Mediocre Moments in Food Safety

For a brief period of my life, I had a job editing food safety reports. Here are the funniest lines I ever edited: “There is a woman in the meat packing department with a beard. Beard net rules apply to women as well as men.” Imagine being the foreman who had to go explain to this lady that she needed either a beard net or close shave.

I met a food safety auditor named Walter who, when describing someone who had their shit together, would always say, “There’s a man who stacks his beef on top of his chicken.” Food safety humor. Catch the wave.

When you’re a food safety report editor, you get to see the following words way too much: feces, cross-contamination, temporary-fix, hairnet and vermin. Kinda makes lunch hard to swallow.

One of my fellow food safety editors stood seven feet tall, had to use a specially designed keyboard that would allow his big ass fingers to type and played rugby with regularity. Job circumstances would teach me that this man was afraid of heights. Have you ever stood atop a four story building with a 280 pound rugby player while he has a panic attack about heights? In case you haven’t, it’s not pretty. Also, that moment spawned variations of the following joke: “Whadda ya mean he’s a afraid of heights? Look at him; he is heights.”

At the end of each day, yours truly would deliver all the reports to the post office, where they all had a nickname for me: “Slim Shady.” I don’t know how I got this nickname or why I deserved it, but I got it.

My buddy Tyler worked at the food safety office on every payday Friday. He would come in, file some stuff, collect his check, and then come back two weeks later and do it again. He set the bar so low that when he showed up on any other day of the week (like he was supposed to), people were impressed. When he was first hired, the boss told him he would not be allowed more than 25 hours a week. “Don’t you worry,” replied Tyler. “I won’t come close.”