'm working at school and have a video to finish, a paper to write, a test to study for, or even a book to read, that things could always be worse, that I could be doing something that I don't love for the rest of my life.  I now understand the importance of being here at Ithaca,  it's not about being with friends, or going to class, or even getting rich someday, its about learning more about something that you love so that you can provide yourself with the opportunity to do it the rest of your life.  So you can fit into your designated spot in the world and flourish, not only for the progress of your own life and career, but for the progress of mankind.  We're all on this earth to fulfill our own purpose and I realized this summer that I was put on this earth to work in the film industry.  What that means yet, I really don't know.  Where I'll end up, you're better guessing for yourself than getting an answer out of me.  All I know is that I have to work hard a create things for myself and things will begin to clear up, that I will find my purpose, and that I will do everything I can to excel at it.

Tyler Chadwick