In the spirit of TIMTOWDI, the following snippet demonstrates another way. Calling srand is not necessary as the seed is already unique per worker.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

use MCE::Loop chunk_size => 1, max_workers => 5;

my @fruits = qw( apple banana cherry lemon lime orange
                 peach pear plum raspberry strawberry );

mce_loop {
    my $fruit = $_;
    print "Sleeping with $fruit\n";
    sleep 3 + rand 8;
    print "$fruit done.\n";
} \@fruits;

MCE::Loop->finish;
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Regards, Mario.