First Day of Work

First, I want to talk about the human experience I had today.  You see I had the pleasure of working with the nicest people I could ever hope to work with.  

I have to tell you that I only remember the man’s name in the middle, and I believe it is John however I am unsure. I don’t know how they pronounce John in Spanish. And there might not be a different pronunciation. Regardless I was literally blown away by how accepting these three showed a complete stranger. It really showed me, the miser that I am, that true kindness exists in the world. 

Today I spent nearly 8-1/2 hours working in the fermentation room. And room isn’t the right word to use to describe how large this space is. I spent the day on a team moving a piloné. What is a piloné? This is a piloné.

As I said I worked on a team. Most of what I did today was stack hands of tobacco onto this very piloné. The top three layers are mostly my handy work. I have to tell you that creating that space between the layers wasn’t easy. I don’t think I quite got the knack of it today as that was the time, I received a lot of help during the day. The most challenging part of the day was separating the individual leaves in each hand. Those tobacco leaves curl in on themselves as well as curling around each other. I do hope I haven’t ruined anything as my first few attempts resulted in a few rips, tears, and new holes. Fortunately, I worked with filler tobacco, mostly, so I’m not too concerned.  

Tomorrow should prove to be interesting. You see the team I’m on wants to move an entire piloné in one eight-hour shift. I see a bottle of ibuprofen in my near future.