Still wearing studied boots...? 17 2 9 (12) 25 1 28

17 2 8

 In a week when I feel as if I have been to hell and back I thought today it is high time I returned to going down to the sea for my daily dip..? My wife tells me there is now ice on it so it will make for an interesting hour or so this afternoon.

Yesterday I ventured out to visit our nearest store a 10 minute walk away and exceptionally I walked a further 5 minutes to the next store which is a Sports shop. There I bought a pair of these detachable studied heels I was using belonging to my wife so that I'd get a better grip on any ice underfoot. Now my wife has been wearing these things so long in successive winters that half the studs on her pair were worn away, and for the past two winters she has been singing the praises of winter shoes which are studied the whole way, soles as well as heels.

Meanwhile I have been wearing two lots of winter footwear neither of which feature studs because basically I am too mean to buy them. My wife cleverly bought hers at the end of the winter when the price had dropped to 50% full price. Well yesterday I at least bought the heels for just under €30 about US$32 bringing the total purchase price for my two sets of winter footwear to a grand total of about €65 or US$69.

The company I used to be employed by meanwhile when I first left them because they no longer wished to keep me on for my special knowledge almost went bust because the new MD the eldest son of the owner couldn't take advice from anyone. Time and again one heard reports from people how he just wouldn't listen to what people who had been in the business for years was trying to tell him because he would have his own head.  The products I have told before are fibrous food casings and the biggest market for these was and still is I daresay the USA. The company's biggest market was in the pepperoni business and pepperoni production is a highly mechanised business: 64 inch lengths about 163 cm of casing, tied at one end were stuffed with meat emulsion on a stuffing machine which secured the open end with a clip once stuffed and then for 3 weeks the sticks hung while the enzymatic processes got to work converting the raw meat into sausage, 3 weeks in the US to kill off trichinosis an endemic parasite in pig meat.

This particular problem was to do with paper quality which when I worked for them was a part of my speciality as an ex-paper development chemist who was also Quality Assurance Manager for a time. In those far off days I used to think of the casing coming off our machines and how much of it went to the customer who was 100% reliant on our source of supply 1/3rd the way round the world away and a supply chain that comprised 100’s of 1000’s of metres and the customers stuffing machines ready to find the weakest links in our product, and if it got through the stuffing section what of hanging for 3 weeks before automatic peeling machines chopped off both ends of the stick to inflate the casing for automatic removal with a blast of air..? Any defect at this point meant manual labour had to be used to replace the machine and we can all work out what that means for customer relations..? All this before the pepperoni was chopped into pieces to end up sitting in your store or local Pizzeria as Pepperoni Pizza.

Well I have since heard that the company is happily supplying the US market once more but whether they have any customers locked into a 100% supply situation I don’t know? What I do know is that during my time if I made a paper change, like one year I was responsible for introducing a lighter weight of paper when I first had a 500 metre roll of casing tested by our customer then up-scaled to 5000 metre then 50 000 m and by the end of the first year of the new product in question we supplied 16 million metres, that's the equivalent of 40 times round the world.


Well I think I have already related how my two broken ribs a week ago today caused me to reflect on the days of yore when people were not so fortunate to have the strong pain killers they have today to make life tolerable in such cases nor the laxatives perhaps to ease the process of going to the loo with a couple of broken ribs that don’t need any such extra flexing work to do also like when coughing, etc., etc., etc. Have a good day everyone wish me luck as I go..?

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