Our feet stuck to the giant sticky pads as powerful jets blew air all over us. Reaching the other end of the chamber, one of the accompanying employees opened the air lock. We stepped into the clean room where people in full body suits were all working at their designated stations. Most of them wore white. Some wore yellow, and a small few wore blue. We wore pink.  Circuit boards, glue, E Ink material, and all other manners of parts were being melded and carefully laid in custom plastic trays. One microscope showed us how minute and detailed the little cities of a circuit board and microchip are.

If you haven’t guessed already, we were at a Kindle screen factory. My dad had been planning for this for over a year and was very excited. Surrounded by a cluster of two pink suited men, one yellow and one blue, we were led on a tour of the clean room complex. Many sophisticated machines dominated the rooms. Tape marked out everything in extreme detail:  there were designated areas for boxes and separate clearly-marked areas for their lids. We thought the suits were super cool!  A hair net and nurse-style nose and mouth mask came first, before the full head piece, body suit, high boots that go over your pants, static electricity dispelling bracelet, and finally the rubber gloves go on. White meant you were a normal operator. Yellow meant you were a line manager/ section captain. Blue meant you were an engineer. Pink meant you were quality control or a customer. The tour was organized by the factory’s quality director, Mary, who was really nice.  Before our tour we talked with Dad’s friend, C.H. who is responsible for worldwide manufacturing operations, and the factory’s general manager Jason.  We talked about things like cycle time. Cycle time is the amount of time that it takes to make a product from start to finish. Improving this is a good thing because the less time it takes to make something, the more units you can make and therefore the more money you can make.  Faster cycle time also means that you have less money at risk in inventory because you’re using the parts faster, they’re not sitting around waiting to be assembled into finished products. We also learned how a pixel works on a normal LCD. There are three sections or sub-pixels: red, green, and blue. By blending these three primary colors you can make any color on the spectrum. When certain sub-pixels turn off or on to certain degrees, your eye blends the colors and shows you the result. A dull blue and a dull yellow might give you a pine tree green, where a bright blue and a bright yellow might translate as a lime green. When we finished our tour we all had big grins. The clean-room complex was amazing! Also, we were quite happy to be able to breathe again. Those suits and masks get hot!

    

We also got to visit the employee dormitories. Oh yeah, NEWSFLASH: If you worked here, you lived here.  You would be working a 12 hour shift, six days a week and if you were single, you would be living in a 6 person dorm room ON the factory grounds. There are thousands of employees at the factory, both women and men, and they live in separate dorms.  The employees are quite young; factory workers in China are often from 17 to 23.  Many come right after high school and work for a few years before returning home, or they can be line managers by their mid-twenties.  My dad said there are factories with dormitories all over Asia and some other countries. It wasn’t that bad to live here though.  There were trees and playgrounds for the managers’ children. The dorm building had many nice facilities such as a small stage, cafeteria, gym, library, and videogame playing room. Before we left we bought some ice-cream. (You know that your cone is artificial when it squeaks).  You could see the factory managers had to get the work done but they also put a lot of effort into treating people well. As we drove away, I was feeling happy that I do not have to live like the people who spend their lives inside a factory area, alternating between a bedroom, a cafeteria and a point in an assembly line.   I learned that manufacturing is a complicated process involving many more people than you would think.  I will never look at a Kindle the same way again.