Sunday, May 09, 2004

Outsourcing Dave Barry

Hey, even humor is being outsourced is another solid article from Dave Barry. Here's a bit:
You youngsters won't believe this, but there was a time when Americans actually made physical things called "products" right here in America. Workers would go to large grimy buildings called "factories," where they would take a raw material such as iron ore and perform industrial acts on it, such as "forging" and "smelting." By the end of the day, as you can imagine, they smelt terrible (rim shot) but they had turned the ore into something useful, such as a locomotive or a toaster or (this was not a big seller) a toaster-locomotive.

Today, of course, we don't make anything. If you give iron ore to modern American workers, it will get into their Starbucks mocha latte, and they will sue you, and they will win. The making of things was outsourced decades ago to foreign nations such as Asia. Today, we Americans are dimly aware that our TVs, computers, cell phones, underwear, dentures, cartoons, etc., must come from somewhere, but we have no real clue who is making them, or how. We have enough trouble figuring out how to remove the packaging.

No comments:

Post a Comment