[jasonkester]

I once worked a summer job at Nintendo in Redmond, screwing together refurbished Super Nintendos. One day, the Big Bosses came down and toured the GameBoy line, and they had a kid do a demo using this new "hand you screws" machine so they could see how much it increased productivity.

He rolled up his sleves, took a deep breath, and screwed cases on something like 16 machines in the span of a minute (normal production is about 4). Only afterwards did the ramifications of what he'd just done start to sink in.

Glad I wasn't on that line. Extra glad I wasn't that guy. Lesson learned.

[kragen]

That's really interesting! I didn't have any idea Nintendo had assembly lines for refurbishment. Is that a typical refurbishment process?

[jasonkester]

It was actually a pretty cool little assembly line. At one end were pallattes of SNES's that had come in for service. They'd get dropped onto the belt and dissassembled completely by the first 10 or so people, then the individual parts would be tested as they moved along the line. Good parts were collected in bins and eventually moved down the line to assembly stations. Bad parts, stickered lids, and cockroaches would be allowed to roll down the belt and eventually off the end.

Once the pieces were collected, the machines would be re-assembled from scratch as they moved down the line. Some jobs, like screwing on the razor-sharp "tins" were terrible. Routing wires and screwing on lids was OK. My second summer there, I got the prime job on the line: Testing.

My job for the entire summer was to essentially play the first level of Super Mario all day, every day, on every machine that came past. That, plus some simple control tests, plus 8 hours of sitting on a rack running the intro demo of Zelda was enough to verify that a machine was good. Every once in a while the line would stop for whatever reason and I'd keep on "testing" away. I got REALLY good at Super Mario that summer.