13 Live Observations From The LEGO Factory & Museum Tour
1. The Redundant Robots Story Might Be The Most Devastating Of All Time
While I spent most of the LEGO Factory tour gawping in wonder and getting over excited at machinery and shelving and great big silos of unmoulded plastic grain, one thing will haunt me forever.
The tour guide introduced the robots - efficient but charmless creatures singularly dedicated to their job - with a story about their predecessors. The old robots used to have arms ("like Wall-E"), but they found that when they turned around with full boxes of bricks they'd often drop them.
That's a hugely charming image, of a robot with a human capacity for clumsiness - but of course there's no place for that in this sort of efficient environment. So they were made redundant and replaced; it's hard not to immediately think of Wall-E abandoned on Earth when you hear that.
Still, at least they're not messing up LEGO's work flow any more.