Wednesday 16 January 2013

Fruit picking

I have a new found appreciation for anyone who's ever picked fruit, and I mean that. I just took a moment to think of the poor sod who picked my apple and the other poor sod who had to put the sticker on. Why am I suddenly going on about that? Because I just done a day tomato picking. The worst job I've ever done in my life and I'm not joking.
We started work at 6am and it all started fine with the farmer explaining what size and colour to pick (not the red ones you gotta pick the green ones) issuing us our bins we had to fill, they were a metre by a metre about that deep. We'd get $65 a bin and we were to work in groups of 4. Easy money! We'd pick loads and make a fortune. Yeah right. It's back breaking work because you're constantly bending over searching through the bushes trying t find the ones that are ready. Up and down and moving along. You get excited when you fill your first tub and you take it over to the bin and throw it in and it doesn't even make a dent. Ok so this may be harder than we thought. It took the 4 of us 3 hours to fill one. So the farmer moved us over to the next crop which was bell tomatoes. Took us 3 hours to do half a bin. It was soul destroying, it was the last pick of the crop so there was barely anything. I lost the will to live. Today we made $24 each. 6 hours work working in the sun with no shade with temperatures upto 45c and covered on flies all day for $24! I'm starting to rethink if I can do another 87 days of this or if I wanna just leave my 2nd year visa.

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