Top Ten Messes; Mess #10
Macaroni Guy
We made a popular line of frozen macaroni entrées. Most of them had pasta. I was a supervisor on second shift.
This evening, one of the lines I was supervising was processing one of our macaroni items. Cooked pasta was brought to us from the pasta line.
At the pasta line, an operator would take a stainless steel bucket and dip it into a bin of dry macaroni, then feed it into a stainless steel auger (like a big screw) filled with boiling water for about 11.5 minutes. About the same amount of time it takes you to boil it at home to get it done right.
The challenge of doing the job was more often than not trying to feed the pasta into the auger slow enough so the pasta did not stick together. Pasta that has stuck together is ruined, as it is undercooked from a lack of heat penetration where it stuck together. Also, clumped up pasta will not weigh right going down the line, and looks terrible. Of course on the other hand, if the operator fed the line too slowly, it would run the line out and cause downtime.
Another supervisor was in charge of the pasta area, which in turn supplied by entrée line. He was a fun guy to work with. He kind of reminded me of Squidward Tentacles. I know he would be offended by that, so I will just call him "Patrick".
We were always going through people at the Companies I supervised at. They worked too hard for the money they got. They worked way too many hours. Since the pay and conditions were so bad, we would always lose them to other industries that had better profit margins than the food industry. Consequently, the food processing industry was a very demanding place to supervise. You had to make a quality, commercially safe product, with generally a bottom of the pay scale work force. If you were not savvy enough to treat the good workers like gold, you would pay the price in short order.
One company I was with considered suspending the drug test requirement. Another one would bus workers in from the minimum security jail They tried all kinds of hiring bonuses and enticements.
Anyway, this was the pasta guy's first day on the job. Patrick was good at explaining a job very well. But he expected the young trainee to listen. Patrick made a point of telling the guy to pour very slowly and watched him do it for a bit.
Then after Patrick left, I saw the guy just cramming the pasta into the line with the bucket as fast as he could go. Huge globs of macaroni, about the size of a loaf of bread came flopping out on the auger into the stainless steel tub. I immediately got the guy to stop and contacted Patrick.
Patrick was irate at the ridiculous scene. He helped clear the waste by shoveling it into a scrap barrel and talked to the guy. "AGAIN. . .Do not feed the pasta in too fast. You can see what happens." Then Patrick had to leave because he was even more behind on his other chores.
A little time had passed. I glanced over at macaroni boy. Whoa! He's doing it again! The guy was flailing the bucket with a vengeance. I stopped the guy. Shaking my head, I got Patrick over there again.
"AGAIN. . . Do not feed the pasta too fast. You can see what happens." So the cleanup began again. Of course, we were accumulating downtime from the cleaning and refilling the pasta line.
Some time had passed. Lo and behold. . .yep. . .again. (You can't make this stuff up.) Patrick showed up and was jawing at the guy for some minutes while they scurried about. Then Patrick stood there and glared at his trainee with his arms folded for an extended period. He asked me to watch the nervous lad continuously while he made a call. Patrick called our manager at home, since we had destroyed a whole bin of macaroni. This amounted to a few hundred pounds of dry macaroni.
Patrick returned. "Well, I got the whole story. Evidently the new people we got today were from a special education institution and they are all mentally retarded. I told them it would be nice if they would have said something to us beforehand."
Sometimes we functioned more like a social institution than a business. Patrick and I both agreed that when we got a person like macaroni boy in to work, if we could somehow get them trained up on a task, they would be happy on a job others would find uninteresting, and they would stay there forever.
Happily, every day after that, the guy did do a pretty well. Once in awhile we would have to give him some feedback, but Macaroni Guy could be counted on to do a nice job.
Double Whammy
It was not too long after I started in the food industry. I had just missed a lot of work for being sick. Then a massive blizzard hits, which was actually two blizzards back to back. It was the worst snowstorm of my lifetime.
My car was parked in a lower level of a hill behind the house. By the time the snow was done, there was 6 feet of snow on top of the roof. The neighbor pulled my car out with his tractor.
Many people were stranded at work. You know it is bad if they can't make it home. For some reason, it is much harder to go to work than to go home.
After a day or so, Dad called from work, some 20 miles away and said he was going to try and make it home. We didn't have a snow blower, so I went out and shoveled the long drive. It was blowing shut about as fast as I could shovel.
Sure enough he accomplished the impressive feat and made it home. For years after that , I kept snow gear in my car so I could walk the five miles down the nearby railroad tracks home if I had to. To date, this had not happened.
The accounts of horseplay in this book were before I thought about someone getting hurt doing stunts like this. While amusing, horseplay is ill-advised. People do get seriously hurt from doing stupid stuff!