(Because it didn't fit in the original post without completely going off topic. It's still an interesting story, and it gives a better explanation for why I only lasted a day.)
I was still on the wave of calm feelings Sunday evening when I received a phone call from the temp agency about my job starting on Monday. This was the first that I'd heard that I had the job. Apparently I'd accepted this one without meaning too. So the next morning, 4 am, completely unprepared, I headed out to a dairy farm to feed and water baby cows. It was dark and the roads were icy, I have no snow tires and my little clunker clutch car doesn't like to go much above 60. I hydroplaned at least ten times on the way to work. Then I found out that most of my co-workers could barely speak a lick of English. Fortunately the job was the kind that you could mime a lot of it and they were very nice.
My job was to feed and water all 400 baby cows and bottle feed the littlest ones. They ranged in size from small labradors to maybe a mastiff. The youngest couldn't even stand yet and wouldn't take the bottle. Each cow had it own ten foot by three and a half foot pen with over half of it being a little shed. They stood up on fresh hay and had vaccinations and were fed organic grains if they weren't having milk. The ground was cold and hard until about one o-clock in the afternoon when we started wading ankle deep in mud. Before lunch the boots I had brought had already leaked through so they gave me some company boots. One boot leaked and by the end of the day my socks on my right foot were completely black.
I saw three dead baby cows during my shift. One we discovered that morning and it was still in it's pen when I left. I saw another around lunch time laying in a corner in the pasteurization room, and another one just as we were finishing the last round of watering. By the empty spaces in the pen rows I could tell that this is normal. It is farm work, babies are known to die. I get it. Farmer's do have to factor in the death rate for their stock. Still, I can't help but wonder if they would have lived had they been with their mothers warm bodies instead of little sheds with only their own body heat to protect them from the cold.
The temp lady I worked with was the only other one who spoke English. I mentioned how the work wasn't too great for my weak back and that maybe I aught quit since it was too far away for me to feel safe driving. If the weather got really bad I wouldn't be able to get out at all. Plus I wasn't sure if it was worth the pay/gas ratio since I found out we were paid less than 8 dollars an hour and the drive took a half-hour of highway travel. She mentioned that she had a daughter who might be in need of work soon so I called the agency at lunch to let them know that I couldn't take the job. After all the breaks they gave me that afternoon I'm glad I did. If it was like that every day I wouldn't be earning even gas money.
(So there you go. All my excuses wrapped up in a little package. I could handle most everything else. It was the danger of travel plus the pay that finally made me feel ok with saying, "I quit." I may have also been scarred for life seeing how they treated the dead baby cows. I know it's a company, I know what cows are for, they're just livestock bred for human consumption, I get it, but you don't leave dead cows among live ones and you don't have to put your dirty boots on a dead baby cow, whose fellows you fed so tenderly just earlier that day, and laugh. You don't get to do that unless you're a big game hunter and you shot an animal yourself. That's an accomplishment worth having a victory over. Not a dead baby cow who died from cold in your cramped pens. That's just sick.)
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