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Scary Things That Fly

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There is no such thing as a common news item that our breathless reporter Bud Buck can’t inflate into a major crisis. Witness the latest technological leap forward in the construction industry …

This is Bud Buck with Bud’s Newsbucket of News!

Your intrepid reporter has learned that the 21st Century Robot Wars have moved one step closer to reality with the development of sinister whirlygigs that have been built expressly for the purpose of stealing the millions of stable, high-paying jobs that we have long relied upon in the dynamic foam block construction industry.

Woe to you if you are an ultra-light materials builder. View the video below, and see the coming apocalypse!

Yes! Mechanical airborne demons have now mastered the skill of constructing vast, wavy-sided foam block corrals where we will all soon be quarantined, watching in helpless wonder as waves of infernal heli-stackers quickly surround us with Frank Gehry-inspired barriers of doom! Be afraid!

How serious is this? I see it as another giant step forward in our increasingly brisk walk towards total destruction. We have known for generations that this day would come, ever since today’s elders foresaw the assault as part of a widely shared generational nightmare.

Just like the wall-building robots, notice how much programming those monkeys need before they’re set loose! Blah, blah blah blah blah! But then they spring into terrifying action! If your children are still wondering what line of work they should enter – carpentry or code writing – wonder no more. The handwriting is on the undulating wall!

This is Bud Buck!

Ever been replaced (or merely threatened) by a machine?

52 thoughts on “Scary Things That Fly”

  1. thanks, Dale – it’s so comforting to sit down in the early morning with a cup of coffee and all the Baboons. very nice. hope that nepver gets replaced by a machine.
    as we all have, i’m sure, i’ve had lots of technology impositions in my professional life. some were really great – some were a pain. the latest change was imposed on our physician’s life. he now has voice-recognition dictation. so some poor transcriptionist lost his/her job when this new technology moved in. the letters we get are hilarious!! and not medically helpful – “he should contact his head and change the dose to 12.5 mcg” and there was mention of “mania” also. we get a good chuckle and then call for the real skinny. keeps the phone people in business anyway.
    good morning, everyone

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    1. Good morning to all. There are a lot of things I do by hand that most people do using a machine including shoveling snow instead of snow blowing and spading the garden instead of using a tiller. I even like hand washing dishes and, in this case I have been replaced by a dish washer.

      At Hormet there are a lot of machinces that do things that people did by hand years ago, but there are still a lot of things that do require hand work. The most highly automated part of the Hormel plant that I saw was a big automated storage area for storage of packages on pallets. This system stored many hundreds of pallets in a big area without any handling, moving the pallets in and out by machinery completely controlled by a computer. I’m sure that machine put some warehouse workers out of work.

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      1. Right, Jim. I met a man who built warehouses for the Schwan food company. He said they were probably the most automated company in MN. Food items are organized by computers and then loaded on delivery trucks by those computers, with no human hand ever touching anything. Items are packed in trucks in exactly the order they will be unpacked by the driver along the route. It amuses me to think of that old fashioned company that delivers pies and ice cream to farm wives having such stunning technology behind it. Lots of people were replaced by machines there.

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      2. i hve their competitor on my loading dock and they have a guy who all day fills trucks in reverse order with milk sour creamcottage cheese orange drink and yougert. i have oftne though what a terrible job that was to be out ther on hot days cold days rainy days working pallets and forklifts with little pieces of paper stuck to ythe loading slips for the deliveries. a good job to replace with a droid. same thing for parking lot attendants. repace them with a machine that takes you card and gives you a magnetic stripe ticket to stick in when you get back. parking lot attendants of the world can move on too

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    2. Barb, I have a friend who writes her fiction using voice recognition software (she has horrible carpal tunnel syndrome and can’t type). According to her it takes a long time to train it to understand your diction, and then something like background noise or a head cold will completely mess it up. If a writer finds voice-recognition difficult, I feel for your poor doctor, who presumably got into medicine to work with people, not computers!

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      1. that’s exactly what he’s said about this new thing – it takes away time he’d spend with the patients. he said in the old days he could see lots more folks in one day but now he spends lots of his (precious) time proofreading (and we know, not very well 🙂 these dumb things.
        but another example of how tech can be bad and good – wonderful that your writer friend can continue writing!!

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      2. CG – I’ve wondered about that voice recognition software recently, as Dragon is spending a lot on tv ads the past couple of weeks. One of the woman is narrating along and then says “scratch that” and the computer takes out the last phrase she spoke. And I found myself wondering just how the computer knew what “scratch that” meant and how it knew how many words back to scratch!

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      3. Verily, what if you were a writer dictating to the Dragon voice recognition device and you wanted to have a character say that she intends to “scratch that itch”? If the programming automatically erases the previous word every time it hears “scratch that”, soon your voice recognition sentence would read something like this: “Itch damn itch no itch damn itch stop itch”. Frustrating, no?

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  2. I remember the first time anyone in my family dealt with an automated message. By horrible luck, it was my mother, and by worse luck she was in full panic mode. She thought she smelled gas in our basement one Sunday, so she ran upstairs and called the gas company.

    “Hello. This is a taped message from your gas company. We are not open on Sundays.”

    “Gas!” yelled Mom. “I’ve got GAS in my basement!”

    “This is just a recorded message,” said the recorded message.

    “But I’ve got GAS!”

    The machine hung up and then looped back to repeat itself.

    “You don’t seem to GET THE POINT!” screamed Mom, as if yelling at a tape machine would help it comprehend. “I’VE GOT GAS! i’VE GOT GAS!”

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  3. When I was in college a pneumatic drill tried to eat my hair (but that was partly my fault for tempting the drill by letting my long tresses get to close). I also had a run-in with a table saw that nibbled on a thumb. Maybe they were lashing out because they knew I would not play with them as much once I was done with college and in the “grown up” world. Poor lambs.

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  4. in italy there is a rule that if you hire someone they are on your payroll until they are dead. you are responsible for them and their health care their paycheck or unemployment forever so you had better be sure before you hire them. as a result two things happen. there is a big gray market for jobs where people are hired under the table and never really offer jobs , just paid cash out of the pocket for a bit of your life you spend to do a task for them. the other thing that happens is you can justify robots very easily. a million dollar robot costs as much as 2 or 3 people by the end of the second year, never calls in sick, has no quality control issues and can be maintained by the maintance robot. i gt replaced in sales by robots and computers all the time. the horrible little crap i used to spend my time doing like multiplying the cost of something by the number they ordered and figuing out how to anticiopate all the purchaes for the year now grets done on a spread sheet as we are laying out the predictions for the season and you can tweak the model buy upping or lowering one number in the equation. i am doing a program right now where the number crunching is needed for the bank and the way you add more money is to change the numbers in the spreadsheet cells. the computer automatically adjusts everything to new reality in a nanosecond and you proceed from there. i can just sell stuff these days i dont need no stinking math. just like i told my 5th grade math teacher

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  5. Morning… ho ho ho. (In Christmas mode here…)

    Didn’t we just talk about the flying monkeys last week? If I have a bad now I’m blaming them.

    Not sure I’ve ever had a job that was actually replaced by machine but that’s more an issue of the manual labor jobs I’ve had. But I certainly enjoy the advantages machines bring to my work. Be it cabs on tractors (with radios, AC and heat) or computerized lighting boards to bring reliability to shows. We’ve lost the ‘art’ of the person running a manual light board but it still takes a person to push the ‘Go’ button or program it in the first place. And of course created a new job of the person to fix it.

    I’ve been threatened by a few machines too. Worst was when I was 14 and I stuck my leg in a silage auger. Yeah, that hurt.

    Lately it’s the auto-spelling on my iPhone. Daily I send garbled messages to my family.

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  6. At Hormel they had a machine that would wrap packages stacked on a pallet. You set the pallet on the machine with a fork lift and the machine spun the pallet around as the wraping material came off a roll wrapping up the stuff on the pallet. In other locations workers did the wrapping by hand by running around the pallet several times unrolling the wrap from a big hand held roll. I have a lot of respect for the workers at that plant who knew how do many different tasks that didn’t always go smoothly and had be done very quickly.

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  7. Library administrations are doing their best to replace librarians with Google and clerks with automatic checkout machines. I didn’t directly lose my job as a substitute librarian, but I was fortunate enough to see where things were heading and retrain before the recession hit, budgets were decimated and all the sub hours went away. On the other hand, I’ve been reading a lot about peak oil recently, and it sounds like it won’t be all that long before the carpentry is more useful than the coding, so keep up those by-hand skills and pass them on!

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  9. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    I wish. I’d love a machine that would clean my house to my satisfaction. There is the roomba that vacuums, bouncing like a giant pinball off of walls and baseboards. That is kind of fun. Now for a dusting a mopping robot. With the use of computers at work, we actually increase our effectiveness and reduce the need for a receptionist/secretary. Does that mean I am walking on the Dark Side with Darth Vader and Dick Cheney?

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  10. For me, word processing is both a blessing and a curse. The guys I work with now type and send almost all their own memos and letters, if a memo or a formal letter is even used. They use email for short memos almost all the time now. Dictation to a skilled typist is history, as are letters typed on a typewriter in duplicate or triplicate. The term “carbon copy” has become a meaningless artifact. And don’t get me started on the telephone! I used to spend a third of my day taking phone messages. These days, I’m lucky if I take even one. Lately I find myself holding on to tasks with which I once would have gladly parted, and actively seeking out new skills and tasks to replace the ones that have disappeared.

    I really enjoy using spreadsheets, writing and word processing now. Word processing software makes typing and editing such a breeze. The other thing I think word processing has done is create writers out of just about everybody. Everywhere you look these days, someone is trying to be some kind of writer. Again, a blessing and a curse.

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  13. All internal combustion engines can smell me coming. And they, after making their threats, do me in:
    They spin their fly wheels softly, murmuring vague threats through their air filter, quietly getting hot in their oil tank while planning various ways to complicate my life by plugging a spark plug, jamming a valve lifter, losing/building pressure, ending the fuel or air supply in mysterious ways,
    or, by far their favorite, sending the electrical system into some cloud of confusion or terror. I swear they smirk at me, then boil up in anger and then go into a deep pout refusing to ever talk to me or my mechanic until they have extracted large sums of money in offering.
    Oh, yes the internal combustion engine marks me out the same way a guard dog smells fear in the timid.

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    1. i had that issue happen in a little 2 seater airplane on tuesday (thus no brubck participation) created a little angst but got resolved and i didn’t die. iam glad avbout that. i am glad they havnt gotten you yet either

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  14. My father loves machines and buttons he can monkey with, and usually is adept at figuring out how to make any machine work. AS a little boy he always got into trouble for pushing the buttons on the dash board of his grandmother’s Reo. He loved the clicking noises they made. He had only two accidents, one in which he lost a couple of fingers in a lawn mower, and one that could have been even more serious. It is sort of hard for me to describe accurately, but this is what seemed to have happened. He was walking across a wet floor in the garage, carrying a heavy metal bucket. There was a plugged-in car battery charger (about the size of a large picnic basket) operating on the floor, that was also on the wet floor. He noticed that he was being mildly electrocuted by the charger and the wet floor and the metal bucket and couldn’t drop the bucket and his feet were sort of immobilized on the spot. He purposely turned in a circle, swinging the bucket until centrifugal force moved him to a dry spot and broke the current path. He said his heart was beating pretty fast.

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  15. I am not completely comfortable with computers and they do somethimes seem to be out to get me.. Out Look Express has decided to check the spelling I use in my email messages using French as the language which, of course, is not the laguage I am using. I found the setting in the spelling checker for language and the only language it will allow is Fench and gives no option for changing to another language. How did that setting get loaded and why can’t I change it. The computer is plotting againest me. It has done other things like this that I think are hostile.

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    1. ha, ha, Jim! that’s a plot right out of a David Lynch film. very surreal – the man struggles to communicate, but his every word is strangely morphed into garbled French. then, a cute little French Girl appears in a vision inside his radiator – she is singing the pseudo-French words and dancing to the little tune. Jim’s hair is about a foot tall.

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      1. I would like to see the dancing French girl, but I only get some odd guesses at correcting the English words I am using offering French words that makes no sense to me. Maybe I should just accept all of the suggested French words and see what I get. Do you think that would cause the cute French girl to appear?

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    2. It sounds like he led a very full and wonderful life. I was also tickled to read in his obit that the picture of “Mrs. Potter” on his desk was really his wife and Sophie was really his horse.

      It is always a pleasure to read something about someone you have never met, but feel you know, and find that they really were as wonderful as you thought they were.

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    3. Anyone else remember him on Pete & Gladys, which was a spinoff of December Bride (used to be on right after I Love Lucy when I was little.)

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      2. that must have been the show, i knew i knew him when he showed up on dragnet all those years ago annd then mash, i also used to get messed up as to if i was thinking about him or henry morgan of whats my line fame. i thought he was a putz on dragnetit was hard to make jack webb look alive on that show as joe friday but harry did it. i loved him on mash. i had heard that was his wifes picture. nice personal touch to the show

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    4. RIP, Harry Morgan. From the obituaries in this morning’s Pioneer Press, I see that a woman by the name of Virginia (Ginny) Bell passed away. I worked with a lawyer named Ginny Bell, so this obit caught my eye. This was a different Ginny Bell. Her parents must have had a wacky sense of humor, one of Ginny’s sisters was name Jesse Bell. I kid you not!

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  17. Greetings! Similar to Krista, a lot of work I’ve done as a secretary, most folks do on their own with desk computers and word processors. I haven’t done dictation in decades. Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to keep up with all the technology because I’m not currently working and I haven’t done secretarial work for 8 years. But I’m also extremely grateful for the machines that do dishes, wash & dry clothes, kitchen appliances, etc. Technology is a double-edged sword.

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  18. I am particularly glad to have been replaced as a laundry maid by automatic washers. And though I still use the clothesline, there have been times in my life when I loved having the dryer…

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  19. I learned to type on a manual typewriter, the old fashioned kind; no electricity needed. Then graduated to the electric, and later the IBM Selectric with the rotating ball. I remember typing with carbon paper between sheets of paper, and what a pain it was to correct a typo. Since I was never that good a typist, I welcomed the word processor and later personal computers, tools that helped compensate for my poor secretarial skills. Most of the machines I’ve encountered in my life, have helped rather than threatened or hindered me. The one exception, the most recent machine to have entered my life: a rice cooker. Everyone I know owns one, and everyone told me how wonderful they are. To me it’s just one more appliance taking up room, and I’m looking for a new home for it. As it is, its just taking up space. I love rice, and we eat a lot of it. Somehow I like cooking it in just a regular pot on top of the stove.

    To my mind, this video shows why, wonderful as machines can be, they’ll never replace humans. I love this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=XKRj-T4l-e8&vq=large

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    1. I’m looking to replace my aluminum one with stainless steel (which I’ve seen at the co-op, very pricey), if that’s what you have. I, too, prefer the rice from a pan on the stove, but some day’s it’s so handy to just put the stuff in, plug it in, and be able to go off on some tangent without burning the rice! I suppose it’s making me obsolete, though.

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    2. PJ – I went through all the phases of typing that you did. I worked at a law office throughout college and I was the one that they chose to train when they brought in the first Savin “word processor”. Big huge 10″ disks and compared to now it could hardly even be called technology, but it was a big step at the time!

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