The Worst Job I Ever Had

  What’s it like here in the winter? Well, for one thing, you have to be prepared to make a living in a variety of ways you may not have considered. One of my first jobs was at the Cold Storage on Commercial St. In spite of it’s name, it was not a place where ladies stored their furs, but instead a large building located where the Coast Guard Station is now, a building where frozen fish products were packed and shipped.

   “Dress warm,” the man who hired me warned.

   The temperature was the least of the unpleasant aspects of that job. From 8am to 5pm, we stood in a large, cold room before long wooden tables divided into sizing bins. A conveyer belt brought the fish, which we then consigned to its proper weight bin after (quickly) weighing each on a scale. A radio, tuned to a popular Boston station played the same “top twenty” songs all day for our entertainment pleasure, and we got a whole half an hour for lunch. We had to wear heavy-duty rubber gloves that turned our hands white and wrinkled and everywhere was the underlying smell of fish. The fish we were sorting during my time there was frozen rock lobster tails from South Africa, which I could never figure out since at the time selling just the tails of lobsters was illegal in this state, and anyway, why did we have to import frozen lobster tails from South Africa when we live here in lobster land? I never got a satisfactory answer to that one.

   The only good part of the job was the people I worked with. Having just arrived in town, I had very little experience with the Portuguese community, but that winter I met some of the greatest ladies I’ve ever known. There was Alameda, who had worked at the Cold Storage all her life, and never missed a day. Since I rarely completed a week at the place, I was very impressed. Helen had a similar story, except she’d gone away for ten years when she got married and moved to New Bedford. When she returned, widowed, she went right back to work at the Cold Storage. Nearly everyone there had started when they were still in school. They were a lively group, full of Provincetown stories, and able to find the rainbow in the darkest tale. Those ladies were what kept me working there as long as I did, and after I left we remained close friends.

   After I’d packed lobster tails for six weeks or so, Helen took me aside.

   “Look, darlin’,” she told me, “you don’t seem to be enjoying the work here. My niece has been working behind the counter at the Pharmacy, but she’s going off to collage. Why don’t you go see if you can get her job?”

   Thank you, Helen. Thank you. Some days I still say that.

   I watched from the street the day they closed up the Cold Storage. The electricity had been turned off, so there was no more refrigeration, and the place literally melted. It seemed the ice in the building was the only thing holding the structure up. A few days later the rubble had been cleared and what had once been a large part of the town’s history was gone. Sometimes I tell people that was the worst job I ever had, but when I remember the great stories and the laughter, I have to admit that’s far from the truth.