My Job in an Apple Plant Working in an apple plant was the worst job I ever had. First of all, the work was physically hard. For ten hours a night, I took cartons that rolled down a metal track and stacked them onto wooden stands in a tractor-‐trailer. Each carton contained twenty-‐five pounds of bottled apple juice, and they came down the track fast. The second bad feature of the job was the pay. I was getting the minimum wage at that time, $3.25 an hour. I had to work over sixty hours a week to get a decent take-‐home pay. Finally, I hated the working conditions. We were limited to two ten-‐ minute breaks and an unpaid half hour for lunch. Most of my time was spent outside loading dock in the freezing cold. I was very lonely on the job because I had no interests in common with the other workers. I felt this isolation especially when the production line shut down for the night, and I spent two hours by myself cleaning the apple vats. The vats were an ugly place to be on a cold morning, and the job was a bitter one to have.