A Brand New Machine

I went back to visit the old plastic factory where I used to work.  The quality control woman was showing me around the place.  I could see that a good number of the old presses had been removed and quite a few others had been gutted for parts, to the point that I began to wonder how the place could still rightfully call itself a plastic factory.  There were just oily pits left on the floor where the presses had been.

But then she led me back to a spot in the back corner of the shop where a crowd of workers had gathered.  I pushed through to the front and saw what they were all gaping at.  It was a completely new kind of press.  Instead of using the crude method of melting the plastic and injecting it into a mold, this new press assembled the part molecule by molecule from a digital blueprint.  Through the glass I could see a set of metal styluses at work, weaving the part together out of arcs of blue electricity.  After this impressively rapid fabrication, the parts would drop onto a conveyor below the machine.

The woman running this machine sat before a silver bank of levers and dials.  She checked the readings on a display and marked endless figures down a clipboard.  I thought about how it would be to work a shift at this new machine.  I figured it would be easier, most certainly cleaner, but probably as mind-numbing as ever.  I pushed back out of the crowd, and left the shop out through the bay door, and emerged into the bright blue day with a sigh.  

Color Blind Test

Early one Saturday morning when I was still little, my father took me down to the school to have me tested for color blindness.  It was one of those bustling Saturday morning events that schools often have where there are booths set up and people are passing out fliers, and signs made from construction paper are displayed everywhere in the halls.  The classrooms sat dark and the parents sat  in loose groups in the cafeteria, where coffee and donuts were being served.

The color blindness test involved several different puzzles that were set up on a series of different tables.  There were a variety of intriguing puzzles.  There were some where you had to work your way through a maze by following different color paths.  There were others where cards of various colors were laid out in a grid on a table, and you had to add up all the cards of a certain color to arrive at the correct sum.

I moved from station to station, trying my best to solve each puzzle.  For some of them, I even had to get up onto the table and tap the correct answer with the tip of my shoe for some reason.  I was having a blast.  But I sensed that my father was getting irritated with me.  He didn’t see why I should be trying so hard to solve these puzzles when I already knew that I was color blind.  It just seemed like wasted effort to him.  I countered that the point of the tests was to see if I actually had color blindness.  If I already knew the outcome, what was the point of even being there in the first place?

I thought that was a pretty compelling piece of logic.  And so I moved on to the next station, where I had to get back up onto the table and match these pictures on different yellow squares by tapping them with my foot.  Soon I was having a good time again, tapping and shuffling at the cards.  But when I looked out over the crowd of laughing people gathered around the table, I saw that my father was gone.  He had taken off and left me there.