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Washington Post KidsPost Block Party
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lugnet.mediawatch
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Tue, 13 May 2003 17:06:28 GMT
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Appeared on the last page of the Style section in Tuesday's paper.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47580-2003May12.html
washingtonpost.com
Block Party
All Work and No Play? At Lego Headquarters, No Way!
Tuesday, May 13, 2003; Page C13
If you've ever accidentally knocked over the box where you keep all the Lego
in your house, you know what a couple hundred of the colorful plastic pieces
look like as they skitter across the floor. And your parents know what it's
like to find stray bits of Lego, weeks later, underfoot and wedged behind
sofa cushions.
Now, imagine 300,000 bits of Lego -- pea-sized Lego heads -- cascading from
a high shelf and bouncing like plastic hailstones.
"They were everywhere! We were finding them in nooks and crannies for years
after that," said Judy King, who is one of the people who manages the
gigantic warehouse at Lego's U.S. headquarters in Enfield, Connecticut.
King was remembering the day when a new employee bumped into a shelf with
his forklift and, well, heads rolled.
King is just one of the 1,000 people who work -- and play -- for a living at
the Danish toymaker's offices and warehouses in Connecticut. Unlike most
adults, who regard the 71-year-old company's snap-together sets as a fond
memory, these grown-ups see, touch or think about Lego every day. If they
forget about fun, there are reminders all around them.
The stop sign in the parking lot? It's made of Lego. The streetlights?
Green, yellow, blue and Lego-ish. If that uniformed security guard over
there looks a little weird, maybe it's because he's made of yellow and blue
bricks.
"Our president wants this place to just scream 'TOY COMPANY,' " said Melinda
Semionko, a Lego spokeswoman.
That means adults are encouraged to get down on the floor and play . . .
when they're not buzzing around on scooters.
And these are not even the people designing new Lego products. That work is
done at the company's headquarters in Billund, Denmark, which is also where
the pieces ("elements," as the company calls them) are made.
Enfield is where most of America's Lego comes to be packaged. The pieces are
brought over on ships and are then taken to Connecticut, to be bagged and
then dropped into the boxes you buy.
Combining those pieces is noisy -- it fills the air in a big room with
clunking, whining, wheezing and clicking sounds. When KidsPost visited, some
Bionicle sets and buckets of basic bricks called Make-and-Create were being
assembled.
There were rows and rows of orange machines called hoppers, and short
conveyor belts leading to them. Workers loaded the conveyors with the
contents of big boxes, each containing thousands of a single Lego piece:
two-by-two bricks here; Bionicle masks over there.
The hoppers jiggle the pieces down in the proper pre-programmed combinations
(two Gali Nuva aqua axes, three masks, two lower-leg pieces, etc.)
The machines "know" when the correct pieces have been assembled because the
weight of pieces is programmed. When the weight is reached, the bag is sealed.
Another area at Lego headquarters is devoted to answering the phone calls,
letters and e-mails from people in need of a spare part or some help
assembling that giant Yoda head or tricky Hogwarts Castle.
"If you're one bump off, it can wreck the whole thing. It's fun to help them
figure out where they went wrong," said Audrey Laird, whose work area
includes a fake palm tree, twinkly lights and a flowery bamboo parasol.
Her department keeps assembled versions of every Lego product made in recent
years, so Laird and her co-workers can use them when helping callers,
"My son's just devastated," a woman from Illinois told Laird. "He's got the
Naboo fighter and he doesn't have the instruction book anymore and his
little brother, he thinks, destroyed it."
Laird figured out which Star Wars item the woman was talking about and
promised to send instructions for free.
Another thing that happens at Enfield is design. Graphic artists come up
with the packaging and displays you see in stores.
The artists' zone at Lego looks like a 12-year-old boy's bedroom -- there
are Japanese robots, Godzilla, King Kong, Homer Simpson, R2D2, Jar Jar
Binks, Yoda, rubber duckies and pretty much every version of Batman and
Spider-Man ever made.
It's not surprising that the company uses some of these kidlike adults to
help fine-tune new products. When Bionicle was being developed, for
instance, the toys' Denmark-based designers came and spent time with the
Americans.
"They were able to tell them, 'Bionicle will appeal to older kids, so here's
what tone you should take and here's what colors they'll like,' " Semionko said.
But 32-year-old "kids" are not the only toy experts who count at Lego. Many
walls are plastered with pictures and drawings of robots, buildings, space
ships, two-headed monsters and other Lego creations, sent in by kids from
all over the world.
And sometimes the place is overrun by real kids, for an annual event called
Play Day. They hold it on Veterans Day, when kids have no school, but their
parents have to work.
"We have a big auditorium and giant screen and kids play PlayStation video
games," Semionko said. "The graphics department teaches kids skateboarding
and there's a sack race and they make murals."
And of course, she said, there's lots of Lego to play with -- thousands and
thousands of pieces that make that skittering sound when you dump them out.
"That way," she said, "we know they'll have fun."
-- Fern Shen
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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