Tight quarters — that’s the description I heard when asking about several produce positions I’ve had and the cramped offices occupied.
As in, “Here’s your desk. As you can see, your desk butts right up against Mark’s desk, and you’re both right next to Debby and Joe’s desk. One big happy family here, you might say. Yup. Tight quarters.”
The sales office was indeed cozy — and by design. When I had trouble locating chopper bell peppers in Florida or Georgia, Mark, who bought out of Mexico via Nogales, Ariz., waved at me, one hand covering his phone mouthpiece and holding pencil in the other hand as he said aloud, “I can get up to three loads of choppers loaded today — $8 fob work?”
And so it went, Monday through Saturday. Call it the produce broker version of the New York Stock Exchange.
Of course, with such tight working conditions, we had very few secrets between us. Between produce calls, we all knew which person’s kid was having trouble at school, which salesperson was due for a doctor checkup and so on. It was mostly business, but again, everyone knew everyone else’s business too.
It was like living in a small town, only worse.
In later years as a buyer for a larger company, I envied the bosses’ offices. They were lined up against a long running wall, all with uncluttered desktops and spotless windows overlooking the inviting, green courtyard below. Tranquil. Private.
Not us buyers. No way. We were shoehorned into what we called the Bullpen.
We had four, sometimes five people crammed together and facing away from each other against the walls, with a single escape opening on one side of the pod. Desktops were piled with paper stacks all day and half-eaten sandwiches at lunch. The walls were adorned with faded produce posters: banana and tomato ripening charts; apple and citrus variety charts. A small bulletin board was reserved to post our kids’ pictures, along with schedules of our favorite sports teams.
In the middle was a low-level bank of filing cabinets, which doubled as a central table when we had impromptu face-to-face meetings. Usually, though, we just shouted things (or obscenities) over our shoulders like, “Oh great! My Yuma lettuce truck just showed up with a frozen load — busted reefer!” or “That Santa Maria shed just turned away my truck after waiting all day for four boards of strawberries. Ahgh!”
If nothing else, the Bullpen was a good place to vent.
Sometimes, a visiting vendor would just sidle up to one of us to meet informally as we simultaneously answered phone calls and pulled truck passings (verification of loaded trucks) from the Bullpen’s centrally located fax machine. Amid all the chatter, it was like how cops say they can discern the crackling background radio traffic from the calls that pertain only to them.
It’s a sixth sense developed in tight quarters: an instinct to know how and who to tune into for relevant information.
In the midst of the controlled chaos, a coworker might poke his or her head into the Bullpen to share a joke or drop off a box of doughnuts to boost spirits — or sometimes it was a boss who called for an unplanned “mandatory” meeting in 20 minutes to squash any semblance of good cheer.
In the end, it was all about working closely with one another. Like any good team, we usually did all we could to manage the work at these produce desks, whether it be buying, dispatching trucks, quality control. You name it, we combined our efforts to keep the endless flow of fresh produce, uh, flowing — all in tight, sometimes very tight, quarters.
And if we ever needed to meet with someone confidentially? Well, that’s what the water cooler cubby area was for.
Armand Lobato’s more than 50 years of experience in the produce business span a range of foodservice and retail positions. He has written a weekly retail column for two decades.
