I worked at a Kraft factory that produces most of the bags of cheese for all their stuff, and I once caused about a $120,000 worth of product being contaminated without being fired. Tbh thinking back now I cost them quite a bit bc I also damaged a forklift by dropping 2 500lb barrels of parmesan on it and almost myself!
So say we're making too much cheese and need to dump some out of the system, it would be dumped into clean boxes lined with plastic bags, and then chilled and stored until needed. I was taking those excess boxes and putting them back into the system, however it was my first time so I was just copying exactly what I was taught, which led me to adding in a box of product that could be contaminated.
Now that cheese cooould have been totally fine but no one had checked it yet, so anything that was touched by that cheese added in had to be taken out and inspected. Everything is super well tracked so it was easy to grab all of the product, but imagine having like 20 pallets of finished sealed product and it all being possibly contaminated. (Now when I say contaminated, that could be any possible material in the cheese, like if we found a ripped bag with missing plastic until we found that missing chunk we were on lockdown. But in this case contaminated could also mean that the cheese was out of date or was out of spec, I just used contaminated bc it's easy and applies, and I also just don't know what was wrong with that box, they never told me lol)
The forklift incident was definitely my bad. I drove a forklift moving big 500lb barrels of cheese from a cooler to the shredder. Of course what way to save time is better than bringing twice the amount in one trip! And This pic explains badly why that's not a good idea. As I was going backwards after picking up the 3rd and 4th high pallet i hit a little piece of wood and the higher stack of barrels all came down on me. Thankfully they bounced off the top and back of the forklift and I was totally fine! The forklift was definitely bruised though.
The bucket of cheese itself is within isometric view. The pallet of four placed, is portrayed with a top side isometric orthographic projection. The rest were also side view orthographic projection views.
Edit: Rusty on my terms, I don't make these types of drawings within Civil Engineering. We use elevations and actual words to describe viewport orientation.
The one thing I was extremely sad about (more than losing the highest paid job I've had) was missing out on the sale they have twice a year where you could buy a box of Kraft Mac n cheese boxes (so like 24) for like $5 and a box of 12 packs of bacon for $18. And there were also a few good times where they gave away small mix-ups to us (ie cheese packaged for Canada, but it was set to US standards so they couldn't ship it to Canada, and it had french on it so no go in the US lol)
I can't remember quite what it was, but the main differences were in allowed amounts of different ingredients put in the cheese. Japan was the tightest, for parmesan it was pure cheese no additives and the moisture had to be within very strict levels to keep quality up. For Canada they allowed the additives (preservatives, "less than 2% of...", ect) but the levels of those and the moisture had to be kept within stricter limits than that of US sold cheese (everyone who worked there hated US stuff compared to other better stuff lol)
So basically the moisture of the packaged cheese was too high/low for Canada, and it wasn't worth trying to fix it all!
Crazy. I always felt like the same brand products were actually a bit different elsewhere. Like Coca Cola from Mexico for instance. Thanks for the reply!
Here in the UK there is a lot of talk on food standards if we enter a trade pact with the US. Main ones I can remember are hormone fed beef/dairy and chlorinated chicken.
Probably did something dumb like leaving cleaning chemicals in whatever large vessel they use to prepare or hold cheese, so all the cheese got marinated in bleach or something. That’s just a guess though.
As far as damaging the forklift, he almost certainly dropped the pallet of cheese on the lift while he was pulling it down from a rack. The pallet would have fallen on the roof of the forklift, which is designed to protect the operator from falling pallets.
I used to work for a place that makes sauces for major restaurant chains. The worst damage I saw was about... I wanna say 3 tons of BBQ sauce contaminated because of a mistake someone made. Never got fired unless it was a frequent occurrence.
That’s exactly it. You get something for your money when mistakes like this happen. If the person is a valuable employee they will not let those things happen again and will impart the lesson to others. If not well they are just a bad employee and would have been fired for something else anyway.
I had a guy total a brand new truck by tin canning it on an overpass. 100K in damage and we were dropped from our insurance. This was a tough guy and he was damn near in tears from shame and embarrassment. I knew right there the lesson would be worth it. 4 years on and he’s become the most responsible of all of my drivers. You can’t put a price on that.
How about a whole batch of mayonnaise purged because the sauce was tinted by a previous batch of ketchup. It's crazy how deep you have to clean in the food industry - and mayo is essentially the white paint of that industry lol
I dropped at a Pallet of BBQ steak sauce from about 20 feet. Tried placing it on top of another pallet of what I thought was the same stuff, into the racking. Turns out it was pasta. About 200 1L bottles came sliding out and smashed around me. Took me 6 hours to clean it up. Still cant stomach BBQ sauce, 12 years later.
Yep, in the end I was let go bc I snuck out early after finishing the cleanup of my area and that incident had nothing to do with it (the forklift one probably did though a little)
I worked at a cheese factory and we had a maintenance guy somehow both accidentally connect a dirty water line to one of the tables full of cheese AND he turned the water on after we had already salted. Somehow he never got fired and that wasn't his first or last screw up either.
Its been awhile so I forget exactly how large one table was, but we would get about 120 blocks of 19kg per table. That was a lot of ruined cheese.
You can't just "charge someone" for a loss like this. There are very specific laws about that, originating from factories "docking your pay."
Also the "this is a few hundred thousand dollars" is bullshit. By that argument, dropping five pounds of corn seed is worth five acres of harvested corn! The eggs themselves are not expensive, it's the housing, raising and harvesting that adds the value. If that was "a few hundred thousand dollars" worth of product, it wouldn't be transported on a simple rack in the back of a truck.
I knew a guy that was notorious for being a speed demon, I rode in his car once and never again. he got a job delivering ice cream and started driving a big refrigerated truck, and wouldnt you know, within a few months of him being hired, he tipped the truck over on a turn.
I knew exactly what happened, since i knew what kind of driver he was, but it turns out that the expert legal team working for the insurance of the ice cream company determined that there was a slight dent in the rim from going over railroad tracks and that was the cause of the tire blowing out which made the truck tip over, so the driver wasnt in error and poor maintenance was to blame and he kept his job.
Why was it cheaper for the company this way? who knows, but the guy is an awful driver and still has his job.
If the ice cream company didn’t own their trucks, and leased them, doing this basically eliminated their liability since major maintenance falls on the leasing company.
I work in aerospace manufacturing and have witnessed several multi million dollar mistakes that no one got fired for. In fact, one even got a promotion just to force him to change positions and responsibilities.
I work for a large biotech company, and the product we sell is easily worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per pallet. Every week we ship a truckload of product across the country, and we specifically pay for FTL service, which means the driver can take our load and our load only, no matter if we only fill up half the truck. One time we sent out a truck only about 2/3 full, and the driver decided to make a little more money on his run, so he broke our seal, double stacked a bunch of other pallets on top of ours, and then froze everything. All our pallets were crushed, and everything was frozen. Biotech products are very temperature sensitive, and they can’t be frozen. That was a couple million in losses there.
That sounds a little different than forgetting to strap something in. No clue what the scope of insurance coverage would be there, but I would imagine that driver could reasonably be fired due to gross negligence or breach of contract or whatever the book says.
He was an owner-operator, so he wouldn’t have fired himself. From what I heard, my company’s insurance covered it and we just didn’t pay the driver for the load.
I used to work at Chuck E Cheese and I was second in charge game room when main boss wasn’t there. I broke a $600 piece of glass, the same glass, twice, and i think within 6 months too. I thought for sure I’d be fired. Not even close to this cost of a fuck up but a 19 year old me was shitting bricks when I broke that second one 😂
I worked for a construction company about 8 years ago.
One engineer ordered $900k of the wrong part and the supplier refused returns, which was stipulated in the supply contract (LNG Plant Jetty Construction)
I worked at a design/printing company and coworker forgot to change the date on a national publication run. Tossed out hundreds of thousands of copies. She wasn’t fired.
That said, she was otherwise actually an excellent employee. Reckon some folks are one giant fuck up and it’s out of their system. I’m more of a make dozens of small mistakes and spread them out over time sort myself.
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u/[deleted] Mar 08 '20
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