Tom Wakely for Congress

December 19th, 2025

 

My first job after leaving the military was delivering eggs from a local farm to grocery stores, hospitals, care homes, and people’s homes. Every day, I got up at 5 am, drove over to the farm, and, as I waited for the ladies in the cooling barn to sort the eggs and pack them into cardboard containers, I had to clean out the laying barns. I drove a compact tractor with a bucket scoop. It took me about an hour to clean out the chicken shit, and by the time I had finished, my delivery truck had been loaded, and the “Egg Man” was on his way. Twelve hours later, I was back at home. After showering, changing clothes, eating dinner, watching a little TV, or listening to some music on the radio, I was exhausted. I usually hit the sack no later than 9 pm. I got up the next day and did it again, six days a week. The pay was good, and everybody I worked with was great.

After a couple of months, I began to notice that something was a bit off with the eggs I was delivering to the care homes. Now, in the cooling barn where the eggs were sorted, each egg was inspected by the ladies who held it up to a high-intensity light. They were checking to see if there was any blood or anything else inside, like a chicken embryo. If there was, I just assumed the egg was not for human consumption and would instead be set aside for some other purpose. Well, my assumption about those eggs I was delivering to care homes was spot on. Those ‘not for human consumption’ eggs were being sold to care homes at a deep discount and fed to all those elderly folks living there. And I knew that just wasn’t right.

So, that night when I got home, I wrote a letter to the state agency responsible for ensuring that eggs being sold commercially were fit for human consumption. But what I didn’t know at the time was that the owner of the farm where I was working also sat on the board of the state agency I had just written to. It didn’t take long for my boss to figure out who had squealed, and thus, my time as the “Egg Man” came to a swift end.

 

The moral of this story is this: Sometimes doing the right thing has unforeseen consequences, but that should never stop you from doing the right thing. Never!