Moron Enterprises

Did anyone notice that I wasn’t online yesterday? That’s because I wasn’t working from the office. I was working, here. That’s right. I was so far out in the middle of nowhere, that even after driving 3.5 hours north, San Francisco is still a 4.5 hour drive away.

I woke up at 5:00 AM to drive out to the Kraft plant. For those of you that do not know, I work with steam and hot water applications, and every single food product is processed using steam and hot water whether it’s making the actual product or cleaning up after the product. This plant was no exception. It is where all the Parmesan cheese is made.

I was doing a steam trap survey with the saleman in the territory of every single steam trap in the facility. This entails finding every single one in a huge facility. These things range in size from computer towers to the size of your fist. They can sit on the ground or 30′ in the air. Once you’ve found them, each one has to be tested with an ultrasonic listening device. If that means strapping on a harness and walking on a catwalk, it has to be done. Detailed notes are written for each trap and temporarily tagged for action. Eventually, we will write up a summary and recommendations and go back to finish up the work.

With so many changes made to the facility, it was so damn hard to find a lot of the traps, because they tore out so many lines and never told anyone. Looking for something that is no longer existent is a real pain in the ass. We hammered out the project in one day instead of two, because we didn’t want to return, but we were there until 11:30 PM.

Leaving this late after a day like this makes for a long, tired drive home. It’s strange how the tail lights turn into whatever you happen to be thinking about at the time, whether it is a giant water bottle or shoe. I slammed on my brakes so many times to avoid these objects. I finally woke up completely when I was just north of LAX. They closed the entire freeway for construction! Why couldn’t they just leave one lane open? At any rate, I got home around 3:00 AM regretting the day I took a job from my dad.

Let me tell you some things about Parmesan cheese.

1. It costs the consumer about $1/lb. There is a room, the size of three football fields, with barrels stacked 20 feet up, filled with 500 lb barrels. That’s a lot of money.
2. Parmesan cheese a has a 1-year aging process. There is no way around this.
3. After the cheese is made in California, it’s shipped to the Midwest for grating.
4. The plant smells like horses for some strange reason.
5. Kraft Foods, owns Maxwell House coffee, Kool-Aid and Capri Sun drinks, Oscar Mayer meats, Jell-O snacks, Oreo cookies, Nabisco Foods, and a whole bunch of others. There are really only 6-8 big food makers out there. Everyone else is owned by someone else.