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Italiano (Italian)
This story being about a business trip is sui generis compared to all the others. Only minimally does it tell about an actual trip/vacation. I mention it in this blog because for many people traveling is doing it while working, and we often hear idyllic accounts. In reality, it is never all that easy, or perhaps it is only easy for those with certain qualified job profiles.
I recounted this experience both in national newspapers and on Rai 3 in the program Mi manda Rai 3. The experience lasted for a month and a half, took place in the summer of 1997, and was mostly from around Norwich, England.
The previous summer I had taken my first solo trip, touring for almost a month in France but mostly in the UK and Ireland. I loved it, partly because I surprisingly discovered myself to be a conversationalist in English.
I wanted to improve, and rightly so, I was convinced that the best way was to live a fairly long life experience in England. I was an off-site university student and was also in a hurry to graduate so as not to burden the family budget any further. In the summertime I had always worked at the seaside, but it was not enough to pay rent in Bologna and everything else.
I would have liked to do Erasmus. But I would have stretched my academic course too far and I would have had to ask my parents for more money anyway. I decided that the solution would be to go and work in England for the summer. I was convinced that this would improve my English and maybe still earn some money. All right and by the way shared by many. But at that time there were not the possibilities for informing oneself that there are today. I made the mistake of relying on an agency in Bologna whose ad I had read in a newspaper.
Scammed by mad cow disease
In the second half of the 1990s there began to be much talk (alarming many), about mad cow disease.
This was an epidemic that originated in cattle and could be passed on to humans. This caused a decline in beef consumption, especially in the United Kingdom where there was the vast majority of cases, and consequently a considerable increase in chicken meat consumption.
For 300,000 Lire, the chick from the agency offered to give assistance in finding work and housing, as well as any help if needed. She explained that there was much demand for labor in the fields, picking fruit (the famous English fruit…) and vegetables. It was to be a light engagement, outdoors and giving the opportunity to converse with English people and thus achieve my goal. He emphasized precisely that it was the optimal way to improve the language, rather than being in a smelly kitchen washing pots side by side with a Puerto Rican, as I would have risked in the restaurant setting. Never did he talk to me about poultry factories or chickens.
The company I was going to work for, in addition to giving me lodging, was going to send someone to pick me up at the airport in London and then take me to parts of Norwich-a little trip of about three hours to the northeast. The night before departure I went out; I was living in Bologna from where I would leave early in the morning. On my return one of my roommates was waiting for me with a message from the chick at the agency. They would not pick me up, but she left me detailed directions with the various means I would have to use to get to the unpronounceable-named village where I would be sleeping.
The South African arrival and manager.
It took me exactly 12 hours and it was not smooth. I began to have some doubts about the seriousness of my agency only once I arrived in the small square with yet another bus. At the same time another one arrived directly from Gatwich Airport from where I was arriving.
As I was approaching, from the dilapidated facility where my fellow workers were also housed, I began to hear yelling and shouting, but it was not in the local idiom. While waiting to have an interview with the manager, I clearly identified that everyone was speaking in Spanish.
The boss turned out to be a sharp-talking, fast-talking little guy. He was as South African as the entire staff of what was basically a temp agency (they had not yet arrived at our place) that lent foreign labor to a number of companies in the area, providing workers with room, board and transportation. But the surprises were not over. In fact, these services had to be paid for, the workplace was 40 minutes away, and most importantly, other than orchards, we would be working in poultry processing factories!
My business trip becomes a matter of pride
The birds would enter alive and be hung by one leg; upside down. As they passed, a machine would give them a sharp blow on the head that was supposed to kill them; they would be plunged into boiling water to pluck them. Then they would enter our large room where depending on their weight they would fall into large metal boxes. After arranging them in a certain way, we would put them in cardboard boxes.
We had to be fast, because the pit filled up quickly. It rained a lot of chickens that fell and bounced off others and ended up on the ground. Despite the movement, it was quite cold in the cold room. The gown could be changed every week, although after ten minutes of splashing it was already making cocodé.
A clock loomed over us and made that hard, monotonous day an endless torture. In the first plant, one did not even know the time. One would leave when they were finished. I remember one day that around 11 p.m. it seemed they were finishing, when extra carts arrived with more chickens that had arrived from who knows where. In the second plant, however, it was better: you were sure to work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., with no surprises.
One day they sent me to where the machinery was hitting them, and the workers who had to give the dying the death blow. In fact, as they were moving around, some chickens were not being hit well. Some people with an awl were finishing them off. I wondered how chicken killers could feel. They seemed to be having fun as well, and they were joking around playing with the more viscous birds. After the chickens had been plucked, I was to complete the gutting started by a machine.
On the farms, the chickens are crammed on top of each other, so they squat a lot and blacken the back part of the leg that rests on the ground. Here, I also spent a day of my existence grating with a box cutter, that part.
Songs and singers ubiquitous during the business trip
The feeling of nausea came upon entering the plant because of the smell, but then you got used to it. It came back to me for years when I would hear on the radio I’ll be missing you by Puff Daddy with the Police song base. It was the catchphrase of that summer and they played it over and over so much that I associated it with chickens. Speaking of singing, with one of the guys I made the most friends with who lived in Foligno, when we were pit neighbors, we used to sing at the top of our lungs (the only way to be heard given the constant noise of the machinery) our version of Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry, which had become No Chicken, No Cry. (see image created by artificial intelligence at the beginning of the article).
Next stage Incredible encounters during business trip to UK
Trips taken, travel stories divided by continent
Countries visited in my travel stories
Anecdotes, divided by type in travel narratives
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