All this talk about washing bottles got me reminiscing about my favorite
chore when working summers and holidays at my families regional coffee
roasting plant. I was a teenager at the time. We also produced
extracts and flavorings for cooking (vanilla extract ans so on) and the
new bottles had to be washed. We would take them from the box and
place them in this machine on little spindles upside-down. Hot water
would squirt in and on them as they made a 360 degree trip around the
machine that held a couple hundred of them. Then you would take them
off the other end. It took two ladies (we called them White Hairs, now I
am a White Hair) to operate, one to load one to unload. The machine
was continuous, no stopping. My cousins and I (all teens at the time
and partners in crime) loved showing the ladies that we could load and
unload with only one person, running back and forth fast as we could.
My grandfather (president and as we say in Sicilian Patroni) chuckled
watching us and seeing the humor of how much work he was getting out of
us knowing that in a few minutes we would be hiding behind stacks of
green coffee avoiding work.