Doing Time in the Potato Chip Factory

In the twenty-first century, a master's degree and a journalism job is not enough to keep you out of driving Uber and working at the potato chip factory.

A pile of potato chips.Evan-Amos / Wikipedia


What does failure smell like? To me, it reeks of rotten potatoes.

After twenty years of trying, unsuccessfully, to piece together a living from adjunct teaching and freelance writing, last summer I took a job at Saratoga Potato Chips LLC, boxing chips at their Indiana factory.

My first morning on the job, I knocked over an entire pallet of boxes stacked nine feet high. Later, on the multipack assembly line, I scrambled to keep up like a panicky Lucy Ricardo at the candy factory.

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