Mr. Potato Head

Nursery rhymes begin with "Once Upon a time.....".    I was working at Disney Springs in a toy store called Once Upon a Toy.   A nice play on words between the nursery rhyme and the toy store. 

What a great job.   Can you imagine what fun it is to work in a customer friendly toy store?    No?    I can tell what fun it was ad infinitum.  

I had injured my knee and was on temporary light duty and was assigned to "stocker duties" at the toy store.    I worked in the back.   When you work where the guests (customers) are it is called "onstage".   When you work in the back where the are no guests it is called "backstage".   To go backstage you pass through a portal.   The portals are not readily apparent but if you know what to look for you can spot them.  In the picture below the portal (door) is behind the large Star Wars sign.   See the woman in the blue blouse and the tan pants?   She is close to the doors.

Now you can see it better.   Doesn't look like there is much behind those doors.   But there is: a large stockroom, offices, break room for employees, etc.

My job was unwrapping the accessories (arms, legs, hats. eyes, ears......) for Mr. Potato Head.

 

These were small items and came with tissue paper very tightly wrapped around each individual piece.    I have no idea how they got the paper so tight.  I really enjoyed my work because of the great working atmosphere.   Initially it was quite difficult getting the tissue paper off but I finally mastered a technique for getting the tissue paper off easily.   In a 6 hour shift I would unwrap literally thousands of these pieces.   It was a repetitious job but my fellow cast members were always friendly and happy.   And the managers were the same, very pleasant and nice.    As a child I had a Mr. Potato Head but back then you would only get the accessories and would have to use a real potato.   But times have changed and now there is a plastic "potato".

And the variety of accessories are mind boggling.  

In the store the accessories would be placed in these long plastic tubes with a different accessory in each tube.  

 

All of them unwrapped by me.   Here is a curious aside;   one day a manager asked a fellow cast member if he would do an inventory of the store after it closed.   I asked the cast member how he was going to count all of the thousands of little accessory pieces.   He laughed and he said that they weigh all of the accessory pieces of a single kind at once, say the arms.   They knew how much each arm weighed and so they could calculate how many individual pieces there were.   A neat idea.   What would I have done?   Probably sat there and counted each piece one at a time.   LOL.    What I am coming to is, that I do a jigsaw puzzle on the internet each night and one night there was a Mr. Potato Head puzzle which I did along with a flood of memories from my days working in the toy store.   But I guess that you could say that I was the Mr. Potato Head guy because I unwrapped all of the little arms, legs, eyes, ears, lips, etc.   Below is a picture of the completed jigsaw puzzle and a link to the jigsaw puzzle.   The puzzle only has 50 pieces and so won't take hardly any time at all.

https://thejigsawpuzzles.com/Puzzle-of-the-Day/Mr-Potato-Head-jigsaw-puzzle?cutout=50classic

Have a lot of fun doing the Mr. Potato Head jigsaw puzzle.   And hopefully for those of you who had a Mr. Potato Head it might bring back some fond memories.   Did anyone have the early version where you had to provide a real potato?

Bye.   Lew