Butcher, baker, electronics soldering monkey

At the Ranch, all kids were required to have jobs. Adults worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. We kids went to school a few hours and spent the rest running various errands at various departments. A trait that started then and has unfortunately stayed with me all my life is the perpetual desire for a better job. I started in the warehouse. I listened to my John Lennon tape on my walkman over and over and over again, really "getting" it: "I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and rooooooound/I really love to watch them roll" as I loaded up pallets of kleenex, reams of paper, endless boxes of red dickies and hoodies. I really hated that one. I don't think it lasted long.

Then, when I was 8, I was transferred to the kitchen. I sat around these huge vats of, I'm not kidding, cookie dough and tried to leave some of it for actual cookies. They got rid of me pretty quickly out of that one. I was sent to Atisha, the chicken farm. I actually enjoyed that for a while and stayed. I collected eggs from the chickens every day. That was usually OK, but for some reason, we had a cadre of guinea fowl, I think they were used to protect the chickens from coyotes or something (I'm not a farmer, clearly, but we had them for some godforsaken reason and that's what sticks in my head). The guinea fowl lived amongst the chickens and they were vicious. If they thought I was reaching for *their* eggs, (and they thought all eggs were their eggs) they would peck the living shit out of my hands. I always felt lucky to get out of there alive.

Another thing I did at Atisha was "candle" the eggs. I would take all the eggs I had collected and I would place them one at a time over this light to check for cracks or embryos (we had a rooster, but he was kept separate from the hens. I suppose there's always the worry that he would find his way over and have his way with the henhouse, but I'm pretty sure I never found an embryo.

After that, I was sent to Edison, the electronics department. This was in the summer of 1982, right before and during the First Annual World Celebration (FAWC). The Celebration was a weeklong event in which sannyasins flew in from all over the world, descended on our little community in Central Oregon, making it a bona fide city. The city of Rajneeshpuram boomed to around 10,000 red-clad, swaying, eyes closed, namaste-ing, singing, dancing freaks. My job at Edison was to dupe tapes. Osho had stopped speaking publicly several months prior, but all his discourses had been recorded on tape. We expected to sell several tens of thousands of tapes of previous lectures throughout the course of the festival. I had to dupe tapes, peel off the sticker from a roll, put one on side A, one on side B and stick it in the labeled box. Over and over again. It was pitiful.

Luckily, I befriended Puneet. He was an older boy, a teenie as we called them at the time, but he was always friendly with me. He was one of the few Indian kids there and he had a sister named Richa. She had a very whiny pitch to her voice and was quite bossy so of course everyone always called her "screecha". Anyway, Puneet had very interesting work, which was mostly top secret. Later, of course, we learned that his job involved bugging people's rooms and some real spy shit, but at the time, it was just something new and fun for me to do. He taught me how to take circuit boards and solder things on to them. I don't remember anything, like was it a transistor? A resistor? A capacitor of some kind? I also have absolutely no idea what sort of circuit boards I was working on. But I do remember how to solder.

So by the time I was 8, I had been a warehouse worker, cafeteria cook, farm girl, and electronics geek.