Story of Labels and Jute Yarn

Yesterday I posted a 'One photo every day' post, promising to have a story for them. Here's a short recollection of what happened:

Jute yarn and labels.

As I came to the work rehab yesterday I was greeted with a new job. I was to tie up jute yarn strings to some blue ad labels that would be hang on soft drink bottles. My boss showed me a sample, and gave me a piece of jute yarn to use as a measure to cut up more pieces of yarn into length to tie to the labels.

I took some photos of the labels, but the boss noticed and told me I wouldn't be allowed to publish them to protect the client's interests. It wasn't until later when I realized that if I turned the labels upside-down there wouldn't be any reason to block me from publishing a photo, as they'd look pretty much generic labels, albeit empty.

After cutting and tying about 60 yarn strings to the labels, someone decided to check out if they matched with the sample one.

They didn't.

The yarn strip was about 10 cm longer than the original. It turned out that my cutting method was flawed as the length of the resulting strips of yarn tended to gradually grow longer the further I progressed. It didn't help that the original strip of yarn I was given to measure the new ones was already too long.

I wasn't the only one whose yarn strips got longer all the time. Turned out almost everyone working on the labels had their own method of cutting the string to length, and everyone had made the same assumption that the length would stay approximately the same, while it didn't. (For one employee they had gotten shorter.) We ended up having to scrap a large heap of finished labels and redo almost the whole shebang.

When re-making them, I decided I'd do the cutting since I didn't want to same mistake to happen again. (I also thought out a bunch of creative ways to make it faster to cut up pieces of thread in to length. I guess it would be better to do that beforehand in the planning phase of such a job.) Good thing there were only 500 of those labels to be made.

So there's the story...

"Excuse me while I slither... Going up!"

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