... is explaining why he is a great judge of tomatoes.

I'm not saying it was the worst summer job I ever had; that would have to be the three weeks I was a door-to-door salesman in Charlottetown, PEI. This came a very close second. I was the "General Labourer" (read: janitor and general dogsbody) at a food bank in my hometown of Minto, New Brunswick. I got a lot of the typical warm fuzzies you're supposed to get at a job like that, but I also had a lot of the worst days of my life there. One of them involved spending a hot, muggy afternoon bent over picking rhubarb out of a boggy little piece of property, followed by a day of people making rhubarb jam, which involved three stoves running at full power on another hot muggy day in a building that ran freezers all the time and was not air conditioned. Good times...

The worst day was in four parts.

Part the first, wherin our hero lifts the crates
Minto has one primary industry: coal mining. The coal mined in Minto goes to the coal powered generating plant which provides power for Minto, which mines the coal for the coal generating plant that...you get the picture. The power plant also ran a few greenhouses. From time to time when produce was about to turn they'd call us and ask if we wanted it. We'd say yes and then they would drop it off and we'd go through it and use what we could and freeze the rest.

They called saying that they had many crates of tomatoes, and would we like them. We said sure and called up Leo, one of the board of directors, who came with his pickup truck and we drove out to the plant.

"You know where we get the tomaters," I asked in my best Mintonian.

"Sure sure sure, do this all the time," Leo answered. "Don't even gotta tell 'em we're 'here. Just take 'em."

So there are the crates of tomatoes, and we loaded them into the truck, and they are heavy. I thought that it must have rained a little bit during the morning because there's some water running out of them, and they smell a little gamey. It's tiring work, but we load them into the truck. At the end I have a feeling of already doing a good day's work, and would feel entitled to a nap amongst the clothes left for donations downstairs once I put the tomatoes away.

Part the second, in which our hero sorts bad tomatoes from good tomatoes.
We got back to bank and start going through the crates. That's when I noticed that a lot of the tomatoes were....swollen. Ready to burst swollen. Basically these were the rotten tomatoes of legend. I could see why they were thrown at people: They were big enough that you could get a good grip on them, they were so swollen that they would explode on contact with anything, and they stunk to high heaven. And there was a weird white spiderweb-like fungus growing all over the place.

Since we were getting donated food there would a few of these, but it seemed that the more crates I handled the worse they were getting. The water that I thought was rainwater was actually entire layers of rotten tomatoes. As I could grab one tomato, two others would explode. My hands were pruned from all the water and were starting to get irritated from the tomato juice. I got some of the light plastic disposable gloves like they use in the hospital, but the acid was eating through those so quickly it was not worth it. The bag that I was using to store to rottenest of tomatoes was so heavy that when I tried to lift it, it broke and spilled tomato water and guts all over the floor.

This went on for three hours. We were all livid, even though I was the only one doing any of the work. Sure, we expected a little bit of spoilage, but nothing like this. Eventually, the power plant called. Chris, our office manager, took the call. "I don't know what you think we are, but we spent three hours going through these tomatoes. We're not the dump and...what do you mean?"

Part the third, in which the tomatoes are explained.
It was odd that Chris said "We're not the dump" because there were TWO piles of tomato crates. One was for us. The other were tomatoes that were so far gone that they were to be taken to the dump. Leo, in his haste, took us to the wrong pile. Since he felt he knew it so well that he didn't have to tell anyone we were there, no one noticed we took the wrong ones, nor could anyone correct us when we did since they didn't even know we were there. We had basically salvaged the few good tomatoes from the ones that were destined for the dump. They were calling to see when we were going to pick up our tomatoes. We had recovered extra tomatoes, and sure it was a good deed, but it did not go unpunished.

Part the forth, in which part the first and part the second are repeated as tragedy.
We can't turn down food, so we call Leo and then jump back into his truck and head back to the power plant to get to tomatoes that were supposed to be ours.

Now, these tomatoes that were fresh...er at the start of the day have now been outside in the hot sun waiting for us. So....now they are pretty much in the same state as the ones we borough back earlier in the day. The whole drama plays itself out over again as I delved back into rotten, smelly, mildewy tomatoes and watch my skin wilt and turn bright red.

There were two lasting results from this in the post-bellum period.

1) I gained an almost supernatural ability to tell a good tomato from a bad one.
You could put almost any tomato up to my nose I could tell you how ripe it was. I could tell under-ripde from perfectly ripe to one day beyond ripe. It was uncanny. If there was a team of X-Men with useless abilities, I would have been the Nightcralwer of that bunch.

2) I could no longer stand the smell of tomatoes
If Superman was cursed never to see his home planet of Krypton and condemned to be weakened any time we was exposed to rocks from it, then I could tell the ripeness of a tomato but I was also rendered physically ill by the sight of them and the smell of one that was even a little bit over-ripe. I was THAT GUY at restaurants who had to ask for no tomato on my plate, even as a garnish. If I was walking by them in the grocery store I would actually have to run to the other side. Some days were worse than others, but for almost 10 years even just the sound of the word "tomato" would make me go all Rain Man.

I'm much better now. It took a long time for me to get to the point where a cherry tomato is a nice snack. Some good came out of it in that I learnt you can overcome some fears. Some others have stayed with me my entire life...but more on that later.