POSTED BY

Rob Beschizza

AT 5:28 AM
Friday August 7, 2009

Media

calisthenics

Compulsory calisthenics

Netflix imposes rigorous policies at its workplace to ensure movies get to your mailbox quickly. From the Chicago Tribune:

Employees are expected to perform this a minimum of 650 times an hour. Also, customers stuff things into the envelopes. Scribbled movie reviews, complaints, pictures of dogs and kids. That needs sorting too. After 65 minutes of inspection, a bell rings. Everyone stands up. Calisthenics!

<Source [Chicago Tribune via Gizmodo]

0

4 Comments

mappo

#1 – 6:51 AM August 7, 2009

The calisthenics will continue until morale improves!

Zan

#2 – 7:20 AM August 7, 2009

6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please!

Zan

#3 – 7:28 AM August 7, 2009

I'll also add that the following paragraph from the article is one of the best descriptions of an industrial process that I've seen in the mainstream media:

From there, action shifts to long machines that go ffft. This, right here, is how you get discs as fast as you do. Inspected discs are scanned into the inventory by a machine that reads 30,000 bar codes an hour -- ffft, ffft, ffft. The moment this machine reads the bar code, you receive an e-mail letting you know that your disc arrived. Then discs are scanned a second time -- if a title is requested, and around 95 percent of titles get rented at least once every 90 days, the machine separates it and sorts it out by ZIP code. (The entire inventory of the building is run through this daily, a process that alerts other warehouses of the location of every one of the 89 million discs owned by Netflix.) After that, separated discs are taken to a machine called a Stuffer -- which goes ssssht-click, ssssht-click -- and stuffed in an envelope, which is sealed and labeled by a laser that goes zzzt.

semiotix

#4 – 12:36 PM August 8, 2009

Simpsons did it!

Leave a comment