I got my dream job last night. I had been thinking about getting out of the office, about finding something beyond a cubicle and a desk where I could maybe be outdoors and do something more gratifying. Since the career path I’m on now is likely to leave me alone and penniless why not take a chance on something more organic and basic? So I took a job on a farm. A fish farm.

After I arrived here and got acclimated to life in Connecticut I quickly learned that this wasn’t your typical farm because, well, for one thing, all of the animals are made out of crackers … Or at least all the ones I work with. They tell me that’s par for the course here at Pepperidge Farms and it’s a fun job with good snacks.

I work in the fish division, actually, there’s only one kind, Goldfish, and specifically, my job is in the personality department. That means I’m one of the guys that put eyes and smiles on the crackers as they swim past. We put smiles on about forty percent of the Goldfish crackers and on one of my first days I asked why we didn’t just put smiles on all of them? It turns out that more than half of the Goldfish just aren’t that happy and you can’t very well scratch a smile onto the face of a fish cracker that’s pissed off. A lot of them really wanted to be saltines and others had relatives that were Cheez-Its so they weren’t that stoked to be fish to begin with. You’ll notice that most Goldfish crackers have a flat side and a kind of rounder side. We usually put the eyes and smiles on the flat side because most of the fish think that’s their good side.

Yep, there’s a lot to learn here at Pepperidge Farms.

Since 1961, Pepperidge Farms has been owned by the Campbell Soup Company. Before that, the company was mostly known as a bread company until one day the founder, Margaret Rudkins, went to Switzerland and discovered a cracker shaped like a fishy. There was a biscuit maker there (Europeans like to say biscuit when they really mean cookies and crackers) who wanted to make something special for his wife’s birthday and since she was a Pieces, he turned out crackers that looked like they could swim. The Pepperidge Farms lady brought the idea back with her and started making Goldfish crackers in 1962. For well over thirty years the Goldfish crackers kept their emotions to themselves and then in 1997, we started putting smiles on the crackers who were in a good mood.

While all the fish here are technically Goldfish, I have my doubts. The schools that swim by can all look very different and some guy here says that at one point there were as many as seventy-six varieties, but currently, by my count, there are thirty-nine Goldfish varieties. People eat a lot of Goldfish and sometimes we have trouble breeding enough of them. My boss says that we produce 142 billion Goldfish crackers a year or about 3,000 every second. Something like 330 fishies fit in each bag. Each little fish will cost you 2.5 calories, though since the happy fish with smiles tend to be a little more fit, you may cut calories if you only ate them.

Militant moms on the web and elsewhere don’t like Goldfish saying, among other things, that they’re too salty. I say fuck that. Me and my coworkers often down bags of these delicious Goldfish on our breaks and often times we pour salt from a shaker into our mouths as we eat ’em. We’ve learned that the salt on the fishies helps accentuate the smiles and the smiles and eyeballs on the fish form channels that hold the salt and other seasonings making the happy fish the best tasting ones in the bag.

I can say from firsthand experience that the most popular flavors, measured by the fish that swim by me every day, are the basics, comprised of a top five that typically includes saltine, classic cheddar, parmesan, pizza and flavor-blasted cheddar.

♦

Well, I woke up this morning out of a job. My employment on Pepperidge Farms really was a dream job, but it was weird because I woke with salty cracker crumbs on my nightclothes.