THE PENNY PUB

A Teenage Girl and Her Workplace Nightmares

The worst, most horrible, terrible jobs in the cosmos of my life

“You won’t believe the pay! It’s unreal! We’re going to make so fucking much money! I’m going to buy a Camaro! We can buy the coolest clothes!”

At the time, the “unreal” pay was ten bucks per hour, which at that time was a fortune. The year was 1976. It was a tenuous time in a young girl’s life. I was the young girl, only sixteen years old. I had floated around with different jobs. My hype-man cheering me to work the mushroom-picking job was my older sister. She was seventeen.

All of my jobs thus far had sucked

Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour had been the recent nightmare. As a teenager, I didn’t think things through. For example, I was embarrassed that people were looking at me, so I applied for a job in which I wore the equivalent of a clown suit.

I wore a styrofoam old-timer’s fake straw hat, puffed sleeves and red-white-n-blue armbands to ring up ice cream at Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour at Washington Square shopping center. Sis and I got that job together, sitting for an essay exam and a math test to score the hardest job there — on the cash register.

Working together (for three days) made us closer. We hated it — together, as sisters. The noisy banging of drums, screaming children, and the work outfits! There was no hiding. When you’re getting paid, you can’t duck under the windows. No great-grade-on-a-work-test goes unpunished.

Seriously. Bussing tables would have been much better. But oh, no. We were the smart ones, so we got the hardest job. Boring cash register and on display in the window area.

You want to talk about ghosting an employer? I don’t remember how I quit that job, but Sis and I decided we weren’t going back on the third or fourth day.

I called in and said I had broken my leg or something, or my seizure disorder was affected by all the noise. Some huge lie. Sis in the background, “Yeah, me too! Tell ‘em me too!”

When we walked past the ice cream parlour after quitting so unceremoniously, we snuck by fast, ducking under our hoodies.

Could any job have been worse? Oh, yes. Oh, yes indeed.

The Mushroom Factory

So, my sister and I started working at the mushroom plant in Salem, Oregon. I was still sixteen, and my sister seventeen. When we showed up to work, everyone stared at us. They were mostly older people with vacant eyes. We were pretty teenagers, with fluffy hair and sparkly pink lip gloss — and did not fit the mold. Speaking of which…

The working environments include darkness, which the mushrooms grow in. The ever-present smell of animal dung was so pungent and overwhelming it was torture. Eating food became impossible as the smell permeated my tastebuds, and everything tasted like shit.

Layers and stacks of mushrooms growing to the ceiling of the warehouses meant that we, the workers, had to climb slimy wooden railings to reach and lean over the large beds of mushrooms. Using sharp knives, we cut the mushrooms off and put them in baskets. It was climbing up and down the slimy wooden railings to do back-numbing stretching to pick the mushrooms.

One leg would be on a railing on the wall. The leg on the slippery railing nearest the mushrooms went to sleep, as I’d be in an awkward position. Working heights meant that the people walking underneath, including supervisors, were walking between my spread legs. This invited groping, good-natured jokes about the view (ha ha!), and even supervisors who held talks underneath our young spread legs. It was an unsafe work environment in every way imaginable.

Everyone wore headlamps, so they could see. The lights were weak. If you’ve ever wondered what a mole feels like, go work in a mushroom factory. And every bad joke you’ve ever heard about shit was told, every day. Every hour. I felt my mind go numb as soon as I clocked in.

I learned a few things working at the mushroom plant. First, while the workers were horribly depressed and quiet, they looked out for each other. The one time I threw my leg toward the wall to put it on a broken two-by-four, someone grabbed my leg and supported it. I could have easily broken my leg. Accidents happened all the time there.

This was another short-lived work experience. The dreams of cute clothes and a Camaro went up in smoke, but working in total shit-reeking darkness, and in constant danger, wasn’t something my sister and I could tolerate.

Over decades of work, I’ve had cruel bosses. I’ve ridden through Khmer-Rouge-infested mountain ranges, guarded by a driver with a machine gun and a hand grenade rolling around the Toyota Camry Console. But I swear to God, there was never a job as bad as working in that mushroom factory.

Worst job of my life.

Here’s an article about it. If you click on the link, you can see the levels of beds the mushrooms grew on. See how high, to the very ceiling, the mushroom beds went? The plant has now been torn down. I’m so glad I was able to quit that job, and live under my parents’ roof for a while longer. Other people working at the mushroom plant didn’t have that advantage.

Last night I read a long letter by the mayor of Salem, who was shocked at the unsafe work conditions at that mushroom plant. He supported the workers who complained about horrific treatment at the hands of bosses. In one situation, a worker lost his arm because he was run over by a fork lift. A grocery story chain supported a boycott of the plant’s mushrooms, owing to their dangerous work conditions. It made me sad for the workers. I’m so glad I stopped working there when I could.

No camaro for many years, but sometimes that’s the sacrifice.

Thanks for reading!