from crayons to notebooks...

Not sure if anyone else was obsessed with Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow or 3-2-1 Contact as a kid...but I was mesmerized. I loved it. :) My favorite segment on Sesame Street was this video about how crayons are made. The little girl stares at the melon crayon and the picture fades to the entire manufacturing process from the melted, colored wax to a full box...ready to come to my house.

I was a nerd even as a kid!!

Fast forward a "few" years and I'm sure everyone who read this knows...but just in case you don't...I'm the product manager for the mobile workstations at HP. I'm in Shanghai, China for the next 2 weeks as we do the final builds for the notebooks...so we can start shipping them to our customers!

I arrived on Monday evening and was greeted by my awesome home away from home at the Hyatt on the Bund. Check out my room!

In the last few days, I've been at the factory, watching the assembly process which is totally amazing! The precision and speed that makes a bunch of parts turn into a fully built and packaged notebook is pretty incredible!!!

But, yesterday, I got to live the dream!!! We went to the metal factory where we do all of the top and bottom case manufacturing. First, when we arrived, we had a cute sign welcoming us! All of the people we met were so nice!

We had meeting with a PowerPoint presentation, had some McDonald's and Papa John's for lunch...because that's what the Americans love, right? :) The pizza had pepperoni, pineapple and shrimp (Chinese-style)...I had fries and a chicken sandwich!

Then, we went on a tour of the facilities. I got to stand right next to the stamping machine. It melts the magnesium and stamps it into a notebook base pan...with 5000 tons of pressure!! A robot arm then takes it off the mold, cools it and it comes through the other end as a rough mold. It goes through a ton of other steps from there to make it pretty and smooth.

The image below is from my googling skills...I didn't realize until after the tour that they would have let me take a photo in front of the real machine. Darn! This looks kind of similar though.

We then went on to see how they apply texture and anodize aluminum for the top case. How they stamp and trim all the pieces and how they paint then bond the materials. All in all it was just so much fun to see first hand and made me appreciate all the hard work our teams and all of our partners do to make the finished product! And this is just one step of many in the overall scheme of things.

Here's a silly little pic of me with my protective gear at the final factory stop. I was so sweaty from the walk around the campus...ewww!!!

While we've been here, I've been to a few great dinners. The first night Ron, RC and I went to T8. It was beautiful and the food scrumptious! From our seats at the bar, we were able to watch the chefs prepare all the delicacies. My favorite was the soup...Ron said it best when he called it a carrot, ginger, who knows what else explosion! It was so good! We've also been to The Paulaner and the Park Tavern...both really nice too, but most of the time has been spent working. I'm very excited to venture out into the city this weekend and also planning to take a tour out to Hangzhou on Sunday...it has a lot to live up to...this is their slogan!

“Above is paradise, below is Hangzhou!”