beetiger

Partially because I've been meaning to do this for years, and partially because I'm thinkingit might be a really cool place to work, and partially because a colleague who works there reminded me about it and thought I could tour the food labs, I decided to go to the Annual Open House at Consumer's Union (the folks who publish Consumer Reports) today.

sythry came along with me, as he practically learned to read on Consumer Reports, and he gets fewer opportunities for cool lab tours than I do.

At the front door, they were checking cameras or large briefcases for people who tried to bring them in by mistake. They stopped Sythry, who wears a small leather pouch, fanny-pack style, at his waist nearly all the time, and told him to check it or return it to the car. While I waited for him to return, I looked at my own purse, five times the size, a floppy hippy sort of thing made of hemp fiber and bearing a large patch depicting symbols of world religions and a background which I think is supposed to depict the planet Saturn. I watched a woman with a leather purse, with front straps, the size of a small suitcase, and a woman with a large cloth tote bag, go in undisturbed. The attendant's response, when I asked? "Last year, we didn't let anyone bring any bags in --right after September 11th, you know-- and some of the ladies got very upset that they couldn't bring their purses in, they had glasses and medicine and stuff. Sorry I sent your husband to put his stuff away. Just a consistent policy." I laughed gently, shaking my head. A consistent policy that says that people who read male carry "briefcases" and "camera bags", and people who read female carry "purses", independent of what the bags look like or how they are sized. Hmm.

The annual meeting was pretty interesting, considering it was an annual meeting, and the lab tours were very cool. We hung out in an anechoic room in the audio department (did you know 90% of the sound you hear in a typical room is echoes?). We got to see some of the new 16 X 9 format TVs in video (expect black stripes at the edges of your programming, in the next few years). We saw "glass stomach" testing setups for antacids (baking soda mixed with orange juice is a good home substitute). We found out that 5 people in consumer relations handle 70K contacts per year (and that a major category of contacts are "I'm telling Mommy letters", in which people cc: Consumers Union when they complain to manufacturers). We got to hear from the graphics folks about the policies and politics around cover design (and got a preview of the December cover). We saw a demo on ritual (or at least standardized) abuse of pots and pans (even though cookware instructions tell us not to use steel wool and metal implements with non-stick pans, they know we all do). We finished up our visit listening to an irate man talking back to a scientist about how all low-pressure toilets suck, because all four in his house suck (after the scientist finished talking about the huge differences between different low-pressure toilets, and how only some of them suck).

The food labs weren't open for touring, so I didn't get the chance to sneak up and shake hands with the manager. But still, I had a good time. But I left feeling good about the place. I could do that.