The first "real" job I ever had was working one summer for the U.S Dept. of Agriculture. I needed to make money to purchase clothes for my Freshman year of University.
I had the
very glamorous job of slogging around in the muddy greenhouses, first applying worms to new cotton plants, and then weeks later, finding the worms and plucking them off. They were testing the resistance of the plants to the worms. I also had to clean dirty test tubes that had been housing nasty baby worms - ugh!
One of my other jobs was picking cotton from test fields - yes,
hand picking cotton, and that is a truly hot, grueling, finger-puncturing job! One day while picking, my poor fingers were poked raw by the cotton as I picked, then I developed heat exhaustion and threw up all over the place, and to top it all off, I bent down to pick up a cotton ball that had fallen on the ground, poked one of my eyes with a cotton stalk and tore a cornea. That was a baaad day!
Another job was picking through bags of bugs that were swept from test fields. We had to identify the different bugs and count the number of each type of bug present in the field. I also got to participate in a cross pollination experiment. I had to hand pollinate flowers and label each bloom with a tag to identify the plant's cross. I also prepared cotton seed by burning off the "fuzz" on the seeds with hydrochloric acid.
It was overall a very hard job, but very rewarding both money-wise and educationally. I learned I
really, really did not want to work with bugs, or cotton or anything that poked, squirmed, or burned!
