Dear Mike, My name is Mary Friend, I am 14 years old. I spent this summer working for my dad doing maintenance jobs on different hog farms. I did an array of dirty jobs, but the worst one was when a farm-manager called my dad, Scott, and told him he needed to pull a 55 gallon drum out of the lagoon (aka a lake of poo). So my dad took my two older sisters and me with him to help, although we were the only ones who went into the lagoon. When we got to the farm my older sisters and I went down into the poo lagoon to assess the situation. We couldn’t pull the barrel out because it was filled with crap and would tear the lining on the side of the lagoon if we towed it out. We had to shovel the poo out before the truck could tow the barrel out of the lagoon because it was so heavy that it would have ripped the plastic lining on the lagoon bank. Needless to say, shoveling crap out of a barrel while standing up to your knees in crap is a dirty job. Our boots kept on getting stuck and we kept on slipping in the muck. Once we had shoveled most of the crap out, we managed to stand the barrel up and dump the rest of the poo out. After which, fed a rope through a hole in the barrel and then tied it to a pickup, which was an F-150 (I thought you might want to know) and pulled it out of the lagoon. We climbed out of the lagoon and proceeded to try and get cleaned up because we had a 45 minute ride in the pickup to get home, with all 4 of us in the truck. I have never been so dirty in all my life. I was all covered in poo and I somehow managed to get a huge piece right on my forehead and in my hair. I just thought I’d share this story with you because my friends can’t believe that I would willingly do this sort of job and you probably don’t get many letters from girls my age.
