A summer at the winery

When I tell most people that I spent almost 3 months working in a winery a look a jealousy begins to appear on their face and visions of mediterranean vineyards begin to form in their minds. Here's why they have no idea what the hell they would be getting themselves into.

--------------------------------------------------

Part 1

After I graduated high school I moved 200 miles away to go to University. I stayed in the dorms that year (and the next) and came back home for the first (and last) time to work after my freshman year. From my post below you can see that I used to work at a local ISP in my hometown. However, with 9/11 having occurred shortly before I started my first year of college, the employment situation in small town Eastern Washington wasn't exactly great, and by that, I mean it was absolutely g--damn horrible.

 It had looked like I would be able to get my job back at the ISP up until a month before I moved back, but they barely had enough work for the people they currently had.  I had anticipated just finding a service level job somewhere and passing my time making minimum wage until school started up again. This was easier said than done however. After a fruitless week of driving around looking for jobs with my friend Dan (not a lot of Internet job postings in small town America after all) we followed the advice of a friend who was working as a temp in a winery warehouse about 40 miles south of our town and applied at his temp agency. Of course, at this agency you don't specifically apply for a job anywhere, but it was understood you would end up at one of three places unless you were an expert welder of fruit picker. Your three options were

• Steel Plant
• Winery Warehouse
• Cherry Processing Plant

As manly as it would be, the idea of working in a steel plant wasn't terribly appealing, plus, we didn't have steel toed boots, and the cherry plant jobs only lasted a month. Plus, we wanted to work with our friend, so we slanted our applications towards the warehouse. Ignorant college kids that we were, we spent a long time filling out the 'technical skills' section of our resumes with all of our office application suites and programming languages that we knew, only to turn in our forms and have our new 'boss' tell us that they "didn't really have a lot, or any" of those type of jobs to fill.

 So, after our afternoon of filling out forms at the employment agency, we went back home and waited. We didn't hear anything for 2 days, our friend who worked at the warehouse told us he was trying to get his supervisor to hire us on, but that he hadn't heard anything yet.

 First, a quick digression into the job that our friend had, he and an acquaintance of ours worked down there packaging products for display and special shipments, the name of their department was in fact "Special Projects". They had told us many times that all their day consisted of was shining bottles and folding cardboard boxes, mindless work they said. Sounded easy enough, and they made the kingly sum of $8.50 a hour, it would be the most I would have ever made in my life, if only I could get hired on.  As another bonus, they worked 4-10's, which for those of you who aren't into work shift slang, means 4 10 hour days per work week, Fridays off, every week!

 Finally, our patience was rewarded and we got a call on Monday afternoon, we were needed at the winery tomorrow, but not a 7am, no no, we were going to be making the big bucks and working swing shift, 5pm to 3:30am, this shift carries a $.25 an hour bonus! $8.75, this was the big time!

 

To be continued in episode 2...