We were making some rakes the other day – fulfilling a fairly large order, which isn’t very uncommon in of itself. This one had the distinction of occurring on a tail end of another major push involving our engraved snowflakes. Having found myself square between the two jobs I realized that I needed a quick break before proceeding. So, as one would in parlance of our times, I took an impromptu trip down a YouTube rabbit hole. However, contrary to my typical avenues – fabrication machinery, homebuilt aircraft, hypnotic rebuilds or Wankel rotary engines, I found myself binge watching soviet era Soyuzmultfilm cartoons from my childhood – as it turns out YouTube is littered with them. Everything from barely post-war stuff in black and white, to much more colorful and slightly satirical examples from the late 80’s when tongue-in-cheek jokes about the increasingly obvious cracks in the soviet regime were accepted as an inevitable fact. What caught my eye was a cartoon from somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. It was made in 1958, and its title loosely translates to ‘Mushroom Home’ – Грибок Теремок. The story goes like this – An ant running along on his way in the woods suddenly realizes it’s about to start big time raining. And to be clear – the summer rains where I’m from aren’t as much drizzles as they are a tactical bombing operations with water droplets for ordnances. The water droplets are enormous, and the difference between dry and soaked is a matter of moments. Put it this way – if you’re made entirely out of sugar, or toilet paper you’re pretty much screwed.
But I digress. The ant in question had neither of the two aforementioned problems, but he is tiny, and upon realizing that a single direct hit will be the end of him, starts frantically looking for a place to hide. He happens upon a tiny mushroom growing in the field – so small that its hat is barely larger than the stem. But it’s just large enough for him to stand under and so he does. Slowly other unfortunate forest critters start to come out of the woodwork in search for shelter – a butterfly joins the ant under the mushroom first. The rain has battered her wings which are now wet and she won’t be able to take off. The ant is puzzled because there’s barely enough room for him, but he is a critter of humble means, and has a heart 10x his actual size, so he decides to scoot over as much as he can to make some room for the butterfly. The story proceeds to repeat with other critters, each larger than the one before. In the end somehow everyone rides out the rain underneath the cap of the same little mushroom. …Well not entirely ‘little’: Spoiler alert. Turns out over the course of the downpour the mushroom grew! And as the animals kept coming in underneath it, it was progressively covering a wider dry area… Anyway, the cartoon is 10 minutes and change in length, which is also typical for that era. In the end, as is customary for russian childrens’ tv programming of the time, the moral of the story is revealed, and then roll credits, news and weather.
Gribok Teremok struck a chord with me – and not in a sentimental nostalgic way. Over the course of 2020 PROJECT.ROTATE has undergone a similar thing. Switch out the Siberian downpour with the social, political and viral chaos of last year, and our equipment and operations with forest critters scattered all over, and the whole thing basically rhymes. In 2020 we consolidated our operations under one roof. I admit the whole ordeal was bittersweet. Our warehouse subdivision in Vernon was just far enough away to feel like there is a healthy buffer between home and work, but at the same time it also wasn’t close enough. The initial shutdown has exacerbated the problem – My full time job switched to WFH, and leaving the house on non-essential business seemed risky, if not ill-advised. To be completely honest, however, the only practical problem was that our tools, instruments and material were far away – and when an idea comes to you in the middle of the night, necessitating a prototype or at least a plan of action, you will wish you could step out of bed and into the shop. Which is precisely the vision we were driven by. We moved to a larger space with an extra room and brought the shop with us! We have been here ever since, and have zero regrets.
I would be a fool to decry the pandemic’s impact on us personally. True it hasn’t been easy weathering the social, economic, and political storm that has been coming down for nearly a year now, but certainly others have had it much worse. (oh, nearly forgot, At some point in Gribok Teremok, it briefly stopped raining, the clouds turned white, and hale the size of golf balls started coming out of them – Also a common occurence in the russian wood. At that point a sparrow came down off a tree with a panicked look in his eyes and basically said look guys, I don’t know what the hell is coming from the sky but it hurts like hell. Let me in or watch me turn into Chicken Kiev right here in a sec!!… not in those words of course, but yeah he had a case).
We feel fortunate that we were able to pull together and tuck in our operations under the new found mushroom hat and made it all work. Do I wish we had more space for additional machinery? you bet. Could we use more floorspace for mockups? Of course. There are projects on the drawing boards that I absolutely can’t wait to get my hands on. Prototypes of things in much bigger sizes, more complex mechanical nature, things made of new and unusual materials, made using specialized tools and methods all require a bit more than what we have. But even then – I feel like the longer I plan and think about these things, the more it seems that we could even make them happen right here. Pulling things together allowed us to assess our capabilities much better. We added services to our list of things we do – wehavealaser is now an official operation, living under the same mushroom hat. This one is largely spearheaded by me, but of course Rox occasionally weighs in with invaluable input. If a year ago we were forest creatures trying to hide from the imminent downpour, Now I see us more as sailors aboard a submarine. It is a little known fact that the submarine cerws are set up in such a way that every man on board can do every other member’s job to a basic degree, meanwhile being an absolute beast of a specialist at the one thing that is his role by rank. That way if the captain gets blasted off the deck by a dive bomber someone can step in and at least limp the boat home. Another interesting factoid is that submarines don’t suffer from a whole lot of interior design. Your living quarters are furnished with the function of what you do for a living. I suppose it’s an overly brutalist analogy – I do not wake up with an oil pressure gauge dangling over my head. But what I’m trying to say is that we were able to pull off this frankly enormous consolidation effort largely because we don’t see our craft and our personal lives as separate things. Our shop is a fixture of our home, inasmuch as the work we do is a fixture of our lives.
Running a small business is definitely not without its struggles. There is no 9-5, no predictable ladder of ranks for you to climb, or lateral moves to make. It’s a brutally honest endeavor: Just you and the work you choose to do. It does help to have a partner on hand. We don’t see ourselves as a President and COO of this operation as much as a pilot and a navigator. I think it goes hand in hand with our propensity for travel on a shoestring budget. Haven’t tried that via a submarine yet but so far it has worked brilliantly on roadtrips and took us to some amazing places. More about that in the subsequent posts. But for now – we are prototyping some new products which we will debut soon. Stay tuned!
Skipper! Periscope depth!