An Education

Misjudgment in the Factory

AS AN EXCHANGE student, I once stayed with a commercial artist based in Thailand. Jim had moved there from Australia in the 80s, raised a family and built a successful creative manufacturing business.

Jim was the guy you went to when you wanted something made. His football pitch-sized factory hummed with workers splicing, bending, welding and buffing everything from billboards to beds to ten-foot Buddha heads to snaking spiral staircases for luxury holiday villas.

One day, Jim bought a laser-cutting machine on eBay, promising him new and lucrative artistic possibilities. It took four weeks and a small army to bring the machine to the factory—and it had to go on a ship as it was too big and heavy to travel by plane.

After the machine was installed, Jim couldn't get it to work.

Neither the previous owner nor Google nor Jim's decades of experience could explain why, when he fed the machine commands, it moved once and then jammed.

He finally made some inquiries. Through the brother of a friend of a client, Jim tracked down a specialist engineer in Germany named Werner and paid for him to fly in and get the thing working.

Werner entered the factory some weeks later, laid out his screwdrivers on the floor beside the machine and spent the rest of the day with his fingers in the wiring.

Then another day.

And another.

He postponed his flight home and called his wife.

Jim hosted more dinners.

Despite his rigour and perseverance, the engineer could not make the machine work, finally concluding that it must have taken a mortal knock whilst in transit.

After that, the factory went on as before. Under the showers of sparks and the light of the moons, the cutting machine sat stock-still.

Six or seven weeks had passed when one of Jim's workers, a local man called Nong, offered to take a look. Nong saw the problem straightaway: The machine was simply miscalibrated and thought that one centimetre was ten centimetres. It got stuck when contending with the scale of its task.

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Thanks to Michael Skinner, Susmeet Jain, Lavinia Iosub, Linart Seprioto, Priya Nain, Manu’s Newsletter & Becky Isjwara for reading drafts of this.