How I Used To Feel
Posted: October 22, 2015 at 8:59 am
Tag Archives: stupid job
Flap Flipper
Posted: April 23, 2015 at 10:26 am
I was a robot for two months.
When I worked in factories, a mechanized packing line of household commodities consisted of a crazy, spider-like machine which built an open carton. The carton moved along a conveyor where it intersected with another conveyor bearing the product. The product was grouped in sixes or twelves and dropped into the carton, which continued along its conveyor until another machine glued its top closed. The cartons were then stacked on pallets and taken away by forklift.
One summer, the Ivory Liquid packing line had a problem. Between the time 12 bottles of Ivory Liquid dropped into the carton and the time the carton’s flaps were glued and sealed, a nozzle was supposed to deliver a tiny puff of air toward the back flap of the moving carton. Without this air puff, the flap remained at a 30º angle, when it needed to be at a 120º angle to be properly glued shut. The air nozzle was broken, resulting in unglued cartons, log jams and crushed bottles of Ivory Liquid squirting their contents on the factory floor.
They brought in the expert, me, to solve this crisis. I sat in a chair beside the broken air nozzle for two months. Each time a box rolled by on the conveyor, I gently eased the offending flap into the correct pre-gluing position with one finger. My pinkie. Taxing. I could have mimicked the faulty nozzle and blown on the flaps instead, but I thought my factory buddies would make fun of me.
What stupid job have you had?
Canine Counsel
Posted: March 24, 2015 at 10:11 am
My most off-the-wall professional moment occurred when I was a student working in a law firm, not yet a lawyer. A senior partner in the firm asked me to represent a client at a hearing before the disciplinary committee of the Canadian Kennel Club. The client was a 76-year-old woman. She was a dog show judge who got into an argument with a dog owner who didn’t like the score earned by his poodle at a big competition. The disagreement escalated, then quickly ended when my client (the 76-year-old woman), grabbed a folding chair and whacked the dog owner on the head, like in a fake wrestling match. At the hearing I successfully argued that my client had been provoked and should be reinstated as a dog show judge. My triumph was bittersweet because thereafter the running joke in the law firm was that I was the expert “canine counsel.”
What weird job have you had?
Hit the Roof
Posted: March 16, 2015 at 2:05 pm
During my college years, I had a job one summer as a general labourer with a shady one-man contractor operation. The contractor carried his whole construction business in a rented station wagon, the kind with fake wood on the sides, stuffed to the roof with tools and discarded coffee cups and McDonald’s wrappers. He would accept any construction job, whether he had the skill or not. He convinced one homeowner that we were roofers.
We arrived at the job to find the bundled shingles sitting on a palette on the driveway. The paper packages were damp from the previous night’s rain. With the contractor on the roof, my job was to carry each four-foot-long package up a fully-extended ladder, so long that it bowed in the middle under my weight and that of the shingles. And I don’t like ladders. The only way to carry the shingles was over one shoulder, which meant that I had only one hand free to hold the ladder…..except when I moved to another rung, at which point no hands were holding the ladder. The weight of the shingles caused the package to drape over my shoulder in an inverted “U.” As the packaging was wet, it split as I went up the ladder each time, making the shingles more unwieldy. The ripped packaging also exposed the sandpaper coating of the shingles, which rubbed my shoulder raw. By the end of the first day my right shoulder was an open, bloody sore.
At the end of the second day, the contractor asked me to take down one of the ladders leaning against the highest part of the house. I was having difficulty with the rope-pulley system used to collapse extension ladders, and asked for help.
“I’m busy,” he said from the roof. “I’m sure you can do it yourself.”
“Really, I don’t think I can do it,” I said, feeling like a wuss. “It’s fully-extended, and kinda heavy.”
“I’m on the roof, Bill. Just do it yourself.”
Predictably, I pulled on the rope and lost control of the ladder. As it fell, it scraped along the side of the house, describing a perfect arc, etched into the metal siding. To put an exclamation on the damage, at the end of its plummet, the ladder cleanly sheared off the outdoor lamp above the side door of the house.
I didn’t go back the third day.
What stupid job have you had? Tell me in the comment section below.
Cheez-Willikers Technician
Posted: March 9, 2015 at 5:04 pm
The worst kind of jobs are the jobs where you get paid to do nothing. I don’t mean getting paid not to grow a crop on your land, or paid not to fish for cod because cod are endangered…those jobs would be good because you could do anything you wanted while you were not doing the thing you were paid not to do. The “doing nothing” jobs I’m referring to are those where you have to be somewhere for your shift, and you’re paid to be present just in case something happens (but nothing ever does). Like a security guard. Or a Cheez-Willikers technician.
I sat in a factory every day watching and listening to the monotonous drone of the machine which packaged cheesies, cleverly called Cheez-Willikers. I operated the Cheez-Willikers packing equipment, which meant that I watched the fully-automated process of boxes being filled with tasty snacks from a hose in the ceiling. My only role was to push the big red “STOP” button if the packing machine broke. It rarely broke, but when it did, I performed my sacred duty. I then waited for the mechanic to fix the machine, during which time I sat in the same chair, watching the fully-automated process of……nothing. On the plus side, I never sat in that chair without an open box of Cheez-Willikers at my side. I snacked for the entire eight hours, going through two or three boxes per shift, fingers permanently stained orange. With a 20-year-old’s metabolism, no problem. If I did that today I would weigh 400 pounds.
One particularly boring night, but I don’t know how I could measure the levels of boredom, the packing line broke and the mechanic had been trying to fix it for two hours. I had always wondered where the Cheez-Willikers came from, since all I knew was the mysterious ceiling hose. So I took the stairs up to the floor above my workstation. I was surprised to see a swimming pool-sized metal box, filed with Cheez-Willikers, ten feet deep. A person could dive into this orange pool, totally submerged, and wouldn’t be able to swim or eat his way out. Homer Simpson’s dream. The pool funnelled down to a drain which fed the delivery hose in the floor below. I never discovered how or where the Cheez-Willikers were made or how they were delivered to the pool….maybe there was a larger pool on the floor above. And an even larger pool on the floor above that. And so on, reaching to cheesie heaven.
What weird jobs have you had? Write me a comment below.