Tag Archives: general mills

Cheez-Willikers Technician

blog, writer, writing, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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.

Hamburger Helper Stuffer

blog, , , , , ,
Posted: January 15, 2015 at 9:17 am

 

The cosmic shift in my life was to leave 25 years of lawyering for an uncertain future as a writer. It’s easy to forget that I had many other jobs which were much less fun than writing. Here’s number two of a series:

When I was a teenager, the lazy moms, not my mom, appreciated the ease of serving “Sloppy Joe” or “Double Cheeseburger Macaroni”-flavored Hamburger Helper to their hungry families.

Every box of Hamburger Helper had two ingredients: dry pasta and a foil pouch containing powdered sauce and seasonings. Those delightful ingredients didn’t just jump into the boxes by themselves. I spent most of one summer packaging Hamburger Helper in a stifling Toronto factory.  A spider-like machine of whirring and twisting metal arms constructed and glued empty boxes of Hamburger Helper and then pushed them along a conveyor belt. An overhead nozzle half-filled each box with dry fusilli or macaroni or rotini noodles, and then the boxes bobbed along the conveyor to where I stood. Each box demanded a foil pouch, stuffed by my hand. Inexplicably, the pouches were too long to fit in the boxes of pasta without being jammed and squished in. If the pouches were wider, or if the boxes were bigger, the pouches could have been easily dropped into each box, probably by machine. But this obvious design flaw necessitated the previously-mentioned pouch-jamming. I did this every five seconds, all day, all summer. I had to be fast, because I couldn’t catch up by eating the product, like Lucille Ball working at the chocolate factory.

The problem with all this jamming was that each time a pouch was forced into a box, a tiny hole would open at one corner of the pouch, and a tiny puff of powdered seasoning would escape. Sometimes one seam of the pouch would split, and the resulting explosion would send a large cloud of seasoning over my head. After a couple of hours, my hair was thick with it (that was a rare sentence containing both “my hair” and “thick”). Every inch of skin on my body, exposed or clothed, was covered with a thin layer of powdered Hamburger Helper sauce. Remember when I said it was hot in the factory? I was sweating like a pig, and the Hamburger Helper powder dissolved well into my perspiration. The brown liquid simmered lazily on my skin as it slid down my face, cooking up the tasty sauce loved by lazy moms everywhere.

What stupid job have you had?

Plastic Boat Flipper

blog, writer, writing, , , , , ,
Posted: January 8, 2015 at 10:11 am

 

The cosmic shift in my life was to leave 25 years of lawyering for an uncertain future as a writer. It’s easy to forget that I had many other jobs which were much less fun than writing. Here’s one of a series:

Have you ever wondered why the prize in the cereal box is always maddeningly at the bottom? I sat on a hard factory chair for a month with a large cardboard box on my lap, filled with little red plastic boats, sealed in plastic. The boats, not me. A spider-like machine of whirring and twisting metal arms folded boxes of Count Chocula cereal with wax paper linings. The empty boxes bobbed along the conveyor belt towards me, and I threw a boat in each box as it passed. Actually, I flipped the boats in the air, counting their revolutions (for extra points from my co-worker) before they usually landed in the moving cartons. If I missed, the correct thing to do was get off my chair and walk beside the moving conveyor to find the boatless box. Too much trouble, so the next box got an armada. I figured it all evened out. Once the boxes passed me, a hose from the Count Chocula mothership filled them with its sugary namesake, and another machine glued and sealed the boxes. Every little boy wanted a little red plastic boat because once filled with baking soda and placed in water, the resulting chemical reaction would propel the boat around the bathtub.

What stupid job have you had?