Back in the ‘80’s I worked in a grain elevator in the City Of Regina, one block in east of Albert Street on seventh Avenue. I did that for five or six months. I think there’s a FastGas there now…
We loaded grain cars, by hand, with 50 kg (110lb) sacks of lentils. 1100 fit in a car. We would do two of those box cars a day.
One guy catching a sack onto his shoulders off of a conveyor belt & then running across the floor to roll that sack onto the shoulders of somebody standing in the grain car (the floor of the elevator to the floor of the grain car was about a 15” difference in height). The guy in the grain car would run to the end of the car and drop that sack, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat, etc…until that car was full.
Then 30 minutes for lunch (we also got two 15 minute “coffee” breaks to catch our wind and eat), then we load the second car. Each car takes approximately four hours to load that way. That’s almost a 1/4 million pounds of lentils across the shoulders of each guy and you’re moving at a run. You’d go through a lot of calories in a day, five days a week, for about 1/2 a year.
It was a really quick way to put on mass as a young guy. Now, in my mid-50s I’m still paying for it. Not everybody could do it, and most new meat lasted less than an hour. I did it for almost half a year.
This was during that famine in Ethiopia, in the “We are the world, we are the people” era:
In hindsight, most of those lentils I’m sure were intercepted by warlords and sold for AK47’s and various other items that didn’t do much good depending on your perspective.
Yep, they sure did, & they didn’t give two shits about their own people ‘cuz life is cheap in many places…and every one of these scratchy burlap sacks with 50kg of lentils in them & my sweat on them was stamped “not for resale” but…it is what it is.
Yep, & it’s at least a two way street.