BECOME A TOBACCO MASTER
Tobacco is an important agricultural product due to its (once) economic and social effects in the world and in our country, but it is also a comprehensive industrial product. Based on this importance, while I could enter almost all of the medical faculties in Anatolia with very high scores in the 80s, I chose the Tobacco Appraisal School, where I would study with a scholarship just like my other colleagues, pushing the basic engineering in old universities.
We took lessons from esteemed professors of the Faculty of Forestry and other universities in Istanbul, in our school's high-windowed, warehouse-dismantled classrooms and in the atmosphere of a boys' high school. Prof. We went through the education of Selman Uslu, Hayri Bayraktar, Necmettin Çepel, Ertuğrul Acun, Tahsin Akalp, Torul Mol, Burhan Aytuğ, Muzaffer Selik and many valuable teachers whose name I cannot remember. We learned to evaluate the producer's forehead according to objective, scientific and technical criteria in classrooms smelling tobacco. It is also necessary to be closed to the intervention of the policy and other factors in this evaluation work. It was very nice to hear from the professor. I do not like to say I wish, but I wish I could listen to these teachers by getting rid of the student logic. Our Çaycı Naci brother and our dear sister Müjgan, our student affairs officer, also contributed a lot to us. I graduated from TEYO in 1984, probably with a secondary degree in 1988.
In the school, besides the trainings on all parts of tobacco from "seed to smoke", we were mostly trained as a business engineer . We learned the methods of ensuring the operation in terms of technical and administrative issues related to the business and solving the problems in the shortest and most economical way.
I started working 2-3 months after I graduated because I studied on a scholarship. We traveled and worked like Evliya Çelebi by doing tobacco detection, receipt, maintenance-processing and purchasing works all over the country with my luggage in my hand. We are familiar with new places, new people, and new cultures. We established unforgettable, unforgettable friendships and friendships. Maybe we did internships for a while with our experienced colleagues.
I can't forget my first look for tobacco. When our group chairman Şükrü Polat said “you are starting the village tomorrow”, I spent most of the night without sleep. Year 1990 is the Kürendere village of Sındırgı. Maybe 60 km from Sındırgı. But on the winding Simav road. The village, which consists of neighborhoods connected by wooden bridges with a stream flowing through it, is very beautiful. The villagers are waiting to have their tobacco prepared. I started by saying Bismillah. My legs started to tremble. I looked up and saw that the tobacco owner was white in color. The man understood that I was a novice expert. This shaky state of my three doors continued. Then I calmed down. I finished the detection by the afternoon time. I was relieved to see that I did not cause any unjust treatment at the consolation of the tobacco of the producer and other villagers whose color was whitening. So people were in good color.
The tobacco expert profession and the position of the profession in our tobacco business have been protected by legal regulations. More importantly, it is accepted by the public and especially by tobacco producers. For example, when you go to a tobacco spot in a village, you arrive in the room where there are tobacco in the house to check for tobacco. However, until you get to the room where there is tobacco, you will see the situation of the house, the grandparents living at home, their children, the sick, and the disabled people, if any. You look at the tobacco smelling the smell of dinner cooking on the stovetop. In the eyes of Tütüncü, the expert has never been a civil servant or employee. All these things shared increased the love and affection between them.
Tobacco experts have considered the fate of the Turkish tobacco business as synonymous with the destiny of their profession. The fact that the Turkish tobacco industry reached a point where it peaked in the 1990s, continued with a declining trend in the 2000s, and reached a point where Turkish tobacco was in dire aggression in 2010 meant that the profession was also in death throes. At this point, which is now reached for employees working at Tekel, tobacco technology engineers are asked to refer to unwanted references for other engineering in order to move to an ordinary institution.
You can only do this profession within an institutional structure. The largest institutional structure was Tekel. I don't think a better situation awaits our colleagues working in the private sector. After a certain period of time, we will no longer do any tobacco-related work. We will miss the smell of tobacco in the warehouses. Fortunately for us, we will never think about whether tobacco will open or not, water rot, fermentation, whether the tobacco we are evaluating is male or female tobacco !!! May 2010