Ergonomic Challenge
We had a very good crew in the frozen foods area of our food processing plant. I managed the packaging area at the time. We packaged oriental style entrées into trays, and each tray went into its own box. After the box was sealed, they made the journey down a rather lengthy conveyor belt up to a plate freezer.
When the boxes got to the end of the conveyor, and accumulated about six or so boxes, a pusher would slide the whole row into the plate freezer.
The freezer had stacks of huge metal plates that would go up or down. Once a plate was full of packages, the plate would automatically move to the next plate. While hot packages were going in, frozen ones would slid out the back.
One problem with this system was leaking boxes. If a box leaked, it would freeze fast to the plate. So if a hot box went up against the frozen box that was stuck, it would just smash and freeze there also.
Someone would have to go up the platform and try and dig out with long metal poles, all of the frozen blocks of meals that were stuck to the plate and each other.
After all of the digging and scraping, there could not be any chunks stuck to a plate of the chain wreck would start all over again.
Because of the ongoing battle with the plate freezer, it seemed that we always had someone stationed up there to get the jams out. Otherwise, the conveyor going up there would back up full of boxes and shut the line down.
If the conveyor backed up with boxes the force on them became great enough to smash them into each other. We did not want them to go into the freezer because they were already leaking.
One day we were runny pretty well. Not a lot of trouble with the freezer. I noticed the line was backing up but didn't worry about it too much because we had Beth up there.
Beth was one of my best workers. She could always be counted on to do a great job.
"Dang!" The belt was still filling up and looked like it was going to back all the way up, so I went up there.
Beth was looking at the problem kind of stupefied and not doing anything about it. Normally, this would have made me a little irate, but I couldn't recall her ever being up there before, so maybe she needed some further training. There was no way I was going to make one of my blue chips mad.
"Is there some kind of problem up here, Beth?"
She hesitated.
I asked, "Is there something you need help with here?"
"I can't do this."
"Really, how come?" The silence went on for awhile, and it gave me a really weird feeling. The line was down, so I had to ask, "Why can't you do this?"
She moved toward the plate freezer and stretched her arms forward. "I can't reach the packages."
"Why not? . . .Oooooh."
This demonstration helped me connect the dots. There was a bar across the pusher that you had to either reach over or under, which made the job much worse. But for Beth, that bar was right at Boob level, and she had loads of boobage. It would have been a real exercise in contortion for her to do that job, if at all. She had been quiet about the whole thing and did not know what to do since she did not want to bring the situation to anyone's attention.
No one had heard of the word "ergonomics" in those days, but clearly this situation was an ergonomic challenge. Seeing that Beth lacked the physical attributes (or had too much of them) to work at this station, I quietly switched her out of the job with someone else.
I made the excuse to the others that the freezer was bothering her. The excuse did not make her look too bad, because it would piss off everyone. However, my doing that was probably just another one of those things that make people think their boss is stupid for letting her get away with not doing it.