Little House In Ise

Last week I did Giant Robot Training! Woohoo! Safety concerns were very much secondary as we crawled through a maze of cables and climbed poorly attached metal frames covered with many meters of “DO NOT ENTER YOU WILL DIE!!!” tape. I had a headache brought on by clashing, out-of sync, high-pitched, electronic “Mary had a Little Lamb”, “London Bridges” and “Camp Town Races” spewing from the robots racing past overhead. It made the threat of death rather appealing. This may fall into the category of “The Mondays” but it’s hard to tell.

Based on the size and color of that particular robot, I figured it should transform into a Winnebago. Nobody would tell me where the transform button or what the secret chant was. I really wanted to see if there was an icepack in the RVs freezer.

There were a few other folks in training too. One was an Irish guy who has been at the company much longer than me. “The Young Guy”, who just started fresh out of college and a couple of older guys who are in from other companies and need to know how to work with these robots. The Irish guy looked worse off than I was. He had spent the weekend participating in Shinto a ceremony that involved lifting heavy weights in the sun while screaming and drinking heavily. I might have participated had I known about all the yelling — for me, it would have counted as karaoke practice. I should have been clued in by that fact that it was a religious ceremony. The Young Guy had lost his wistful smile early on in the class. I’m sure the thought of falling from one of those platforms probably didn’t appeal quite as much to him. I sympathized, I still haven’t seen the last episode of LOST.

At the top, we stood around a column where the “remote” control cable protruded. We balanced on a grid of 5cm wide braces meant for attaching metal floor plates. Sadly, someone had forgotten to add the floor. The view down wasn’t so bad but the pile of angled metal parts at the bottom was more threatening than all those wasted rolls of yellow tape. Why we had to climb that thing to play with the robot is still not quite clear (my money is on really bad user interface design …) but we were there to work on the “Stalker” (really it’s “Stocker” but the other is more menacing and appropriate for a giant robot). So I learned to train the Stalker and absolutely sweated beads trying to get the damn arm to carry it’s demo payload to the appropriate trio of kinematic pins. All the guys gave me shit, in their “enigmatic” Japanese way, because the UI for the remote controller was in English and they thought I should be able to understand it because of that. A bad UI is a bad UI no matter what language it’s written in. After much stress, I managed to teach the massive beast where to put its little plate and when I put it in test mode the 5 meter long arms rushing past were, ahem, thrilling. I didn’t wet my pants — let’s leave it at that.

I was happy to get that little bit of training out of the way even though it got me out of a couple of crack-of-dawn teleconferences with irritated customers. So back to the people farm and more stories of the weird as I experience them …

Hi!

On Sep 13, 2006, at 6:50 AM, marcus j chavez wrote:
ERIC!!!! how’s Nippon how are the children adjusting Megumi, CAN you go home again

Funny you should ask. I was just soaking in the tub listening to the rain. There was a horny cricket out there trying to get a little action. The burping of the tub as it heated up to 40 gave this little corner of the world a nice bass accompaniment. Right now,　Japan sounds nice.

But there is a darker side…

I work in an office where industrial robots are designed and built. I walk past half a dozen varieties every day. I think, Asimov would have approved but been a little disappointed. None of these look even vaguely like people. The coolest of the lot, the AGV, looks a lot like the love-child of R2-D2 and a VW microbus (hi Bro!). It gets about as much love. I desperately want to add, “Are you Sarah Conner?” to its repertoire of error signals but no one around here would really get it. Anyway, my point is that I’m spending a lot of time around robots lately. So much so that I wish that Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics were a reality. They might’ve saved my ass today.

It all starts with the almost fetish-like attitude toward personal cleanliness that is more than a stereotype here. This fetish has resulted in the development of plumbing that would look right on the set of a Star Trek episode (if they ever filmed in the bathroom). At the very least, I am convinced that the current models of toilets are robots in disguise. Most seem to be Three Laws compliant but the one in the far left stall of the visiting men’s room at my company stands out as being a deviant.

No one has complained, yet, that I use the visitors’ bathroom rather than take the long hike, to the farthest corner of the building, away from where I do my business, in order to do my business. The visitors’ bathroom is cleaner, or at least has better air freshener, and is equipped with robo-pots that do everything for you except, well, the obvious. Step up and the lid lifts, wait a moment and the hoop lifts. If you sit down you’d better read the instructions before you get serious otherwise you may need to call tech-support. If you think I’m kidding, think again. There is a two-page bilingual manual (full-color, glossy, nice use of graphics) hanging on the wall of each stall.

So, get comfortable, do your thing, press the right buttons, reduce the pressure and temperature — it’s always too powerful — and then fire up the dryer which, thankfully, is_much_ less powerful than the Mitsubishi JetTowel. Done, right? You’d think so but what happens when the toilet displays the Blue Screen of Death? How do you reboot a toilet? Sneaking away isn’t an option as the person to be blamed would be pretty obvious. Damn! Dr. Asimov, where are you when you’re needed!?!? When in doubt, a good engineer returns to the documentation, to RTFM a little more… Aha! On page two, “Tlouble Shooting”, is an answer Scotty would have been proud to use! There is a manual over-ride! The lid and hoop mechanisms still work so, getting down to open the hatch where the　override is artfully concealed isn’t too horrific. Sure enough, lower right side behind the graphic showing how to open the hatch is YES! A hatch! With a flush lever. I rule! It may be an indicator of something that this is the sort of victory that I savor.

Anyway, wouldn’t it have been so much easier if the damn thing just followed orders? (second law of robotics)