A New H-P Laptop

OK here is a real story that I was telling a friend of mine that you might find amusing. One of my past customers was Agrana. They make fruit products that go into things like Dannon yogurt. They also made at one time chocolate products for the same purpose.

I watched the new Chocolate product line as it was being installed and had some minor bits of work there so I was amazed at how complicated chocolate processing can be. It took a couple of months before it was basically complete and the testing and fine tuning began. Lots of PLC’s and controls everywhere and I have to say a modern food manufacturing facility in many ways looks like a chemical refinery with pipes and stuff all over the place. I hated working on some of this as it was often in cramped conditions and welding related sanitary pipe always seemed to get you a burn from uninsulated steam lines used for the cooking vessels. But in any case back to chocolate.

One of the startup technicians there when they fired it all up to do calibration for the system had his laptop hooked up to the PLC’s when they began a trial run. It did not take long before there was a problem and the hot chocolate did not spray too many things but one of the things enrobed in fresh hot tasty chocolate was the techs nice 17″ HP laptop. I am sure it tasted good but it immediately came to a sad end. As he related his tale of woe to us later after it was fixed, well actually after HP replaced it since he had that kind of coverage, he told us that the data had been salvaged off the old hard drive at least so it was not as grim as it could have been.

It did not take long however before he was heralded as the creator of a new line of laptops. “Hershey Powered” of course. Did not work real well but looked great and tasted good.