The writer on working for a chemical company and his suspicions that the chemicals were affecting his health:
“The substance in question is quillaia bark. Quillaia bark is stripped from trees in Chile, bound by heavy wire in bundles the size of washing machines, loosely wrapped in coarse burlap, stacked on pallets, and dropped by the truckload at the chemical company’s loading dock. One of my jobs is to help wrestle, by hand and man-powered machine, the hundreds of scratchy, dusty, unwieldy bales out of the cramped, fetid, airless trailers and pile them in a roomy, fetid, airless space inside the plant. This is the kind of unskilled labor for which my arsenal of unskills is ideally suited.”
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