How I shut down a cannery

I've had a couple of requests to explain #4 on my Ten Things Meme.

When I was in high school, I worked in a cannery during the summers. Or rather, a food processing plant. Mine actually froze vegetables instead of canning them. Ninety percent of the time, we froze green beans.

In order to make more money, I worked graveyard. The cannery paid twenty cents more an hour for graveyard shift, and you also had a better chance of getting a more interesting (and higher paying) job if you worked something other than day shift. The women on day shift had been working at that cannery since World War II. No joke.

One of the women in charge of hiring went to my church, and so instead of picking dead rodents and rotten beans off the conveyor belts, I got to be the person in charge of USDA quality control testing for the graveyard shift.

This involved taking a specified number of samples and evaluating them for various things--size of bean, number of rotten beans, number of beans with bug bites, number of pieces of Harmless Edible Material, color, and taste. (Cold green beans. Yum.) Based on the percentages in each category, I assigned the appropriate USDA grade.

The work wasn't difficult, but it was stressful because of the speed at which I had to work. I monitored up to five different lines that emptied into big totes (which were taken to another plant for packaging) and a sixth line that packaged French-cut beans. I needed to take one sample from every big tote and a French-cut sample every half hour. During a busy shift, three of my lines would fill totes every five minutes. Some nights it was very difficult to stay on top of the work.

For the most part, the shift boss left me alone, other than coming by to check on how we were doing. This was a good thing, because the one time I attempted to explain to one boss how to figure percentages, I fell very behind. (And no, I didn't succeed in explaining it to her.)

One night, in the middle of a very busy shift, while I had multiple samples on my counter, we failed to make grade A on the good line. In fact, we flunked. Our percentage of rotten beans was through the roof. I alerted the shift boss, who came and looked at my paperwork. They shut the lines down. They called the plant boss at home--at three o'clock in the morning--and he got out of bed and came down.

Men in hard hats conferenced together and inspected the beans. I stood at my counter and
caught up on paperwork. And then, with a horrible sinking feeling, I saw my error. I had used the total count from a much smaller sample on line C to figure the percentage of rotten beans for line A. When I used the line A total, our numbers fell within USDA grade A.

I have never been so tempted to lie in my life. All I had to do was keep my mouth shut and look puzzled. It was an honest mistake. And no one would ever know.

Except me.

So, I walked over to the group of high muckety-mucks and confessed that I had made a small error, the beans were actually fine, and I was very sorry for getting the boss out of bed and shutting the plant down for half an hour, but we could get back to work now.

I'm still not sure why they didn't fire me. Or worse, send me to work picking mice out of the beans. Maybe it was the look of complete embarrassment on my face. Maybe it was because they felt protective of me (my nickname at work was Baby). Maybe it was because none of them wanted to do my job. Whatever the reason, I stayed on as the USDA grader until I quit, as usual, when school started back up.

And that, boys and girls, is how I shut down a cannery.