 Your Weirdest food job
While I've never worked in the food industry really, one summer between college semesters I was doing some temp jobs until I could get something solid for the summer.
One day, the temp assignment was at this seafood warehouse. They supplied most of the restaurants and grocers with seafood. They were supposed to receive dressed halibut carcasses that weighed between 160 and 200 pounds as these portioned up properly for their customers. They felt they were getting improperly sized halibut and thus messing up their profit and loss sheets.
So two temps (me and some other guy) show up and this employee with a clipboard traipse through the warehouse into the freezer section. They have a large container and a scale. The temps job is to lift out halibut onto the scale, read out the weight and the employee records the info.
Have you ever seen a whole halibut. They're big. Now freeze it completely solid and coat it with ice. Pack 50 or so of them into the container, which you can only unload by bending over the edge of the thing. When one container is empty, the forklift brings in the next one. Do this all day long.
Turns out they were getting screwed. There were too many oversize halibut, some up over 280.
Halibut is probably my favorite fish. I've come to know them more intimately than most.
Phil  | 
