Monday, August 4, 2008

Those Were The Days.

Back in the day, when he was young and waggish and hurtling towards his ultimate destiny as Mr. Loudshoes, Himself worked for a while at a cheese factory. It was an okay job, all things considered, he said, and it was there when he needed it. He learned, among other things, to drive a forklift, and that he probably was not suited to a life devoted to manufacturing dairy products.

Occasionally he will mention his former life as a cheesemaker, usually in the context of warning people not to eat Cheez Whiz. ("You do not want to see how that stuff is made.") Also, that the factory supplied many different companies, and that they made the same cheese day in, day out, but that they would regularly stop the production line to change the wrappers. Anyone who claimed that Brand X was vastly superiour to Brand Y would probaby not believe that it was exactly the same cheese, but the Mister says it was so, and that the same practice goes on in factories all over God's green earth.

The other day, Thing 1 and I were at the grocery store, and I referred to his former job because of a perceived difference on her part in various shampoos. (Don't even get me started on shampoos....25 years in the beauty business has taught me that shampoos have far more similarities than differences. When some supplier wants me to sell a $40 bottle of shampoo because it contains alien life forms and hummingbird saliva, I know to show him the door. Except that stuff you can get at the dollar store; that stuff really is crap.)

Thing 1 looked at me in astonishment and exclaimed "Dad really worked in a cheese factory?? I thought he was just making that up!!"

Because naturally, if you were going to invent a job that you never had, you would pass up orchestra conductor, pit boss and lion tamer, and pretend that you worked in a cheese factory. Because of the glamour of it all.

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