After visiting Mt Cook, we looked for a job. We started on January 6th and worked for almost two weeks, because Alea wanted to spend her birthday in the action capital Queenstown. That's why we only worked until January 17th.
The work was physically demanding and monotonous. We worked 7 days a week, and a workday was at least 12 hours long. Sometimes it could be 14 or 15 hours.
Brayden and I also worked a night shift one night to clean the machines with the boss.
I got one of the best jobs. In the first few days, I was outside and had to clean the 10-liter boxes for the cherries on a machine. After a few days, I had to switch to the company and we worked on a large water basin. There we had to manually place the picked cherries on a conveyor belt so they could be scanned, counted, and weighed. Two other people then had to distribute the cherries in the water basin, and a third person was responsible for cleaning the water basin with a net. We changed jobs after every break.
The delivered cherriesThe computer with scanner and scaleThe basin for the cherries It was very impressive because this packing house doesn't work with a simple conveyor belt. There's a huge camera installed. It takes 60 pictures of each cherry and then turns each individual cherry. The exact position of the cherry is then memorized, and the bad cherries are sorted out and thrown away. Additionally, the machine can recognize the quality based on size and color and then pass it on to the corresponding lines. The million dollar cameraThe cherries are sorted The camera can detect 95% of the bad cherries. The remaining 5% are then sorted by hand. The lines After that, the cherries are filled and packed.An average of 5000 cherries per minute were processed, and on our record day, we packed 41 tons of cherries. When you look at the price per kilo of cherries in the supermarket, there is a lot of money circulating in the company. I spoke to one of the executives. The company is in its 4th year and is the largest cherry company in New Zealand. To build this company, a capital of 30 million NZ$ was needed (18.2 million €). After the time at the cherry company, I have to say that it was a great experience to work in this job. I think I will never complain about jobs in Germany again in the future. But even with this job, I was sad at the end that we had to go. It once again shows that you can have fun in any job with the right colleagues. By working 140 hours in about 11 days, this job was perfect for earning good money in a short time despite the minimum wage. I think I was enriched not only by money but also by an experience.
