The Industrial Revolution, As It Relates To Burnt Popcorn

The experience of being in a large-scale vehicle assembly plant during the night shift is something that everyone should experience at least once. It is difficult to describe the sensually jarring juxtaposition of beautiful, titanic-scale clockwork machines mixed with the horrible racket and general griminess that you are assaulted with.

Bleary eyed and going on as little sleep as I am, the ultra bright, reverberant sound stage of a plant going full bore is beyond surreal. Every sense tingles. You can hear ten thousand sounds all at once, and it is very hard to localize them. Disorientation sets in and it covers one square mile. The scale of this place is very hard to grasp, it takes a while to come to terms with it. We're used to buildings with normal-sized floors. You could fit many football fields in here.

And it's alive with action. Metal is moving everywhere around you. Giant steel conveyors, some overhead, some below you, clank, lurch and rattle. Partially built cars, like colorful steel skeletons, move without warning, jerking towards you with a loud groan as you pass over the line in front of them. The age of "Just-In-Time" manufacturing ensures hundreds of loaders and fork lifts move with stealthy swiftness along corridors of grey concrete, supplying small batches of life-sustaining parts to each station with precision timing. Warning lights glare at you from every angle, red, green, yellow, blue, orange, and even purple. Computers are everywhere, and tracking it all...down to the residual torque of the remotest fastener, accumulating huge amounts of data that's all going...somewhere offstage.

And people with Megadeth T-shirts and headbands attach the parts that cannot be automated economically, all the while talking on their Bluetooth headsets to...someone offstage. They stare at me, traveler from another world, and keep talking on the phone. Each time a barcode is read, a loud "laser blast" sound effect is blasted through a speaker somewhere (offstage), telling the operator that the part is the correct one.

The luscious sweet smell of some chemical that I recognize only from other plants invades my nose. What is it? I can't tell if it's the best smell I have ever experienced, somewhere between flowers and candy, or if it's going to make me sick. Perhaps both. And then, as I walk, a new smell...burnt popcorn, I think. But from where?

Mercury vapor lighting gives the whole place a sickly pinkish glow. Colors just aren't right. You can't tell what anything you're looking at really looks like, but you know it's wrong.

Adding to the ambiance, there is an enormous thunderstorm moving through the area right now. It is rocking the foundations of this 90 year old plant as if it was made of bamboo.

Now I pass a group of people working on a bolt rundown station. One of them is wearing a kitchen sponge wrapped around his head with tape, to soak up sweat presumably. Another guy, impossibly skinny with blond hair down to his belt and a huge beard, is saying something into the ear of a man who looks like Albert Einstein's head was placed on a 70 year old Arnold Schwarzenegger's body and wearing a hard hat decorated with ocean shells. The James Bond theme song is blaring out from some speakers...offstage, and this whole thing is starting to resemble a Fellini movie. I wouldn't be surprised to see jugglers with giant paper-mache masks.

A horn mounted to the wall looks a hundred years old. It's painted grey but the chips on it reveal at least five other, previous colors. I marvel at this further contrast as my eye moves over to what it's wired to: state-of-the-art computer-controlled robot, obviously new for this build. I think that when Mr. Grey Horn was installed, there were no robots in here, and the cars didn't have heaters.