Word: slimed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...their skull. But for kids like Amy Simon, 9, of Mooresville, North Carolina, a new school year is just beginning. Last week Amy was in her air-conditioned fourth-grade science class at Park View Elementary, mixing together polyvinyl and Borax to make red, green and yellow slime. "If you have the whole summer off, you get bored," she says. Instead of a long summer vacation, Amy now goes to school year-round, with shorter but more frequent break periods. "Just when I get tired of school, it's time for a break," says Amy. Her next respite will...
Life at either kind of plant can be both physically grueling and psychologically isolating. Herne describes his first few weeks and a struggle "to get off the 'slime line," which, according to Herne, "is the worst job in America...
...slime line's attractive job description entails bending over freezing water as streams of decapitated fish bodies speed toward you. Hands are half-frozen, nearly numb submerged in fishy slop; floors are covered in putrid slime. In the unventilated, enclosed factory, "everything smells like fish," Herne explains, and the whine of the conveyer belt is unceasing...
Herne's hard work did not go unrewarded. At the first opportunity he got off the slime line and joined the "Dock Crew," where, instead, of cutting and gutting fish, he shoveled ice on the incoming loads of salmon. His first day, "They worked [him] as hard as they could," but Herne says he kept going. He would do "anything to leave the slime line...
Despite the unquestionable hardships and the perils of his hours on the "slime line," Herne concludes that he would, "do it all again." In a way," he reflects, in a land of stark, uncompromising beauty, in a world where you succeed by virtue of sheer hard work and persistence, "it is the quintessential triumph of the American Dream...