I worked in many different places while I was in Ireland. The economy in Ireland was said to have just started getting better when I arrived there, which was in 1998. So, I was never short of work when I needed a job. Here, I would like to talk about the most memorable and interesting job I did in Ireland.
Working in a Fish Factory
It was in a factory handling raw fish.
I heard about the job from an English man who was one of the people who I met in Cork City. He mentioned it to me a couple of times, explaining that it was casual piece work that paid depending on how much work you did. Also, he told me that the company was run by a Japanese man.
I was really in need of a new job then, so I decided to check it out and went to the fish factory one day. They had work and I was able to start right away. First, they gave me a special knife to cut raw fish.
The job was taking whole roe from herrings and filling trays with them neatly in layers. They paid by the number of trays done and it was quite well-paid compared to other jobs I did before, such as working in Chinese restaurants. All the staff and other workers seemed nice and easy to work with.
After I worked one day, I thought the job was OK. It was easy and there was no pressure from anybody. So I continued to work there. It was a seasonal job and the company only had work in winter. Also, whether there was work each day depended on whether they had enough good quality fish coming from the fishermen. So, sometimes there was no work, but mostly they had work every day.
The job was easy, but it wasn’t a job that everyone wants to do. There were a number of reasons for that. Firstly, the factory was very cold and it felt like we were working inside a large refrigerator. Secondly, when we work there, we had to wear a long navy-blue uniform, large rubber boots, gloves and a net on the head. And thirdly, there was lots of small white stuff all over the fish and it stuck to the uniform. And when it dried up, it really stank.
And all the workers were supposed to bring back their own uniform home every day. So I had to keep my stinky uniform in my tiny room until I washed it. My own clothes usually got that smell also and I ended up sleeping in the room with the smell of stinky fish every day.
Meeting the Japanese Owner
One day, the Japanese man who ran the company came to the factory, for the first time since I had started working there. It was some weeks after I had started the job. He came to speak to me inside the factory as he must have heard from the Irish managers that there was a Japanese girl working there.
He introduced himself and told me to call him Ishi. He was a nice friendly person. He was the first Japanese person I had met in Ireland after I left my English school. He told me that he also owned the other factories that did the same thing in Norway and Iceland. Another day, another Japanese executive came to the factory. It seemed like a quite large company.
The handling and cutting of fish required doing it as fast as we could because new fish kept coming. I was quite doing well at the job. Later, Ishi asked me if I wanted to work in another fish factory for the day that was just a little away from Cork City. I said fine.
He drove me to the factory and it was about a one-hour drive west from Cork City. At another factory, workers were doing the same fish-cutting-and-putting-the-fish-eggs-on-trays job. The Irish people who were working there were very friendly. While working with them, they asked me what Japanese people do with those fish eggs and what the taste was like and so on. This roe was used to make Kazunoko. It is a marinated dish which is usually yellow in colour and we normally eat it with a New Year’s meal and it is very expensive food.
Ishi paid me for the job at the other factory while we were driving back to Cork City. There was extra cash in the envelope he gave me and I was happy. A boy from Estonia was also taken to work there that day. He was also working in the fish factory in Cork City. When I started the job, I was the only non-Irish person working there, but around that time, there were many people from north-eastern Europe who had come to work there, one after another.
It was the winter of 2000. It probably was also around this time that the Irish economy started booming. That was the reason I often met people from all over the world. They had come to look for work in Cork City.
I worked at this fish factory a couple of other times when I needed extra cash. It was the most memorable and interesting job I had in Ireland.