Today I worked eight hours, moving trays of homestyle pecan tarts from one conveyor belt onto another. In the morning I dropped several trays; first from ineptitude, then because of a couple of faulty cardboard inserts that couldn't hold the weight of the trays. Of course, the foreman was passing by just as I dropped them, and he told me that if they took the cost of the tarts out of my pay, I would have to work longer than eight hours just to cover it. Happily, I'm working for temp agency that pays me the same measly sum regardless of how many tarts I drop.
In the afternoon we ran out of cardboard inserts, thus changing the schematics of the job, and I only dropped six pastries. I estimate that I moved between twenty and thirty thousand tarts today, but it wasn't until just as before leaving that I asked one of the ladies the purpose of putting the tarts on a second conveyor belt. The extra process passes the tarts through a metal detector, to guard against foreign bodies in the mix, and lawsuits in the news. I hope I don't now have a radioactive butt from standing in front of the thing all day. So, bon appetite! You can thank me for making the baked goods aisle of your grocer that much more reassuring to frequent.
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This piece of wisdom was shamelessly attached to some spam:
"When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change."
Thich Nhat Hanh
Whoever you are, spammer, no blame OK? Just endless waves of love and hitting the delete button on your posts.
Changed my mind about the endless waves of love: I'm squishing your head, spineless spammer!
i was so ready for a pastry, but after seeing all the spam deleted, i am sickened.
your job reminds me of the famous chocholate conveyor belt job that was in "I Love Lucy". do you know of the episode i am talking about? good luck at it and hopefully they don't speed up the belt!
I know the episode you mean, and was thinking about it many times whilst the tarts came at me like so many torpedoes in some kind of never-ending video game nightmare.
However, the good news is, it was just a one day kind of job. Tomorrow I'll be cleaning the stands at a football game.
That job sounds monotonous. By the by, if you want to cut out the comment spam, do what I did: enable the word verifier filter on Blogger's "comments" tab.
Factory work can be soothing. It's amazing how much your body can do without you being there.
On the other hand the price is your soul.
"Soul tart anyone?"
Em, Tart stacking requires constant vigilance! The only time my mind started drifitng, I almost let a whole fleet of tarts zip by me onto the floor.
However, if I had to do that for much more than a day, I think my soul would suffer some severe trauma.
I never knew the clank of muffin tins could be so loud!
Gyrobo, Thanks for the advice from the frozen lower regions of the blogosphere. Let's hope it curbs this recent spat of spam!
Tartman out.
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