I didn't see where I had posted in this topic previously.
I was hired in 1975 by a consumer products company just out of school (BS Chem, Phi Beta Kappa, Magna cum Laude) to work in the Analytical Chemistry department; my manager later told me that he was reluctant to hire me as he thought I wouldn't stay with the company long as the pay was pretty low (under $8K USD).
He was correct, as a year later I accepted a position with local police in the crime lab after doing written and 3-person oral board; I was told I was their first choice. This was the career I wanted, plus the pay was over $14K, a huge increase over the $8.3K I was making by then. However, on the required polygraph test of 100 questions (more stringent than for police officers), I failed to "resolve" on question that I had "resolves when asked four different times with different wording. So I was turned down; 2 weeks later they called me and told me that NO ONE had passed polygraph, and they invited me back to try to resolve that one question which did not happen. Back then, there were no computerized polygraphs, the operator took out a ruler and guessed at graphs.
So I stayed in consumer products, worked on OTC pharmaceuticals, soaps, detergents, air fresheners, lotions, shampoos, insect killers, etc., following cGMP/USP/GLP regulations.
We had a good capital and supplies budget, and I was at the ground floor of reliable reverse-phase HPLC, fused-silica capillary GC, benchtop GCMS, and computerized instrumentation
We supported R&D, manufacturing, troubleshooting, etc. Some stuff was challenging, like finding that some of a batch of liquid soap was cloudy, and after Micro determined that was not their issue, that fragrance was about 3 times above target due to improper mixing, and high levels of fragrance had never been tested by R&D. Several times we found parabens precipitating out of lotion products due to poor product development. Three times in my career I worked on different anti-dandruff shampoos. The company decided in the early 1990s that alcohol gel hand sanitizer was not a good path to pursue, bad decision, now folks typically call that stuff "Purell". One late Friday afternoon a new product just starting production was not able to be assayed using a procedure in-place for decades (the R&D scientist never thought to have its prototypes tested by us), and I found its fragrance was the reason, and over the weekend determined the fragrance contained a rare component which interfered with the test; so a complete new test procedure had to be developed to overcome that, talk about panic !
I had "discussions" with various managers over the years who argued against innovations like using HPLC-grade ethanol as HPLC mobile phase because it also contained 5% methanol and 5% isopropyl alcohol but it provided great separation of 5 actives in a sunscreen product with isocratic HPLC, and some further discussions with a manager who "fought" against my program to cut preparation solvent costs to 10% of previous (saving on waste disposal as well) and to save mobile phase costs by using smaller-bore columns, as well as tremendous labor costs (all put into practice, saving millions of dollars on-going). One manager did not believe that changes to validated USP and in-house validated cGMP methods detailed in USP <621> and FDA-ORA documents could be implemented without validation, and he got mad when I told him that when I was young I learned 26 letters which spelled out words, and his opinion was different than official folks.
I did manage the department a dozen years. I tried to use my experience and practicality to push the science ahead. After about 3.5 decades the company was sold and after 4 decades of service my position was eliminated and I retired with good pension and severance, was less than 1.5 years to my retirement, and my severance was reduced to 52 weeks, so net cost to company by retaining me to age 65 would've been negligible, but comes out of a different pocket.
So that's how I became the Consumer Products Guy.
