When I was 20 I knew a guy with a weird job. He was a year ahead of me at Cal, part of the group of people I was most likely to socialize with, often around but not an intimate of mine. His name was Scott.

Scott and a friend of his repaired cherry-counting machines. They worked mostly in the summer, mostly in the cannery area near Monterey/Salinas, traveling from one factory to another, fixing or at least fine-tuning the machines.

I’m talking about Maraschino cherries, those so-called fruits which are bleached white until they are dyed red, which taste like un-food and which are found in fruit cocktail (and other cocktails, but I’m not sure those come from the same canneries).

As Scott explained it to me at the time, the cherries are the high-ticket ingredient in canned fruit cocktail. By regulation each can had to contain a specified minimum number of cherry halves. By business economics no can could contain one cherry half more than required. So a machine had to be produced, to monitor the number of cherry halves that went into each can. And once a machine gets produced, an industry of maintenance and repair gets created. Which is the industry Scott and his friend joined.

It was a peachy position (I mean, they sure plucked a cherry of a job). There weren’t others around who could do it, so they were always in demand and appreciated.

I lost track of Scott not long after college. I’m sure he moved on to other employment. But I learned something from his experience. I was tickled at the specificity of his skill. It encouraged my interest in truly odd jobs, whether they are glamorous or not. And it may have primed me to appreciate the strange clerical employment I was to acquire a few years later, and stay with, and come to like, for (now) 38 years.

(Maraschino cherries the most valuable ingredient? Go figure. The fact is, I don’t know anyone over the age of 10 who loves them. The surprising ingredient in canned fruit cocktail are the grapes. After them, the peaches taste best. Then probably the pineapple. The thing about the pears is how much they taste like pears; no matter how you prepare a pear it tastes the same. As far as I’m concerned those cherries are dead last.)