Discover Top Posts Tagged with #ghost factory

{10.10.21}

Currently reading:

The housework is done, lunch is in the slow cooker, my stuff for tomorrow is all sorted, so it's time for breakfast (protein porridge) and a good book... a perfect Sunday!

It's been a while since I read a book in a day, but I'll certainly give it a go!

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I don’t know where I first heard of the concept of the Ghost Factory but it’s the kind of fascinating and almost certainly untrue urban legend that feels like it’s worth sharing. I probably picked this up from a forum that was serving as a stand-in for your friend’s weird older brother who tells you that humans were genetically engineered by aliens to desire gold and platinum.

The idea of a Ghost Factory (I’ve also heard the phrase Zombie Factory) is that it’s a factory that no one owns and no one remembers. Effectively a massive scaled up version of the Forgotten Employee (if you remember that Something Awful thread).

The concept is simple, and very believable. Some company establishes a factory producing cheap tat, usually via a fairly mechanized process. It’s the 80′s, so factories aren’t all centrally controlled by a head office, they do their own dealings in accordance with guidelines sent down from management, they get a Rolodex with their supply chain contacts, and they have their own little departments for handling shipping, accounts, raw materials, hiring, etc. If there’s too many employees it’s hard to lose track of it but if all you have is an accounts department, a shipping team, a dozen QA testers and some mechanics who look after the tooling, that’s easy to lose. The parent company sets up this factory, gets it some contracts making the hulls of kitchen appliances or whatever, and then, crucially, loses track of it.

I must once again stress that I have never heard any proof of this, and I don’t think they’re real.

So now you have this autonomous factory, where it basically looks after itself, manages its own finances and handles all its inputs and outputs, which has demands placed upon it by its contracts but no real obligation to report to anyone. Perhaps the manager who was supposed to run it got fired at the last minute and he was replaced by someone hired by the factory’s own HR department. He’s never going to read all the company policies, as long as nothing breaks he’s going to look after his own little kingdom and assume that everyone else is handling the important stuff. No one yells at him from above because his desk phone number was never actually written down, and he tries his best not to think about this.

And so it continues. Year after year, they extend their contracts, order new tooling, repair old machines. If you hang out in certain consumer product forums you’ll sometimes hear people talk about how “oh this is obviously made with legacy tooling” by which they mean “this has been made on the same machine in the same factory for the past 40 years and you can see the lettering blur as the printer plates wear down.”

They have to, by their nature, make low-stakes items. if they made precision machined engine parts then they would never get away with lasting for decades. There’s too much change in that, they’d get asked to test a new technology and they’d realise that there is no R&D division. Where did the parent company go? That’s their business, not ours. But if they make cheap MP3 player case, or stamped metal blender blades, or cast hunks of zinc for kitchen appliances, well no one is going to notice that. Grad Student’s First Juicer Blender Blades come from the factory on their last legs at the best of times, these ones having slightly rolled over edges because the stamp hasn’t been replaced in years is nothing new.

I must once again stress that I have never heard any proof of this, and I don’t think they’re real.

The story is fascinating, because it looks at a particularly weird time in manufacturing history. The stories are invariably about Chinese factories, probably propped up by the much more accurate stories about ghost towns and the very real existence of thousands of shell corporations that all sell the same product, made in the same factory, silkscreened with a new logo because a thin layer of paint is the only thing justifying their existence at all. The time when mass manufacture was so automated that this could happen but we still lived in a weird unconnected no-internet world where it was still possible to just lose an entire building because your paper records were shoved in a cabinet that someone lost the key for.

It feels like the kind of story that would have arisen during the late 90′s and early 2000′s, when you’re reaching the point where working in a factory is no longer a valuable job because of automation and centralization of manufacturing. What’s more indicative of that than a factory so devoid of human contact that it can be forgotten. Management doesn’t just not care about you, they don’t know about you. You can’t forget about a manual 70′s steel mill in Pennsylvania, it’s too dynamic a space.

I must once again stress that I have never heard any proof of this. I don’t think they’re real.

#stories #manufacturing #ghost factory #urban legend