cannery woes

For some reason I’ve got this blast from the past story stuck in my head this morning, so I’m going to write about it instead of working on my book. :)

My last year of college we were hanging out at our apartment with a couple friends. For some reason I mentioned having worked for several years at Cook Inlet Processing, a cannery out in North Kenai. “Really,” said Brent, an East Coast guy I’d known for three or four or five years at that point. “I worked there for a summer.”

“Really!” said I. “What’d you do?”

“I worked upstairs.”

Now, ‘upstairs’ meant putting boxes together. It was the cleanest, least smelly, easiest job* in the cannery. In the four summers I worked at CIP, I think I spent two days upstairs. “Ooh,” I said, “y’know, my last year there, some kid who got a job at the cannery because his dad knew the owner came in and got that job, working upstairs. We were all so frigging pissed off.”

“What year was that?” Brent asked.

“1990,” I said. “*Man* we were pissed off. Some goddamned punk kid who hadn’t done his time just waltzes in and gets the easiest job in the cannery. We were–”

Right about then I noticed Brent was looking stricken. I said, “Oh, no way,” but indeed, way. The loathsome SOB who got the upstairs job ’cause his daddy knew the owner was Brent, whom I’d met independently two or so years later. Small world indeed. :)

*The egg room was easier, but not nearly as clean or !smelly, so upstairs won for least suckful cannery job.

miles to Isengard: 116.5