If a tale is worth telling once..? 18 1 8 (18) 25 2 17

The year was 1994 and the last time I would visit the USA at least on business when I attended an action brought by our US agents against US Customs who had some years earlier changed the customs heading for our exports to the US and put them under another heading which required the payment of 1,3% more customs duty, of course a US competitor was involved in this business and it had been my job to counter the action because of my life long career in the business of making paper, pulp and cellulose film products... For the purpose of the court appearance as our side's expert witness I was permitted to continue to use my job title when I began to prepare our case: that of R and D Director. Some years earlier though I had lost the title once my 4 year contract had expired in 1992.  Well we won the case and US Customs returned all the excess custom's duty we had been made to pay, and the company that were our agents who were owned by the much bigger company Hormel delighted naturally in the outcome, and I received a letter of thanks from Hormel's Company Secretary, the guy who had overall responsibility, and who in the evening after our success had taken me out on the town in the city of New York to celebrate.

My fortunes around that time had recovered to an extent after the ignominy of being stripped of my job title when some time following my demotion, thanks to the previous CEO deciding he would have the company and its workings enshrined in the ISO 9001 Quality Standard which necessitated that everyone's job be described and written up in the formalism surrounding it. Out of this I was named Product Development Manager and the guy who put the Standard together was one of these roving sort of people who never really settled in any job for very long: being variously responsible for water and gaseous effluents, whence he joined the company from the State run Water Board, Quality Assurance Manager with the responsibility of overseeing the workings of the laboratories, and then with his knowledge of French being given the task of Sales Marketing Manager for France, etc., etc., etc. After his success with introducing the ISO 9001 Standard he now had R and D responsibilities and was a member of the leading group of people of which I was also a member who decided which projects should be selected to enhance the future wellbeing of the company..?

The guy who had replaced me on the board and also the guy who had relieved the departing CEO of his directorship as Marketing Directing, some 2 years earlier, to give him 3 directorships to put on his business card, had also recently departed to found a competitor sister company to replace cellulose by synthetic plastic films such as those made from polypropylene, polythene and so on, either as a single ply or as laminates… This guy was the closest I ever came to meeting someone like a recent incumbent of the US White House who purported to be all things to all men when his exit from our company was heralded with a 2-page spread in the newspaper which asserted the new company would quickly grow to be 10 times bigger than the parent company: which 25 years on I believe to be still small beer, but there you go..?

And the project to replace the cellulose xanthate with cellulose carbamate which I had first worked on 6 years earlier when I first joined the company? Well in the new group I did my best to explain how it was a non-starter, in disassociating myself from such a project being revived: how it hadn’t been possible to remove all the nitrogen of the carbamate functional group in the finished product during the process to regenerate the pure cellulose, and therefore meaning the product was subject to creep. But to no avail I was over-ruled and told by its sponsor that much had changed in the intervening 6 years. When I reflected on the fact that the chemical principles were nonetheless still the same and to cap it all, that the competitor company who had filed a patent for its use had never succeeded in marketing such a product because I had made sure to monitor samples of competitive products’ nitrogen and sulphur contents as footprints of these two functional groups over the years, which all pointed in the direction of the xanthate derivative of cellulose being the universal derivative of choice by our competitors. So began a project which after 5 further years experimentation was discontinued..? Have a good day everyone I just had to put this one down on paper..? hahaha!!!

Blog title: The use of cellulose carbamate in place of sodium cellulose xanthate ..?

A tale i have wanted to relate for some time already..? 18 1 8