Whizbang Industrial Works

When you're manufacturing things all the time, as are the millions of industries in the Residential Industrial Movement, you get to the point where you're eating, drinking, and sleeping industry.

All through the waking day, all around the town, wherever I go, and of course in my own neighborhood, I see and hear all the work going on. We've used up most of the land we used to let go to waste, our yards, since that's the whole point, for every man to have his own industry right where he lives. That's a great thing, but it makes for virtually an unbroken scene, with factories and industrial works right up against each other, property line to property line.

There are the warehouses. Everyone's got his own warehouse, but there's a real range to these since a man has to balance out his land use. Smaller properties, as you can imagine, have less room for large factories and warehouses. Larger properties have more leeway for warehouses. I'm personally a big fan of the warehouse; there's just something about a big space for putting wares that appeals to me. I think it must've been the fun we had in Grandpa's storage shed when we were kids, and I've just transferred that sense of fun from the small shed to the larger facility! So, if I ever get tired of looking at factories (and I'm not saying I do), when that happens I can focus in more on the warehouses and it's a nice break.

I started by saying we eat, drink, and sleep industry. Today I wanted to report on how literally true that is, today the sleeping of industry. I had a dream about a place called the Whizbang Industrial Works, which seemed like it was always coming up with something creative to manufacture and use. What I actually saw in the dream was only one of Whizbang's inventions, and I didn't see it in their factory. Instead it was rolling through the community, either on a track or by some kind of virtual tracking software.

The Whizbang thing was like a circus wagon, decked out like that with the works like a calliope and lots of sounding devices, pipes, gold plating, etc., and it's purpose was to roll through our neighborhoods at about 4 in the morning to serve as a communal alarm clock. It's playing music, with a cycle of lower volume up to higher volumes of sound. It would roll along, then come to a stop outside your place, then the lower volume music would start in, and as it increased in volume it would gently wake you up.

After I woke up and was walking through the neighborhood, I saw that everyone was still basically asleep. There were some lights in some houses, and a few of the factories had trickles of smoke coming out of their stacks, with lights in the boiler rooms or offices. I could well imagine the father of the family in there with his billows, oily rags, and newspaper, trying to get the furnaces going. And how the father might be wishing for a better way to wake up his workforce. What if there were a Whizbang Industrial Works calliope-like communal alarm clock? Wouldn't that come in handy?

Frankly, I'm too busy, I'm way too consumed with my own industrial affairs -- once you establish a particular factory you basically have to go with that for a certain amount of time, if you want to make back your original investment -- to make this thing. But it's a heck of an idea for someone.

And, really, it might be a lot of fun for the kids, who might get up extra early so they could watch the alarm clock go by!