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The math quote of the day is by Theodore Von Karman who said, "The scientist describes what is, the engineer creates what never was."
When I was sixteen I started my employment with Lakeside Packing Company. This company was a cannery in my home town that processed peas and corn. I worked every summer from the age of sixteen to twenty-one. My hours of work were from 6 am to 6 pm, seven days a week for the entire summer. There were a few days during the "pea pack" that the combines could not enter into the fields due to a large amount of rainfall, but generally speaking, I worked every day. The greatest and perhaps only incentive for working at Lakeside was its pay structure. I was paid overtime, time and half, for each hour over 48 hours in a work week. On the rare occasion that the peas were canned with carrots (a commodity provided by the federal government), work after 40 hours was considered overtime. My base pay was the current minimum wage of $2.10/hour and with overtime pay the hourly wage was boosted to $3.15/hour. My gross weekly wage was: 12 hours x 7 = 84 hours; 48 x $2.10 = $100.80; 36 x $3.15 = $113.40; $100.80 + $113.40 = $214.20.
At Lakeside, I was allowed to go to the restroom when I needed to, take morning, lunch and afternoon breaks, and most importantly, socialize. What I wasn't allowed to do was think. My entry-level job was to push pea carts into lines that were sorted by pea's size and density (determined by the pea's ability to float in a brine).
A pea cart was a trapezoidal prism on rusted casters whose momentum was often impeded by B6's, peas the size of #Triball 12 buckshot with the hardness of diamonds. As a side note, when I asked who ate these type of peas, I was told unsuspecting institutions such as schools and nursing homes. These carts were filled with peas from tubes extending from the ceiling. The tubes were the recipients of peas garnered from trucks that had dumped their cargo into washers. From the washers, the peas had made a journey to the attic of the factory where they were washed, sorted, and flung down the appropriate tubes to the carts below. On the image above, there would be a small door on the side opposite of the slanted side. Once the carts were filled, I would push the cart to an assigned line and another employee would roll the cart to a predetermined position, lift up the door, and feed the peas through the rectangular opening into a small, swirling, bubbling vortex of steaming water. This vortex would take the peas to the roof of the factory where the peas coursed their way through a series of pipes. This corkscrew of rides was called the blanching process that all vegetables went through prior to being canned.
Every day, 12 hours each day for about 3 months, I pushed a cart. When I went back to school, my mind was like undercooked oatmeal. Constructing a thought was like wading through wet cement, and as a result of this mental decay, my mathematical processes were slowed. Also, my vocabulary was, well... not creative. I had heard a particular word so often that its usage had to be considered a fundamental rite of passage in this work environment. I had heard this word used as a noun, a verb, an adjective, and an adverb in one sentence. With this one word, employees described their frustrations and their joys. This monolexemic sentence was not conducive in a family or academic setting. This poisonous mixture of mental atrophy and constricted diction reduced me to a zombie with a hunger for abstract thought.
My second year at Lakeside Packing Company, I was promoted to the job of emptying the peas from the carts into the boiling whirlpool of churning water. As much as I had hated last year's job, I hated this worse. The temperature was hot and humid and no one wanted to spend any time discussing teenage topics within my restricted work area.
I was concerned about my deteriorating mental state and I devised a plan to solve math problems. I wanted to know how many A3 peas were in my cart. I first measured the dimensions of my cart and the radii of randomly selected of peas. I averaged those radii and formed an estimate of the volume of an A3 pea. My initial answer was computed by dividing the volume of the cart by the volume of the pea. I knew my quotient was higher than the actual number due to the empty space between the peas.
I devised a new plan based on average rates. My peas eventually made it to the "fillers". The "fillers" were machines that actually placed the peas into a can, sealed the cans, and sent the canned peas to the "cookers". "Cookers" were a holding location where the contents were "cooked" for an appropriate time and temperature. At the beginning of my shift, my "filler" had no peas. I emptied my cart and stopped. When my assigned "filler" received the peas, it started up but stopped again when it ran out of peas. I timed the start and stop interval of the "filler". I knew the number of cans per minute that the machine sealed. Quality control randomly selected five cans from the "filler" to examine their contents. I had them count the number of peas in each can and determined an average number of peas per can. My formula: Minutes x Cans/Minute x Peas/Can = Total Peas in a Cart. I was pleased with the results. Both methods resulted in close estimates with the latter being slightly lower than the former.
I can't remember how long this problem took me to solve. I don't think it took more than a couple of days. I was hoping for a problem that I could work on for the entirety of canning season. I do know I was sad when I completed it. I believe I worked on mental math problems the rest of the summer but those activities did not give me the same satisfaction. One of the reasons I enjoyed this problem is that I involved other workers. I had the people working on the fillers giving me information about their machine and taking the risk of stopping and starting their machine which was not a popular idea among the mechanics and our superiors. I also had to work in concert with the quality control and convince them of doing the added work of counting peas. Perhaps, the problem temporarily broke everyone from the constant boredom that encased their daily routine. Many people were curious on how many peas were in a cart during that brief moment in the summer of 1975. Yes, for a brief time, doing math made me cool :-)
