During their latest marathon (I think there are only about 300 of these marathons a year, so set your DVR) I was sitting there absolutely gobsmacked at the hugely complicated processes involved in making the simplest things. For example, it must take, like the GDP of Norway just to build/buy the equipment alone to crank out twenty-dollar extruded aluminum step-ladders: [Cut to huge hydraulic crushy-pressy thing] “Next,” the voiceover says, “the 19-foot aluminum billets are pushed through a steel mold into 137-foot lengths that will later be cut to size...”[cut to warehouse swarming with people and packed with even more baffling single-purpose machines]
Are you freaking kidding me? How does anyone make any money manufacturing anything at all? Volume, you say? Pfft! Unless some seriously non-Muggle stuff is happening off camera, it looks like you would have to sell a ladder to each and every one of the metaphorical Hamlet-writing monkeys to just break even.
If I had to make aluminum ladders starting with just a pile of aluminum beads (hey, never mind starting out with bauxite ore or, worse, a hill where there might or might not be bauxite ore), by the end of my lifetime I may manage to eke out one cartoonishly unsafe ladder and it would cost north of thirty-seven million dollars.
It's not just about the ladders, though.
The show got me to thinking (again) that no one really knows how anything works. Not from scratch. Not completely. Oh, you might be the world's greatest fill-in-the-blank, but how much unsung support do you actually use to ply your craft? Ok, fine, you are the world's greatest marksman but now you need to make your own gunpowder and shells. If you can't buy anything, you may as well use your rifle as a hammer or a shovel, because it sure as hell isn't a gun anymore.
Of course, your Macbook Air can be re-purposed to cut cake, in a pinch...
I am picturing scenes like this happening about one year after the lights go off for the last time:
[A few tired, hungry, dirty people are gathered in front of a looted, burned-out storefront. They warm their hands over a metal barrel in which a fire is barely smoldering]
Alan: This sucks. Doesn't anyone remember how to make toilet paper?
Steve: A rusted cotter-pin fell out of the old machine that used to make it but, since the cotter-pin making machine is broken as well, the solar-powered toilet-paper maker currently houses a family of six and their goats.
Alan: Can't the cotter-pin machine be fixed? Kevin, I thought you worked at the cotter-pin plant for 35 years before the Generic Disaster of 2011 hit. Can't you do something?
Kevin: Well, see, I was the foreman for the guys that drove the forklifts in the East Wing. Tell you the truth, I never even saw the contraption that actually made the pins – you needed a green security badge for that. Mine was blue. But I understand the device was glorious to behold. [pauses] I also organized the monthly potlucks.
Alan: Damn it. Ok, Steve, take this down. We all know paper comes from trees. We just need to pound some trees super-thin...
[Steve struggles to take notes on a deflated soccer ball when his pencil breaks. He stares at the broken pieces, wide-eyed]
Steve: Oh God! Oh God! Th... that was our last one, man, and now it's gone forever! Game over, man! Game over!
Alan: Calm down, calm down. I once saw an episode of How It's Made and I think I remember that pencil leads are made primarily from graphite, clay, and a binding agent. I'll go get whatever graphite is. Kevin, you secure the clay. Steve, you go find us a heap of binding agent. We'll all meet back here when the moon looks exactly like it does riiiiiigggghhhtt... NOW. Good luck, and Godspeed friends.
Yeah. We're all hosed.
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1 comment:
I so needed to laugh like that. Thanks man.
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