Breaking ICs

Making yogurt is a Much more delicate process than most of what we do at my job. Obviously anyone using live bacterial cultures for anything has to be careful, but it is important that we strike the balance between "there is so much bacteria in here that our packaging won't hold up" and "we ultra-pasteurized all the flavors out of this because it didn't culture long enough."

So what happens is they transfer small amounts of sugary milk to the ICs, which are small silos capable of heating as well as cooling the product. They put in yogurt cultures and ramp up the temperature to make the bacteria all cozy and warm. The process is referred to as "breaking ICs."

Four hours after the culture is added, the lab tech (yours truly), begins checking the acidity and pH via a very specific sampling method that involves basically climbing up to the top of the silo and dipping a little bucket on a stick into it (so as not to disturb the bugs).
Each IC (and they usually do several at overlapping times) must be checked every half hour thereafter until the desired levels are reached, then it gets cooled down to stop the growth of the cultures.

Most people hate breaking ICs because it is a complete pain in the ass. I kind of like it because I'm five and I like to climb on things.

But as I discovered last night, breaking ICs also roughly translates to "no, little girl, you do not get a coffee break."

Run run run stop

Most of our horizon flavored milk is run from one processor into two steritanks and on to five out of the six prisma fillers. In these runs, once all of the product is processed, usually one steritank takes longer than the other to run out, although presumably the goal is to have it all end at once. I feel like I would need to draw a diagram in order to explain how this works, but basically we end up doing more work if the tanks don't even out and one ends while the other is still full.

It is extraordinarily rare for both steritanks to empty at the same time.

Last night, I had two steritanks of horizon chocolate. They had the same codedate. But, they were run through two different processors, making them two completely separate runs requiring two completely separate audits. Meaning twice as much work all night long.

The two steritanks ended their runs within ten minutes of each other.

Thus, requiring three times the work of a normal horizon audit...

...Twenty minutes before the end of my shift.

Lovely.

I could probably get in a lot of trouble for this...

I was assigned to allergens last night. You know, that special task that I got trained in a little, but then my important customer reviewed test failed and then I had to retest it on my own and got the exact same answers as the first time?

That thing? I had to do those tonight, because apparently it wasn't my fault those samples failed which I guess means I'm trained and approved. Whatever.

So I start my testing and in the first batch of samples, one of them looks like it's going to fail. I...fixed it. Because it was a raw tank sample and obviously if there was a problem with the raw tank, all of the finished product samples would be failing, too.

Then I ran my second batch of tests...and a five or six hour block of time all failed.

Uh. Oops?

I had to start over entirely to show that the raw tank had been bad.

Don't tell my boss.

All of first shift called in

Whenever the phone rings its outside ring, everyone panics a little. If DK answers, no matter who it is, he tells us that it was all of first shift - ya know, eight people getting together to make one phone call, saying they're not feeling well and won't be in that morning.

Last night, it was actually just one of the first shift lab techs. First shift calls in more than any other shift for a variety of reasons - mostly because they're a bunch of whiners.

The problem here is that there is this note posted about what to do if there is a call-in. It says that the outgoing shift should check if all the zones are covered...if not, and if no one is going to stay in order to provide that coverage, there is a list of tasks that the outgoing shift must get done before leaving - all of the 48hr, 5 day and 7 day samples, plating controls, plate reading, etc.

Reasonable, no?

Except CK has decided that means that if someone calls in, the outgoing shift must do all of those tasks... No matter what. And although the note implies that everyone should be staying an hour or two to get all of these things done, we get in trouble if anyone stays past 0645ish without being asked to stay.

So, when a first shifter called in an hour before shift change (we are supposed to give at least two hours notice...) we had to scramble to finish all of our work plus getting this laundry list of dailies done for first...even though they still had SEVEN people to cover four and a half active zones.

You will be tested on this material.

We all have to read and sign off on a big binder full of lab procedures this week. There is a test to make sure we are paying attention. Or, really, there is a test to make sure we can effectively copy down answers, since it is open-book.

DK told me if I get one wrong, I'm fired.

If Smitty gets one wrong it's okay though.

The odds

I know I have mentioned before the one person I really don't like, CB. He is very interested in cleanliness and completely freaks out if a lab tech doesn't hose off a silo after getting a sample.

A couple of weeks ago, he yelled at MH for not cleaning off a silo which had chicken soup in it. No one hoses off soup silos. Soup does not make that much of a mess! He yelled at her and she refused to do it and he used this as an excuse to leave halfway through his shift. Everyone in the plant heard about it.

Last night, I sampled pudding from one of the silos on his end of the plant. I did not make a mess. There was a small stream of pudding down the door of the silo under the sample port. I have literally seen more pudding on Tea's paperwork than there was on that silo.

I knew he was watching, but I did not hose it down.

He did not yell at me.

Two hours later, another blender told me he had thrown a fit about it and made V-dogg walk down there to look at it.

V-dogg, love of my life, basically told him to quit being such a whiner.

Obviously, CB does not know my theory on silo cleaning... There is an 85% chance I will wash down any silo I sample, depending on a variety of factors. Everytime one of the blenders is a dick to me, those odds drop five percent.

Knowing this, no one would ever bet on CB's satisfaction when I'm around.

Back and blogging strong

This very long week (I am working last night through Saturday and won't know my next day off until Thursday or later...could be twelve nights in a row) began with two start-ups the minute I walked in.

The day ended slightly more entertainingly, when the last half hour of a horizon chocolate run had to be put on hold for low solids.
MH and I stayed late to investigate. In reality, some water must have gotten in either during processing or somehow between the steritank and the fillers (if that's possible?).
In our minds though, we maintain that there was a problem with the chocolatization process.

But don't worry, we got it sorted out and will live to chocolatize another night.

Relief

I cannot describe how happy I am that this week is over. I am off for at least the next four nights and although normally I would update at least once for my one paid day off, I think I am going to take a break.

This week has been just one nightmare after another and it wasn't until today that I realized I worked TWENTY fewer hours this week than last. That is a whole part-time job less work. Unfortunately, it feels like it's been several years since my last night off.

Exceptional!

When something like a chart or a log that is an official state document gets screwed up, you have to send in an "exception report" stating what happened and when and where and why and what was done to make it better and whose fault it was.
It costs the company hundreds (or maybe thousands? I don't remember but I don't want to exaggerate too much) of dollars every time one of these reports gets turned in. It is bad news. CK said that if a lab tech had a certain number of exception reports in a certain amount of time (again I don't remember... I think it was five reports in six months?) it would count as one step of disciplinary action.

Anyway I had to fill out two of them last night.

The most backward compliment I've ever recieved is when DK told me what a great job I did writing up my exception reports.

Hey, you are excellent at explaining your mistakes!

Shopping

My trainer basically left me to do allergens all by my lonesome today, which I don't know if I was ready for... Maybe I'll start failing and get kicked off in a couple of weeks...

But anyway I finished the allergen testing around four thirty and then went looking for something else to do. We had almost no distiller water left in the lab, so I took a cart and went shopping.

In the lab, when we need supplies, we go shopping in our special little section of the warehouse. Because it would be impossible to have supplies we need regularly ready for us to use, we have to dig and climb and tear stuff apart to find what we need. I loaded up my cart with a case each of medium and large nitrile gloves, a box of 3oz vials, a case of CEM pads, and four cases of water. At this point, I am already tired from searching for all of this stuff and loading it onto the cart. I now have to drag said cart with all the supplies (estimated to weigh about the same as three of me) allllll the way through the plant and back to the lab.

Of course they keep our supplies literally as far away as possible while still being in the same building. What's weird about that?

I do not like shopping in real life. Lab shopping only reinforces that hatred.

Allergens

A few months ago, KS asked me if I wanted to learn how to do allergens. Allergen testing used to be a first shift duty, and having seen how much trouble everyone on first had with it and how much they all complained about it, I said no.

A couple of weeks later, JB got trained to do allergens.

A month or so ago, JB stopped doing allergens- she failed too many times and got kicked off. They tried to give her more training, but she continued to fail.

Today I began my allergen training.

I didn't get a choice this time.

If you can't take the heat, make someone else get your 5 day

I have discovered the worst feeling in the entire world!

It is thus: having sinusitis and standing under the heater in a hundred degree incubator full of milk in various degrees of spoilage.

Sick

I have a sinus infection bad enough that if I had a normal job, I would have called in.

As it stands, I feel like I was almost entirely
useless all night, doing basically nothing but my own audits even though there were dailies to be done and other people needed help. I know DK saw me sitting down doing nothing on more than one occasion.

This is what my review was all about - how I only do my own work and don't help anybody else.

When deciding if I was going to work, I knew this would be a problem, but wouldn't it be worse if I called in? Granted, second shift would then be required to do most of our dailies, but they don't even get their own work done a lot of the time...

Sorry for not being a team player, but it's tough to be helpful when every sudden movement makes you feel like you're going to pass out!

I jinxed it.

When I am in the ESL zone, there are always problems. Around one o'clock, I said something to DK about how nervous I was getting because all my 48 hour and 7 day samples passed without any problems, the line had been running smoothly and everything seemed just fine.

He assured me that there were enough problems with this run before I came in and that if the 48 hour samples failed two nights from now, he'd blame me.

When I started having sediment problems two hours later, he told me he had no sympathy...I had brought it upon myself.

What were we talking about?

Vittles...?

No, no, there was something after vittles but before impregnating horses.

No?

Cupcake

Since MH predicted this would be my blog today, I'll go ahead with it. Wouldn't want to piss her off on her birthday...

Last night was MH's birthday! I made strawberry shortcakes for the occassion, but I did not specifically tell her what I'd made, just that there was cake. So that the cakes didn't get soggy, I kept the strawberries and whipped cream separate until we were ready to eat them.

I took out the cupcakes and she watched as I started to take out the other ingredients. As she realized what I was constructing, her face lit up like a little kid at Christmas. It was awesome. She's like a fat kid stuck in the body of a pretty lady.

In other news, we had probably ten minutes of conversation about boxes, different sized boxes, and putting things into boxes. Fabulous.

Junior's back!

Junior came back to third shift today. She missed us. She says nobody laughs on second and they were stealing her soul. After that we giggled for five minutes because she was putting teardowns out for me to do and we put out four paks for each filler, two standing upright and two laying down and she asked which ones I still needed and I said "you need P over here" and she put them in the wrong spot and I said "no no you need P standing up."

Granted, we were both really tired, but basically our senses of humor pretty much finished developing at age 8.

P standing up. Haha.

Tetra, die already

Tetra dye is an alcohol based bright pink dye that we use to check our packaging.

Last night, MH was doing teardowns, shooting dye into the air gaps.

I was standing next to her at the tetra bench, working on my audit, with no else in earshot when she said, "f***ing die already!"

"what?" I said.

She repeated herself more emphatically, "f***ing die already!"

I knew she could not really be speaking to me, but there was no one else there...

It took at least a full minute before I realized what she had actually said was, "[I got] f***ing [tetra] dye [all over my hands] already!" and she realized what it sounded like and why I seemed so offended.

Sample plan

When our regular microbiological testing fails by a certain percentage, additional samples are pulled from the run and tested to find out just how bad it is and if, for instance, all of the micro problems are at the end of a run, we might still be allowed to ship the beginning. The additional samples, called a sample plan, may be a certain percentage of the run overall or may be samples from specific times, depending on the product and the problem.

In addition to my regular 48 hour micro, last night I had to test a sample plan of ESL milk. I had 72 additional cartons.

55 of them failed.

The higher-ups are pissed that we have to get rid of an entire run.
Wouldn't it be worse to pour green milk on your cheerios?

Coolatta

There is only one product we make of which I never get tired. Dunkin donuts coffee coolatta base. It is basically a coffee syrup used to make DD's frozen coffee drinks.

I don't actually like the frozen coffee drinks so much, but I love the base just mixed with milk (or chocolate milk, or soymilk...).

What concerns me a little is that someday I will quit this job and have a craving for coolatta.

I don't think the local Dunkin's employees are going to be thrilled when I come in and ask... So, you know coolatta? Do you get the base for that in like...a white, aseptic, liter-sized tetra pak with blue writing on it? Yeah? Could I have like small cup of just that, mixed with plain silk if you have it? Or vanilla's okay as long as it's not very vanilla.

No, that wouldn't be weird at all.

Not sure why I found this SO funny...

LS, a well-liked second shifter, recently quit and moved on to greener pastures (oh, I have been working here too long, I think I just made a dairy pun...). We each have a drawer in the lab, in which to store our pens, markers, paperwork, illegal contraband (i.e. gum and candy), hand lotion, calculator, etc. LS's drawer was frequently filled with other things by those of us who loved her... Straws, the caps from liter paks, styrofoam peanuts, pull tabs, and basically anything else we could find. As avid Office fans, MH and I had plans to put something of hers in jello before she left. (As avid procrastinators, this never happened.)

Last night, JB was bored and decided to clean out anything left over in LS's old drawer. LS did clean it before she went but there were a couple of paperclips, maybe a straw left. JB took the entire drawer out and shook it over the garbage can. I watched her do this and started giggling uncontrolably.

On the inside front of the drawer, where no one would ever notice if they weren't looking for it or otherwise inspecting the drawer, there are collage-style cut-outs that say "chicken ass."

Clearly, the "chicken" comes from one of our many kinds of chicken broth and the "ass" is cut from a pak of medpass, but... I couldn't stop laughing about it the rest of the night.

Comparisons

The lab tech who is unmotivated, not a team player and doesn't live up to her potential splashes acid on her arm and waits until she is finished with the work she is doing to wash it off.

The process operator who is too valuable to his department to be allowed to take a different job in the plant takes a two hour nap in the break room, despite needing to take readings on his systems every half hour.

This is a true story.

"It just builds up for eight hours!"

Sadly, Junior has moved to second shift. Just before work last night, I got a text message from her that was a picture of unraveled CEM tape (one of our favorite second shift messes) with the caption "don't worry...I'm on it."

When I got in, she called me in to the plating prep room to show me the crumpled bits of kim wipe on the counter...
Her: "What does this look like to you?"
Me: "The bedside table of a thirteen year old boy."
Her: "I know! I don't have anyone to show this stuff to anymore...they just don't get it! It all just gets built up inside me for eight hours before I can let it go!"
Me: "That's what she said."
Her: ...pause... "Exactly!!"

Sunken Ghetto

Kitchen Basics' clam stock, which DK says we may never run again (excellent news) smells, as I determined last night, as if you took the absolute worst memories of my Long Island childhood and melted them down into a liquid.

Basically, it smells like a north shore beach on a really humid horrible hazy late summer day.

Never thought I'd be smelling Sunken Meadow in a factory five hundred miles away.