Today they took us to the working part of the factory. I usually work in the office or else in the laboratory, but today they took us to visit the manufacturing building. Here I could see how precise and methodical they are, I knew already, but I was still shocked.

The first thing is how clean they are. When you enter the factory you should take out your shoes and wear some kind of sandals. You should step on some sticky (and quite dangerous) layer on the floor to clean the dust from your sandals (even if you know they are clean). Then you go to some machine which measures your static electricity (yes, really) and tells you if you are able to enter. Depending on your clothes you might not be able to enter and you should change them (or take them out). And then they have a weird sandal cleaning machine: you should step on some grill and a brush will brush your sandals, also applying some water. Then you step out to some other platform to dry. They do this often if they think they have their sandals dirty.

Then there is also their working approach. They must have some kind of license to work in different departments. There is a big board where all the employees’ names are displayed in their license group. After that there are some hanging papers where each worker evaluates his workday and writes a “mark” up to five. I took a quick look at the marks and all the numbers were 3 or 4, not many fives. This is funny because they always do overwork like 3 or 4 hours, so I suppose that if they wrote 5 it means they worked until morning or something like that. Then there is another big board with photos of some employees. They told us that it is the prize for a good job, some kind of “employee of the month” but prizing them for good or hard work. We asked if they have some kind of economical reward but they told us that “being on the board is enough”. I guess it’s enough for their pride.

The last funny thing I saw was that on the corridor they have a machine that measures your pace. They encourage people to actually walk faster to improve productivity. You should get a walking speed of 100 (I suppose it is a percentage). My Chinese friend tried first, he walked normally, a bit faster than usual maybe and he got a poor 75%. Then they told me to try. I usually have a fast pace and I used this “happy day average speed” (and trust me, I was happy that day), I didn’t want to cheat and walk faster on purpose. I got a 90% (quite good though), so imagine how fast they have to walk with those tiny little legs of theirs. Then Gerardo tried… I think I have told you about his speed many times… now was the time to prove it! He got a hilarious 46%. Then the machine did something (as though it couldn’t believe a human being could be so slow) and changed the value to 75%; there is a proof that machines also have feelings.

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