job
I’ve told this story like a zillion times. And twice just this week. Time to post I suppose.
I got my degree from the University of Dallas over in Irving. Private Catholic school. My BA is in chemistry, although I did do intensive studies in philosophy, theology, art history, literature and the like. I lived in Europe and the full bit. Well, about half way through school, I realized I wanted to major in philosophy or art but it was too late with my degree plan. I’d had so much math, physics, and chemistry at that point, it wasn’t really going to work to switch mid-stream and still graduate on time. Besides, all the math and stuff comes really easy for me.
My first job out of college was at a certain snack chip company up in Frisco that also owns a certain soda company and a certain line of fast food places that serve everything from fried chicken to burritos. I had a security badge, a white lab coat, and a full lab at my disposal to quality test puffed cheese snacks… made with a “fat free oil” for the Spanish market. I don’t know if many folks remember this “fat free oil” that was popular years back, but it was fat free because your body doesn’t absorb it, therefore it comes on out as an “oily anal discharge.” Delightful.
So anyway, my lab was across the hall from the pretzel lab and my job was to receive large bag after bag of uncooked puffed cheese snack product and do testing. The first test was to do a moisture reading on a random 10 uncooked samples from each of the large bags coming up from manufacturing. Then on another 10 uncooked samples from each bag, I’d do a physical measurement – length, width, height. Last, I’d do a “crunch test”. I’d take all my carefully labeled samples down to another lab with big, fancy computers and such. I’d take one cheese puff out and place it on a platform where a probe connected to the ‘puter would come down and poke through the cheese puff. A graph would appear on a screen and I’d write down some number. Periodically, a team of really cute British guys would run up from manufacturing and see what different bags of samples were crunching.
Those were the uncooked puffed cheese products. I also had to do the same test on cooked and cheesed samples. After all the testing, I bagged them up for taste testing (and most likely bad stomach aches) for folks in Spain. I did this for three weeks. THREE WEEKS. And then I quit when they offered me a full time gig. That’s right, I did such a good job at this, they wanted me to stay.
And now here I am. I’m grateful for the experience and glad I’m using my skills to be ridiculously tedious and tidy for the common good and not oily butts. YAY! Have a great weekend folks.
