One summer, before I started college, I got a job working in the cafeteria at Fisher body in Lansing. It proved to be a real eye opener.

Everyone that worked in the cafeteria performed various tasks depending on the time of day. And so, one of my tasks was working on the serving line at lunch time.

Now, working on the serving line was a challenge because the factory workers had an attitude and it wasn’t pleasant. They were always complaining about the food. It was either too hot, or too cold, or too salty, or too bland, the list goes on and on. In particular, they complained about the soup.

When you dished up the soup you had to do two things. First, you had to stir the pot in front of them. That insured that they were not getting just broth. The second thing that you had to do was ladle the soup into the bowl when they asked for it and not before. That insured that the soup was hot.

One day, I found myself serving up vegetable beef soup. And in keeping with the demands of the factory workers, I stirred the soup and ladled into the bowl when they asked for soup.

Everything was going as planned until this one particularly disagreeable worker asked for soup. I gave the soup a long and deep stirring as he looked on. But, just as I was about to ladle the soup into the bowl, I looked down at the soup. There in the middle of the ladle was a tampon, string and all. Horrified, I quickly slipped the ladle back into the soup and gave it one more stir. Pulling up on the ladle, I noted that it was now tampon free so I filled the bowl. Fortunately, the factory worker did not see the tampon in the ladle. He must have been distracted at the time.

Now, this was the lunch time rush so I didn’t have time to go fishing for a tampon. Thinking that the tampon was probably on the bottom of the pot, I made sure that I didn’t stir too vigorously. I also checked every ladle to make sure that the tampon didn’t make it into someone else’s bowl. Yum!