Random Story – My ninety-minute, half-hour lunch breaks

This is just an odd little story from my life.

Several years ago, I worked for a company that made metal cutting fluids and other related stuff.  Most of my time there, I was the lab tech for this one guy.  One of the main things we did was to make slight modifications to the formulas of our products, and see if there was a change in their effectiveness.  Maybe there was some cheaper alternative for one of the components, or maybe one of our suppliers was going out of business, or maybe they were just reformulating their product and we needed to see if we would need to change ours.  Whatever the case, I’d usually spend the morning mixing or dissolving twenty or so chemicals to make a liter of Product X, and I’d either start testing it in the afternoon, or I’d make a second batch of Product Y.

A couple times a year, my boss would go on these weeklong business trips to various conferences.  Before he’d leave, he’d write up stuff for me to do during that week.  And several times he would be gone for five days, but all he would leave for me to do would be to make six batches.  Again, I could easily do two batches a day without straining myself.  If I did rush myself, I could do three batches a day.  So I’d clean the lab, restock supplies, odd little busy work.  But I’d also take very long lunch breaks.

The way I did this, is I’d start about half-an-hour early.  And if anyone came in, I would say that I was in-between things, and I was hungry, so I was just taking an early lunch.  But people rarely stopped by, so usually when the normal lunchtime came around, I’d still be at my desk reading, or working on a story taking my “normal” lunch break.  And if nobody saw me that first hour, I’d take another half-hour, and if anyone came in, I’d just say that I had been running late and was just taking a late lunch.  I probably took three or four ninety-minute, half-hour lunch breaks the weeks my boss wasn’t there.  I do miss those.