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chickenfeetI have this feeling I should write a bit more about my year or so at the Bird's Eye plant in Kirkby.
I was 21. I had just graduated and I went to Kirkby as my first assignment as a management trainee in the Unilever Companies Management Development Scheme (UCMDS) which was the Big U's fast track graduate recruitment programme, for which, three years or so later, I was to become a poster child.
Kirkby was, and probably is, the biggest dump of an apology for a town in the whole of England. The churches had stained plexiglass windows so that the bricks the kids threw at them bounced off. Most employers had left in despair We remained in despair.
The plant had two main production units. Meat 1 did butchery and chicken stripping. (I did briefly date a chicken stripper). Meat 2 was brand new and was a highly automated state of the art pie and boil in the bag meal plant. The technology was bleeding edge and very little of it worked properly. A particular disaster was the Raque pie line. This thing was supposed to turn out 500 cartonned and shrinkwrapped pies/minute but it ran at about 25% uptime. It was made by the same people who botched the design and manufacture of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
Most of my time was spent commissioning and then running a bank of Unitron cookers and the associated preparation operations. The Unitron was a half to pressure cooker with vacuum cooling. It being 1979, the control system was electromechanical and not especially reliable. The result of this was the the damn things would often boil over during the vacuum cooling cycle sending maybe a 100kg of, say, chicken and mushroom ready meal down the drain. Fun. I developed a bit of reputation for overriding the mechanical timers on the beasts and operating them by opening the control panel and tripping the control relays with a screwdriver.
Prep mostly consisted of semi thawing and dicing large quantities of meat and chicken. Usually the meat was taken from cold storage and left in a conditioning room for a ew days to come to just below freezing. This takes a while with a pallet, roughly a four foot cube, of frozen meat weighing roughly a tonne. Occasionally the conditioning room thermometer would malfunction on a weekend and one would come in on Monday to a room full of thawed ratting meat. Lovely.
The workers were about as reliable as the equipment. It being a suburb of Liverpool, anything not nailed down got nicked, often in ingenious ways. One day, one of the men from Meat 1 was noticed slumped over a table in a local pub in a pool of blood. An ambulance was called on the perfectly reasonable assumption that he had been stabbed. In fact he was dead drunk. The blood was caused by the large slab of steak that he had taped to his chest to get it out of the plant undetected.
Meat 2 packaging floor had a driverless FLT system for delivering packaging to the lines and to take finished, palletised product to the coldstore. For safety reasons the 'trains' stopped if they hit anything and had to be manually restarted. Consistent with the general Bolshieness of the place, giving one of them a quick kick so it stopped was a popular pastime. Disabled trains played a tune until fixed. One of my early assignments was to try and find a way to make them more reliable. I discovered that the tune was selectable. I also discovered that trains blasting out "Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles" at top volume got restarted a lot faster than one's playing something less obviously annoying.
I learned a lot in that job.
I was 21. I had just graduated and I went to Kirkby as my first assignment as a management trainee in the Unilever Companies Management Development Scheme (UCMDS) which was the Big U's fast track graduate recruitment programme, for which, three years or so later, I was to become a poster child.
Kirkby was, and probably is, the biggest dump of an apology for a town in the whole of England. The churches had stained plexiglass windows so that the bricks the kids threw at them bounced off. Most employers had left in despair We remained in despair.
The plant had two main production units. Meat 1 did butchery and chicken stripping. (I did briefly date a chicken stripper). Meat 2 was brand new and was a highly automated state of the art pie and boil in the bag meal plant. The technology was bleeding edge and very little of it worked properly. A particular disaster was the Raque pie line. This thing was supposed to turn out 500 cartonned and shrinkwrapped pies/minute but it ran at about 25% uptime. It was made by the same people who botched the design and manufacture of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
Most of my time was spent commissioning and then running a bank of Unitron cookers and the associated preparation operations. The Unitron was a half to pressure cooker with vacuum cooling. It being 1979, the control system was electromechanical and not especially reliable. The result of this was the the damn things would often boil over during the vacuum cooling cycle sending maybe a 100kg of, say, chicken and mushroom ready meal down the drain. Fun. I developed a bit of reputation for overriding the mechanical timers on the beasts and operating them by opening the control panel and tripping the control relays with a screwdriver.
Prep mostly consisted of semi thawing and dicing large quantities of meat and chicken. Usually the meat was taken from cold storage and left in a conditioning room for a ew days to come to just below freezing. This takes a while with a pallet, roughly a four foot cube, of frozen meat weighing roughly a tonne. Occasionally the conditioning room thermometer would malfunction on a weekend and one would come in on Monday to a room full of thawed ratting meat. Lovely.
The workers were about as reliable as the equipment. It being a suburb of Liverpool, anything not nailed down got nicked, often in ingenious ways. One day, one of the men from Meat 1 was noticed slumped over a table in a local pub in a pool of blood. An ambulance was called on the perfectly reasonable assumption that he had been stabbed. In fact he was dead drunk. The blood was caused by the large slab of steak that he had taped to his chest to get it out of the plant undetected.
Meat 2 packaging floor had a driverless FLT system for delivering packaging to the lines and to take finished, palletised product to the coldstore. For safety reasons the 'trains' stopped if they hit anything and had to be manually restarted. Consistent with the general Bolshieness of the place, giving one of them a quick kick so it stopped was a popular pastime. Disabled trains played a tune until fixed. One of my early assignments was to try and find a way to make them more reliable. I discovered that the tune was selectable. I also discovered that trains blasting out "Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles" at top volume got restarted a lot faster than one's playing something less obviously annoying.
I learned a lot in that job.
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-25 10:41 pm (UTC)What, do you think, makes a town into that?
no subject
Date: 2008-01-25 10:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-26 01:27 am (UTC)I probably shouldn't ask you how you came to that conclusion, and yet...
(Mancunian, aren't you?)
no subject
Date: 2008-01-26 12:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-26 01:26 am (UTC)FLOORED with admiration.
(and laughter)
no subject
Date: 2008-01-26 05:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-26 11:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-26 08:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-26 12:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-26 10:26 am (UTC)I'm not going get into how much it pisses me off that German bashing (and thoroughly unoriginal German bashing at that) is still considered oh so funny, but I *will* point out that our national anthem has never been called Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles (note correct spelling). If you must use it as a punchline, please refer to it as the Deutschlandlied.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-26 12:04 pm (UTC)