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?