SENSE AND NONSENSE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 71, Issue 237, 6 October 1928, Page 18 (Supplement)

SENSE AND NONSENSE

RANDOM REFLECTIONS BY ROBERT MAGILL By the courtesy of the proprietors, I was enabled the other day to pay a visit to the new Speeder Car works in Cov" entry. The Two-Horse model is a dead secret at present, and the factory is so built that on the approach of a rival manufacturer, or a journalist, it can be sunk underground until danger is past. By 1930 it is hoped that cars will bo in production at the rate of ten thousand a day, and the counters of Woolworth’s will be covered with them, although by that time, of course, they will have been rendered obsolete by the One-horse Harris-Cowley, which will appear, and be likewise obsolete, in 1923. A few statistics may be of interest. Ono thousand tons of glue, ten thousand miles of string and ten million papers of pins are used every week in the manufacture of the engines. So much money is earned there that tjio Bank of England has a special printing press for producing notes for the wages. Enough brown paper is used every week to cover Hyde Park, and it seems a pity that this can’t be done so that the police can get back to their ordinary jobs. The car consists of 10,000 parts, each one of which is stamped out by a press weighing so much that it pushes out a new island in the Pacific every time it comes down bang. So complete is the equipment that harps and wings are stamped out for each purchaser. Before long the purchaser will be stamped out, too, only not that way. All these parts were at first fed into channels and allowed to roll down to the assembly shop, but this was found to be too slow, so now the place has been magnetised, and as soon as they are ready the parts fly off and assemble themselves. The old method of spraying the paint on was discovered to be too tedious, often taking nearly three minutes. Nowadays the paint is pressed into shape and slapped on to the car as it whizzes through on its way to the sale room. A row of mechanics stand on cither side of it, hurling at it with deadly precision such things as headlamps and tyres. Lastly, a test driver is chucked into the seat a fraction of a second after the seat hits the chassis, and in ten seconds the car has been driven round the track and is ready for the repair shop. . In fact, verything is done so rapidly that if the car isn’t sold in twenty-four hours it wears itself out by fretting, and has to be scrapped. I am asked to say, by the way, that these cars should be driven carefully for the first five hundred miles. After that it doesn’t | matter. They will have fallen to pieces. Work.

I have often heard about the dignity of labour, but somehow I’ve never been able to like work, and I realise now that I have never tackled it in the proper fashion.. I have always treated it as something like medicine, that is, painful, but necessary, and to be finished w’ith as soon as possible. Which is where 1 differ from the British working man.

The other day the man next door bought himself a bookcase to replace the one he set fire to. It was a secondhand affair, about seven feet by five, and they delivered it while he was out. It looked as though it had been made from old egg-boxes—which it actually had —and as his wife didn’t believe it was a bookcase at all, and didn’t show where it was to go, they left it in the garden. When George camo home, he asked me if I’d give him a hand to take it upstairs, so we got hold of it, and carried it up. I admit that I stuck one corner of it into George and .squashed him a bit, and we scraped some of the paper off the wall, but when we got to his study, we naturally found there was no room for it, because it hadn’t occurred to him to clear a space. So we carried it down again, made room for it, and carried it up again. This time he decided that it -would look better against another wall, so we carried it down once more.

Luckily tea intervened, or we might have gone on carrying that thing up and down his stairs for ever, and during tea the men came back from the furniture shop with the intention of planting the bookcase in its lair, so George said, “Right ho, carry on.” There w r erc four men, all dressed in tidy green baize aprons, and they spent a quarter of an hour carrying in sacks, strips of webbing, ropes and things. Ono of them was the foreman, and under his charge they laid all the sacks on ‘the ground, attached .ropes to the case, and lowered it gently on its side. They then rested ten minutes and lifted it up again to place the webbing underneath, after which, to a sort of seashanty provided by the foreman of “Life—easy—heave—now she’s yours” —and so on, they got it to the door, shifting the sacks as they proceeded. One man wanted to send home for some rollers, but no, they reckoned they could do without, stout fellers. The foreman now debated with himself whether to take the banisters down or not, but after severftl intricate measurements and calculations, ho decided it would just go, and with superhuman efforts they edged the case into the hall where it stood for an hour, and everybody in the house had to use the back door.

Next they wiped their brows, and took the stair carpet up, and it was while they were taking out the window to make room to turn it, and unscrewing the door from its hinges, that I got fed up and went home. By the look of things that case was going to be, on the stairs all night, and Mr and Mrs George would have to go to bed via the roof and the chimney. But it was all very wonderful, and well worth the thirty-five shillings he paid for the thing. Seaside Snares. Sir Arthur Keith probably knows as much about man as man does about greyhounds, and he says that we live only when we live dangerously. Consequently, the only holiday that appeals to us is one full of risks. I often think that we ought to be able to take out en insurance policy especially for the seashore. For instance, you may be seated on the sands wondering idly whether it is a small crab crawling down your neck or a touch of the sun, when you suddenly fall through the earth and land right in the Pliocene strata, to find, when about six strong men have dug you out again, that it wasn’t an earthquake, but some small boy behind you making a sand castle, and his mother calling you names for spoiling it. As you advance in open order to take cover behind a breakwater, you have to go through a sort of barrage of four games of cricket, two free fights which began as rounders, and a tennis tournament, mostly played with hard, heavy balls.