Sun, Sangria and Spanish flies

It was a lot of fun to be in Barcelona at the same time as Doug Belshaw, Martin Weller, Audrey Watters and several other members of my PLN. We were there for two different, overlapping conferences and it was too good a chance to miss. So, one evening as the sun was setting, a whole bunch of us ended up  down a side street in a tapas bar enjoying the culinary delights of the Catalan capital.

After a few glasses of sangria we began regaling each other with our stories. At one point someone asked us all to say what was the worst job we'd ever had. When it came to my turn, I thought back to my late teens and the summer holiday I had spent earning a little extra cash to see me through my college course.

I had managed to get a holiday job working in a large canning factory, and learnt a lot about how canned and bottled goods were produced. I remember watching as lemonade was bottled. I was quite surprised. After an hour of bottling the most expensive brand of lemonade, a bell sounded and the production team switched labels and started bottling a budget version. It was the same lemonade, just different shaped bottles and different labels. And a very different price.

One morning I was tasked, without any training and with minimal instructions, to work on the marmalade production line. My job was to take the huge cans of orange pulp that had arrived from Spain, lift them onto an automatic can opener, press a button that took the top off, and then dump the contents into a large vat on wheels. When about 20 cans had been dumped into the vat, it was wheeled off, and another took its place. Then the process began again. It was mind numbingly boring... until the moment I lifted a relatively light can up onto the can opening machine.

I thought it was rather strange that it was not as heavy as the others, but because no-one had told me any differently, I carried on. I pressed the button on the can opener and the machine deftly removed the top ... and then .... shock horror! Several thousand flies swarmed out in a huge black cloud and began angrily buzzing around the factory. It was an event of biblical proportions. Within seconds panic had spread. Grown men and women were running screaming from the building. It was absolute mayhem.

The management were forced to shut down the factory for a full 24 hours so it could be completely disinfected. We were all sent home on full pay. The incident of the Spanish flies cost the factory owners a full day of production and I was never asked to work on that part of the production process again. No-one ever blamed me for the debacle, because I had received no training on the job.

The moral of this story? Derek Bok was right. If you think training is expensive, try ignorance.

Photo by Christopher Lynn on Flickr


Sun, Sangria and Spanish flies by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.