My job is tough. I have to heavy stuff. Lots of heavy stuff. A lot. It makes me get real tired, sore, and/or sweaty. One of the most physically draining jobs is working ice. The only problem: people think it’s easy and cool to work the ice on a hot Summer day. These people are wrong. Filling ice is really one of the toughest jobs I do.
First off, ice is really heavy. Really heavy. Think about it: each bag of ice is seven pounds. Bags of ice come in bales of six. That’s forty-two pounds of ice per bale. On one pallett of ice there are five bales per row, stacked up about ten to fifteen rows high. Assuming the minimum on an unworked board of ice, that makes for fifty forty-two pound bales of ice.
Here’s what I do to fill ice, in order:
-Pull the board out of the freezer in the back.
-Pull the board of ice to the front end.
-Fill the ice box in the lobby of one door, which involves:
-Picking up and dropping each bale onto the floor in order to loosen up the ice
(sometimes it’s already loose, but very rarely)
-Swiftly open the bag with my well-honed boxknife skills.
-Pulling each bag out of the bag, and put it in the freezer.
-Putting the empty bags into carts.
-I then go outside and fill the box at the other door (outside… where it’s hot)
-Pull my garbage cart and the board to the back room, dispose of the plastic.
That’s a lot of ice. 300 bags. 2100 Pounds of Ice. A little over a ton. Holy crap, maybe I miscalculated. Oh no. I didn’t. I can’t even pull a full board without the assistance of the powered pallett jack. Then I have to lift up all of it and drop it on the floor to loosen it up (unless I’m feeling lazy… hee hee). Working ice makes you sweaty and tired.
This normally wouldn’t be a problem, since I possess Herculean strength, but it becomes such when people walk by and go “Oh, you have the cool job!” Although I appreciate the pun, the job is far from cool, especially when I work the ice outside. It’s not like I’m rolling around in the ice. I’m taking it in my hands and putting it into the cooler. The only thing that gets cold are my hands — although they don’t really get too cold since they’re constantly moving heavy bags of ice around.
Even worse than “you have the cool job” is when people say “It’s the Ice Man!” thinking they’re really witty or funny. I haven’t figured it out, but they’re either quoting something from the 1984 movie Iceman, which I never saw, or Vanilla Ice. Either way, I’m not laughing. I’m not the ice man. I wasn’t a prehistoric man frozen in the arctic alive, then uncovered by anthropologists. I am not a rapper, and OG, or whatever else those cool cats think they are these days.
Next time you go into a grocery store and see a helper clerk filling ice, don’t come up with some lame quip that everyone else already thought of. Give him or her a pat on the back and say, “Keep up the good work, ice-chuck” (that’s what we’re called).
Boy I’m glad I’m done with the grocery business come September 4th.
