When we picked up an order from a grocery store earlier this week, we discovered one item which had taken all the space in a single bag.
This bag of potato chips had apparently been packaged at a plant at or near sea level, then shipped to our 4,000 foot elevation in the high desert of southern New Mexico. I’m concerned that if we try to open it, it will be raining potato chips throughout the house after the explosion.
This reminded me of an incident that I must confess I helped create years ago and about which I wrote a blog four and one-half years ago. Once I saw this bag, I thought it was worth repeating.
When I was a regional marketing manager about 20 years ago for Wells Fargo, my territory covered all of New Mexico and about one-third of Texas. We worked closely with another regional marketing team from central Texas and were always looking for promotions that would engage and reward our hard working employees in the regional bank branches. One such promotion we came up with was to send each regional branch a “Fiesta in a Box,” consisting of some tortilla chips, salsa, various decorations and even a small plastic box of Mexican jumping beans.
The plan first went awry when the pilot of a small commuter plane transporting the boxes to branches in West Texas suddenly started hearing popping noises coming from the cargo hold. The alarmed pilot declared an emergency and quickly landed at the nearest airport. It turns out that the sound was salsa jars exploding or popping off their lids because of the change in altitude. The aircraft was not pressurized, so when the pilot flew as high as 10,000 feet along the route, the internal pressure of the jars — apparently manufactured somewhere near sea level — could no longer be contained. The pilot was left with a salsa-coated cargo area and our team was left red faced.
But it gets worse. One of the boxes that did make it through ended up at the local post office in a remote far West Texas town. As the local post master began to take the “Fiesta In a Box” to the local branch, he or she began hearing a ticking sound coming from inside it. Apparently, the Mexican jumping beans had awakened and began bouncing around in their small plastic boxes.
The postmaster assumed the worst — a ticking time bomb — and immediately closed the post office and summoned local police. After gingerly disassembling the box, the police discovered the lurching beans and declared the emergency over.
And our teams faces got even more red.
aero-cordero.com 