Last April, after a long winter of living in poverty, I decided that I really needed a job. I was able to procure a position at a little deli in the Byward Market called The Sausage Kitchen. The most compelling feature of this deli to the average passerby in the market is their wide range of pork-based products - most notably, sausages.

I'm a vegetarian.

On my first day, I was fully immersed in the sink-or-swim world of The Sausage Kitchen. There was a lot to memorize; all the varieties of smoked pork, dried pork, smoked and dried pork, different types of ham, sandwich meats, and, of course, sausages. I spent each day standing behind the counter, answering mundane questions about meat that I wasn't interested in, and then wrapping up each customer's selection of animal flesh. When it was quiet in the store, I got to lug sausages, hams, racks of bacon, and other forms of dismembered pigs from the dark, blood-soaked basement, and up the steep, greasy stairs. My boss was a big Austrian jerk-off named Franz; thankfully he was hardly around the store most days, and all of the employees were adept at pretending to be busy when he was there.

Wednesday was the day they brought in all the pigs. Dead pigs. Heaps of them. Piled on top of each other with distorted, woeful facial expressions; their pain at the moment of death frozen in time. Early in the morning, the pigs would be piled up all over the walk-in fridge. Later in the day, they would be dismembered, and the various parts arranged in heaps around the basement... a pile of hind legs over here, heads with spinal cords attached over there... and throughout the next two days, these parts would be fed into the sausage machine, or made into one of a varitable plethora of pork-based foods. One Wednesday, I was downstairs in the walk-in fridge, trying to get a tray off a high shelf. One of the other employees noticed me struggling, so she pushed one of the carts of dead pigs over to the shelf, and clambered up to the top of the wobbly, pink mountain of corpses.

Up until this point, I had been able to deal with all the meat, the gross working conditions, and long workdays. But watching that little Polish lady balance herself on top of the dead pigs was more than I could handle. I told Franz that day that I was quitting. He tried to tell me that I wasn't allowed to quit, because too many other employees were quitting (well, I wonder why buddy), so I just stopped showing up for work.

During my time at the Sausage Kitchen, I learned one important lesson: there are two types of people in this world... those who order assorted cold cuts without head cheese, and those who order assorted cold cuts with LOTS of head cheese. Yuck.

I'd give this job 4 out of 5 asses.

Although it was a supremely crappy job, it was really easy to steal groceries (the store carried many regular grocery items, chocolate, and specialty gourmet condiments in addition to the spectrum of meat), and it was nice to work right in the market.