October 2010 Archives

Sausage man

 I was walking to work, and along the side of the road, carelessly discarded, was a vienna sausage can. Seeing this triggered a cascade of thoughts I now share with you.

I imagine there is a machine that puts the sausages in these cans. A vast intricate clockwork apparatus designed to take 7 small cylinders of sausage from a hopper or bin filled with them, and carefully insert them into each can and then on to the machine that seals on the pop off lid.

Wouldn't such machines require constant care? I'm sure there's a programmable controller that moves the articulation that stuffs the weiners into the can, but this would require calibration and maintenance. Somewhere, there is a person who has a business card that says, quite proudly and in Copperplate Gold font, "Senior Weiner Insertion Machine Calibration Engineer" or something similar. Such people must be in high demand, as you don't want to loose too much product if the machine shaves off half a weiner trying to stuff it in an off centered can. These sausages go to feed a hungry Earth, after all, and we need all the viennese we can get.

Next to the weiner insertion machine must be the weiner chopper machine, which in turn fed by the near-infinite weiner machine. I say near infinite, because determining if a weiner machine can produce an infinite weiner is, of course, NP hard, and not something I can easily post on the internet in the time I have today.