The Vacant Lot Puns

A new worker, Rowan, is starting at a factory job and is receiving instructions from their manager, Colm.

"The items come out in batches over here. You're going to sort them by eye and place them into the corresponding shelves for the guys on the other side to stack and move out. There are five possible label colors, indicating destination," he gestures at the column labels above the shelves. "Within each color the stack order doesn't matter except that our most fragile product, our red flowers, have to ship out on top and then any cans of caviar just below them. So if either of those products are in the batch, put them on their corresponding higher shelf. Everything else goes on the lower shelf."

Rowan gets the gist and begins work placing items in their appropriate column of shelves, keeping an eye out for flowers and caviar.

However, there is little to do. The prodigious worker just before this step in the assembly line had been picking up the slack while Rowan's position was vacant, and hadn't been told yet that the job was filled.

So Rowan waits for any sorting to be needed, but each batch of items that arrives is only ever one color of tag, and the delicate items are always already on top. All day, Rowan only ever has to move them over to the correct column.

Later in the day, Colm is checking up on Rowan, not realizing that their work today is redundant. He sees from across the factory that Rowan isn't doing much work and has lots of downtime between new batches. So he makes the long walk over to them.

"Rowan, why aren't you sorting all those items into separate columns? You're just moving them into one column every time!" argues Colm, annoyed.

"Well, each batch always consists of only one color. I don't know what to tell you," replies Rowan.

"I'm sure thats not true! And I suppose the rose and roes just rose to the top rows?"

Rowan just shrugs and says "Look, I just column like I see 'em."