If You Can Handle, You Can Candle!

Coming down from the mountains yesterday, one of my boys reminded me of a funny story I used to tell them. I thought maybe it would be fun to write about it and post it for someone else to enjoy! It was back in the forties, and I was in my twenties looking for a new job to do besides waitress work. One of my sisters and I decided to apply for a job at the egg processing plant where they candled eggs. I will explain that in a minute. Eggs were delivered to more places than just the grocery store. You might be surprised to find out where they all went. We were thrilled to find out we were both hired. Because we were inexperienced we had to start from the bottom and work our way up. The first thing we had to do was paste labels on boxes. Besides not being very exciting to do, it was also very messy. It was not hard to get yourself all glued up. Thank goodness we only had to do that for a few days until they had us go into the candling room. We each had a booth where a box of eggs were put in front of us and there was a little light in front, just about in line with our sight when we held the eggs up, I would say a little bit above shoulder height. There also were several egg boxes for the different grades of eggs. By that I mean eggs that were small, medium, or large. Until you learned to know the sizes, there was a scale you could use. Then there were boxes for eggs with blood in them, or long thread like worms. Bet you did not know eggs had all these things in them. Ugh! We had to learn how to tell what size an egg is and also how to hold four eggs in your two hands, check out the right hand egg under the light, then check out the left hand egg under the light while you are rotating the egg in your right hand to the lower part of your hand while pushing the lower one to the top of your hand. Do the same with the other hand and then deposit them in the correct boxes and grab four more. When you put them to the light you can see into the egg and discover any thing that should not be there or give it the O.K. for being good and into a box it goes. I never ate another egg at home without first putting it under a light. I don't do it anymore, but I did for a long time. O.K. we got pretty good at that and then they said they were short of help in the rotten egg room. Well, that was when our careers as egg candlers came to an end. Come on, go into the rotten egg room with me. Have you ever seen the Lucy show where she works on the candy belt? Well then you can imagine how funny this is because in here they have an egg belt. Eggs come rolling down that belt slowly until someone thinks we are going too slow and they speed it up. Fortunately you can yell stop or slower when it becomes too stressful, but at times it is quit humorous. We put these eggs in categories also. Guess where these go? You will not believe it. At this time we had service men stationed in town and all of the rotten eggs went to them to use in whatever cooking they did. Oh my gosh! Those guys did not know what their cooks were serving them. Now where did the bloody eggs go? Do you really want to know? I guess you do. They went to the local bakeries. You can have your cake and eat it too! Yum!! I doubt that they do that anymore with so many laws around now, so do not be afraid to buy at the bakery. Back to the belt. As the eggs came down the belt we sorted them and put them in a flat that held several dozen eggs. When this was full you had to learn to grasp it at opposite ends, twist it so they would not fall out and carry it across the room to a stacking place. I was so proud of myself because I thought I had mastered this and was doing quite well. I shouted to my sister,"Look, I'm doing it, I'm doing it" and at that very moment the eggs decided to make a liar out of me by escaping out and flinging themselves juicily upon the floor. I had to keep walking trying to get them to where I was headed as the went splat! splat! splat! upon the floor. My sister is laughing hysterically and it infected me and I started to laugh also. I got across the room with only a few of the eggs intact. I hope I have described this well for you and you can see me creeping slowly to get to my destination all the while laughing uncontrollably trying not to drop any as they continued tumbling. Did I mention that the rotten egg room smelled so badly that you wanted to gag? I know I did not so let it go down in the books now as a horrible smell. I cannot tell you how happy we were to get back to our waitress jobs. Scrambled eggs anyone?