January 14: Assembly Line Day

There is no holiday, no celebration, no observance more exciting than today!  Who can dispute the overwhelming joy and excitement accompanying modern workplace efficiency.  I, for one, am all a twitter.

Guess what time it is now?  Time for the only thing drier than that intro: a history lesson!

YAYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!

See, back in 1908, the Model T debuted and changed the world basically, like, forever and junk.  While cars besides the Model T existed in the same time period, they were each unique creations that weren't mass produced.  Henry Ford, when he wasn't being all Nazi-ish, was coming up with one of the most important innovations of the 20th century.  

In 1910, Ford introduced interchangeable parts to his sweet, sweet rides.  Why does that matter?  Because now people could sub in the part they needed if the car broke down.  That made his Model Ts instantly one of the most popular machines on the road.

I'm sexy and I know it

For the next roughly four years, production was moving smoothly, all while Ford was building a whole new facility - one designed from top to bottom to accommodate a new production technique.  Whereas whole cars were previously assembled one-by-one, on January 14, 1914 the first Model T rolled off a brand spankin' new assembly line.

Happy Birthday, inanimate object!

In honor of the centennial anniversary of the modern assembly line's first baby car, we decided to adopt assembly line techniques in our lives for the day.  It was not NEARLY as doable with just two of us as I thought it would be.  A few days before the holiday, we decided on a dinner that we thought would allow us to used an assembly line technique for the preparation.  Meatballs.

First we laid out all our 'interchangeable parts'

Turns out, two people can't assemble dinner in assembly line style while one of them takes pictures.  Who would've thunk it?  We talked a lot about assembly lines, researched the history behind the technique and studied how they worked.  At first it was upsetting that we didn't manage to put it into practice.

Then we got the hell over it.

We sat down and chatted about it later that night and realized we'd used a different production technique - we divided the labor to avoid a waste of time as a resource - while Justin took one the single, most involved task (the meatballs), I did everything else around him.  And that makes sense - when one task takes 2x the time, you put 2x the resources behind it or you load up the other resource on all the smaller tasks to balance the time through the production line.

So... mission accomplished?  

Yup.  Mission accomplished.