The Oddest Jobs, the Hardest Jobs & My Life as a Carrot Juice Technician Part II: The Virtues of Bright Orange Hands
[Be sure to first read The Oddest Jobs, the Hardest Jobs & My Life as a Carrot Juice Technician Part I]
If what you do for a living defines who you are to some extent, then to some extent at the age of sixteen I became a carrot.
You see, for about six months in 1986, for a long-gone mini-chain of health and gourmet food stores in Chicago called Foodworks, I had an after-school job making carrot juice. I was “Brian Vaszily: Fresh Carrot Juice Technician.”
And while it was not the first, second or even third job I’d ever had, it was and perhaps with one exception still is the oddest job I’d ever held. With one other possible exception it was also the most difficult.
For those reasons – and though I wouldn’t realize this till years later – it was also amongst the most rewarding.
Toward understanding, please bear with me for a typical afternoon as a carrot juice technician:
1) Arrive at the vacant old second floor apartment above the Foodworks store where the juicing operation was based. Crank WXRT, “Chicago’s Finest Rock” station, to 11 on the old stereo that management had kindly placed in the vacant kitchen.
2) Walk out the back door and down two flights of stairs to the cool storage area in the basement beneath the Foodworks store. Load one 50 lb bag of carrots onto shoulder and haul it back up the two flights of stairs to the vacant apartment kitchen. 
Rock out briefly to “In Between Days” by The Cure playing on the radio while in kitchen.
Return back down two flights of stairs and load another 50 lb bag of carrots onto shoulder and haul it back up the two flights of stairs. Repeat process up to ten times, depending on volume of fresh carrot juice required by management. Occasionally, when feeling heroic, load a 50 lb bag onto each shoulder and carry one hundred pounds of carrots upstairs that way, paying for it only years later with an occasional aching lower back.
3) In the kitchen of the vacant second-floor apartment with Robert Cray’s “Smoking Gun” blaring on WXRT, razor rip open first 50 lb bag of carrots. Dump carrots from this first bag into the large steel tub sink. Hose carrots down thoroughly or so with a high pressure sprayer (i.e., a garden hose attached to a spigot right outside the back door and turned high as it will go.) Repeat process with three more bags of carrots, as steel tub’s carrot weight capacity is 200 lbs.
4) Prepare to use the industrial-strength juicer located right next to the tub of carrots. This pre-sophisticated-juicer-era juicer stands three feet tall and two feet wide and resembles an oversized Mr. Coffee sheathed head to toe in steel armor. Make sure the hole in the top that is about as wide around as a coffee cup through which the carrots get pushed is clean enough. Make sure the solid cylindrical plastic device known as the “carrot pushing thing” is clean enough. Place the large wastebasket lined with a heavy-duty garbage bag underneath the juicer’s back spigot to catch the carrot pulp. Place the large and clean enough white bucket under the juicer’s front spigot to catch the fresh carrot juice. Plug it in.
5) Finish singing along to “Every Little Kiss” by Bruce Hornsby and the Range because you think you sing it so well, plus you know you won’t be able to hear the radio for awhile. Turn on the juicer. It roars. Like thirteen vacuum cleaners. You can’t hear anything else.
6) Grab a carrot from the tub. Any carrot. Place it small tip into the hole on top of the roaring behemoth juicer. Grab the solid cylindrical plastic carrot pushing thing. Push the carrot all the way down into the grinder. The machine roars even louder as the carrot is obliterated, the juice spinning and spit out one way, the pulp spinning and spit the other. Repeat with another 163 carrots or so. Quickly shift to a second large wastebasket when the first is overflowing with pulp, and shift to another clean enough white bucket when the previous one is filled with carrot juice. Repeat with another 163 carrots or so, till tub is emptied of them. Turn off the juicer.
7) Brush your hands together vigorously to remove some of the pulp bits and juice. The orange has saturated deep into the skin of your hands. Cool.
8) “Walk of Life” by Dire Straits ends on the radio, but the ringing in your ears continues. Repeat step 3 above … rip another bag of carrots open, wash its contents in the tub, then another bag, and another, and a fourth. Then repeat steps 5, 6 and 7 for all those carrots. Repeat it all yet again till all bags of carrots have been juiced.
9) You now have about three to five buckets of fresh carrot juice. You now have six to ten bags of carrot juice pulp. You now have a very messy carrot juice machine. You now have hands and arms glazed completely over in orange.
10) Place cheesecloth over an empty bucket. Pour first bucket of fresh carrot juice slowly over cheesecloth into this bucket, so cheesecloth catches remaining pulp. Rinse cheesecloth after each bucket is filled. Repeat with remaining unstrained carrot juice. Cover strained fresh carrot juice buckets with plastic wrap.
11) Clean up the stupid carrot juicing machine. Just enough. Clean up the tub sink and sweep the floor just enough, too. Sing along to “How Soon is Now?” by The Smiths on the radio to make this cleaning part, the part you like the least, more enjoyable.
12) Haul the first garbage bag filled with pulp that is heavier and clumsier than a 50 lb bag of carrots down two flights of stairs and out to the garbage bin in the alley. Repeat six to ten times.
Haul one of the big buckets of strained fresh plastic-wrapped carrot juice down two flights of steps and place it in the cool storage area in the basement. Repeat three to five times. (Later that evening, someone whose job is “Fresh Carrot Juice Bottler” will come and have to pour the juice into a bunch of small single-serving size plastic containers labeled “Homemade Fresh Carrot Juice!” They’ll then have to label-gun the price on each of those bottles. Who would want that ridiculous job?)
13) Go back upstairs, wash your hands with Lava soap while Talking Heads and The Clash and maybe Leadbelly play on WXRT. Give up on trying to wash the orange out of your hands. Leave.
On the CTA, Chicago’s public transportation bus that you take to get home, tell the guy who is trying to be funny that no, you don’t work in a Cheeto’s factory, ha ha ha. And give him two bright orange middle fingers as he gets off the bus.
14) Repeat every day after school, five days per week.
Now either you’re wondering a) how this was rewarding; b) why I did it; or c) if my hands are still orange.
In reverse order, no, after twenty-one years I think the orange tint is long gone. But if we ever meet you can check my fingertips as I may have just gotten used to it.
Why did I do that job, when I could’ve bagged groceries, flipped burgers, or any of the other more typical teen jobs? Well first and foremost, it paid a quarter more per hour than other jobs, a fortune then to a sixteen-year-old from the inner-city. Plus they sold me on being able to blare whatever music I chose as loud as I wanted, and on building my physique by all those trips hauling heavy things up two flights of stairs.
Indeed, aside from the money that was one of the greatest immediate rewards – I became quite “ripped” for a sixteen year old with the routine and heavy-duty workout. That certainly prevented some boys my age from teasing me about my orange hands; but then, it didn’t stop others, particularly girls.
Though I am brown-haired and hazel-eyed, my permanently orange hands and arms earned me the unflattering nickname of “The Carrot Man” or sometimes just “The Carrot” in my high school halls.
And that’s another way the job rewarded me. Prior to that, I hadn’t really been one of the “teased kids” since all the way back in second and third grade, when my mother routinely dressed me in striped and checkered pants that she found lovely but that just didn’t appeal to
the schoolyard bullies’ fashion sense. But especially from 7th grade on, I was considered cute and well-liked by girls, athletic and fun by guys, and likely getting too full of myself for it. I didn’t like it then – I considered quitting the job many times solely because of it – but the teasing I got for those “rabbit paws” humbled me.
That job also confirmed the power and joy possible in solitude. Aside from a boss checking to make sure I was alive every 90 minutes or so, I hauled and cleaned and juiced those carrots alone. High schoolers typically like to surround themselves with friends, so when I first agreed to the job I thought I’d hate that solitary aspect. But I grew to love it.
While pushing carrot after carrot after carrot through that hole to their obliteration, and beyond the juicers’ roar which you quickly get used to (eardrum damage is a different matter), I could allow my mind to wander anywhere without worrying about getting back to my homework, or what my parents or teachers might say, or how I looked to my friends. And my mind wandered everywhere. I first started writing books in my head while juicing carrots.
That job, which others assumed from the description of the work and my chapped orange hands was horrid, had still other rewards. Because they were carrots, and because of their sweet earthy smell, it only enhanced the value I already placed on natural foods. And when the juicer was off, I could sing along as loud as I pleased to the WXRT songs … turns out they occasionally heard me down in the store, but it only served to entertain the staff and customers down there.
I didn’t leave the job actually; it was phased out. I forgot exactly why, but I believe due to increased demand and better margins, FoodWorks switched to homemade fresh carrot juice mass-produced in a factory. Like John Henry before me, technology and I had worked me right out of a job.
Which brings me to the Carrot Juice Technician position’s greatest reward: though I never longed to work with carrots, and they weren’t even among my favorite vegetables, and the heavy-lifting was grueling, and I didn’t appreciate orange hands, I missed the job when it was gone.
This prompted me to wonder why, of course, and to recognize – weeks, months and even years later – everything I’ve written above. That was when I recall first learning that, though I wasn’t necessarily doing what I loved, I could appreciate, gain from, like and sometimes even love whatever I was doing.
In a world that shines far too much of an artificial light on movie stars, sports stars, political stars, business stars and the next American Idol, that can be a hard lesson to remember. When I forget it – and I often have and still do – what I find helps me is looking down at the palms of my hands and seeing orange there.
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Now Check Out "The World’s 25 Oddest Jobs"
(with Inspirational, Hilarious, Stupid Insights Included!)