Actor Peter Facinelli says his daughter setup a spy cam to catch Santa. Instead, he placed this video on the device.

Kids have always been smart enough to bust Santa if they wanted to. Now that video tools are easy, faith in the jolly fat bastard ends when kids are old enough and curious enough to click record on their 99 dollar flash camcorders. Unless you’re an actor with spare time on your hands like Peter, consider this battle lost, parents. [Twitter]

A few years back Chris Dunphy and Cherie Ve Ard flipped the bird to their desk jobs, packed their belongings in a custom 5m solar-powered fibreglass camper, and hit the road to live “at the intersection of Epic and Awesome.” A couple months ago, while staying with friends, they noticed that Amazon was luring RVers to Coffeyville, Kansas, the site of the retail giant’s original and largest fulfilment centre.

“We were located in San Diego at the time,” explained Cherie. “We’re part of a community of younger full-time RVers on NewRVer.com, a group of non-retired-age folks who are living the mobile lifestyle and kind of going outside the norms of ‘Wait for retirement to travel.’” They noticed other RVers were flocking to Kansas to work for Amazon. The pay wasn’t great – just above $US10 an hour, typically – but Chris and Cherie were planning on being in St. Louis for the holidays. Why not kill a month in Kansas working for Amazon?

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and the self-styled “technomads” were putting down stakes at a state park about 30km from the four enormous but dull warehouses that comprise the Coffeyville hub.

Their first day inside, Chris was awed. “Walking inside reminded me of the scene from Indiana Jones when they abandon the Ark in that giant warehouse. It’s three storeys high. It feels like an industrial library. Shelves going up and up and up.” Hundreds of employees scurried, some “orange-badges” or “green-badges” hired by two temporary employment services mixed with the sought-after blue-badges of full-time Amazon employees, guided to their next destination by computers that flashed lights when bins were full or guided workers through the maze with handheld computers. “Pickers are basically playing a human Pac-Man game. They’ve got a computer scanner that they carry around that tells them where to go. They find their little shelf. One slot might be a book. The next shelf over might be a toaster. Or an iPod. The next slot after that might be a pair of jeans.”

Fibreglass City

Amazon didn’t always lure in “workcampers” from the RV community.

“From what the agency people had told us, Amazon had a bad experience busing in people from Tulsa,” says Chris. “There was a lot of theft and a lot of people who weren’t really serious about the job.”

Workers from Tulsa were adding a four-hour round-trip commute to an already gruelling 10-12 hour shift, Cherie is quick to add. “They’d get there exhausted.”

Enter the workcampers, people making a go at living in their RVs full time – many of whom might be otherwise overqualified. “I think Amazon was sceptical at first,” says Cherie. “But after the first trial year they were very, very impressed. Workcampers came in enthusiastic about working, since most are professionals. We’ve owned businesses or been managers.” White collar workers, trying their hand at the gypsy life. Even better, the workcampers were able to stay locally.

Not all of the camps provided for the workcampers were exactly inviting.

Chris and Cherie pulled into the one just before Thanksgiving, but could tell it wouldn’t make for a pleasant stay. “The closest one was a city park called Walter Johnson. RVs were very close together. Half the campsites had full hookups, which meant they had water, electricity, and sewer dump on-site. Half the sites just had electricity and water and they had what they call a ‘Honey Wagon’ that comes around and pumps your sewage out a few times a week.” Some RVers had been in Coffeyville since August.

Worse, it was cramped and muddy. “Coffeyville also had a flood three years ago, so it was very, very wet and muddy because the area had been washed out, then rained on recently.” They eventually moved on to a state park, which was lovely, but also four times farther away. They rarely had time to enjoy the scenery.

“We were on the night shift,” says Chris, “Our day would start when we would wake up at three in the afternoon. Work started at five.”

“Every shift starts with what they call a ‘Stand Up.’ You gather in one area with your usual department – ours was called ‘Sortable Singles’, which sounds like it should be the name of a dating site – and they’d count off how many people they needed in each department. Run through a few announcements. Give you a few safety tips. And then they lead you through five minutes of group stretches.”

Cherie was mainly a packer, putting items in the box and scanning them. Chris, on the other hand, was a “water spider”. He explains, “A water spider is responsible for keeping all the packers supplied, so ideally they’d never need to stand up and leave their station to get any other supplies like all the different sizes of boxes, plus making sure their tape machines and paper-spitter machines are operating.”

“I never quite exactly figured out why they call it a water spider. My guess is back in the history of assembly line jobs, the water spider would be the person who would bring people on the line water to drink. Nobody seemed to know!”

The Mocha Factory

Work was monotonous and – for a couple who had been living a relative life of leisure – full of endless hours of standing on one’s feet.

“24-Hour Fitness, Amazon-style,” laughs Chris. Cherie liked to think of it as having “a personal trainer for 60 hours a week.”

Inside the warehouses, machines and man alike were controlled by Amazon’s computerised assembly line.

In one part of the factory, Chris watched two giant elliptical carousels, each one the size of a football field, carry wooden trays around at 24km/h. “All the items are coming in the totes on one side of this giant machine. There are people who take each individual item, scan them and put them on the trays as they go by. The trays get to a chute where their order is being assembled, tilt, and the product flies down into that space. When all the items for a particular order are assembled in one place an orange light comes on and somebody comes by.” Above, another carousel brought an endless procession of empty boxes to be filled with the orders.

It wasn’t exactly what Cherie had envisioned. “When we told people were going to do this, someone said ‘Whenever I click the order button on Amazon, I always imagine a chorus of happy, singing Oompa-Loompas riding around on Segways and shipping my stuff.’ Well… no. It’s not exactly like that.”

“The computer has to prioritise how it’s going to send out all the pickers in this giant facility. So someone could order a book and a sweater and an iPod, and those could be in completely different corners of the whole facility. But somehow they all arrive within about 30 minutes of each other.” It’s efficiency even Willy Wonka could love.

Chris and Cherie wouldn’t work another season at Coffeyville, but not because they were miserable. “Everybody treated each other really nicely!” says Chris. It’s just that the two are “experience junkies, craving the new,” even if working for Amazon certainly gave them a fresh perspective on American culture.

“You’d have a tote come down the line, and you’d have adult toys right next to kid toys in the same bin,” laughs Cherie. “The Obama Chia Pet was an oddity. And the Bill Clinton corkscrew. And I did have a tote one afternoon that was full of mooning gnomes.”

Chris geeked on it pretty hard. (Before he became an migrant worker, Chris was a founding editor for boot magazine -later known as Maximum PC. He also worked for Palm.) “Just getting to experience that type of work, to literally see consumer culture flow beneath your fingertips, was absolutely fascinating. You feel the pulse of the market.”

Besides their pay cheques, all they’re left with are memories – cameras weren’t allowed inside.

“One of the rules at Amazon is that you’re not allowed to bring anything into the facility that they sell.” Chris went through a bit of withdrawal. “One of the hardest things about the job was going without my iPhone for a month. It was a great way to break the addiction of wanting to Twitter about things. You’d be like, ‘Oh my God, I just saw this Bill Clinton corkscrew and you won’t believe where the corkscrew comes out.’ But oh crap, I can’t tweet.”

He asked the kids what they wanted for Christmas but seemed surprised by their expensive and high-tech tastes, including iPods, [mobile] phones and video games.

“Whatever happened to, like, asking for a bike?” POTUS asked. “Everbody has a bike,” one informed him and others agreed.

From the mouths of babes: Gadgetry beats lo-fi, analogue “bi-cycles” any day. [Gawker, image source]

Car Magazine is running a week-long sleigh-fest, with this Land Rover design featuring height adjustable suspension and a particle accelerator. Just what every jolly chimney-climber needs.

Land Rover said on the sleigh:

“Land Rover Design with Santa Claus reveals the Christmas sledge of the future – designed to meet the ever-increasing delivery timetable. It boasts all-terrain capability, is powered by particle accelerator technology and has optional laser guided present delivery. There’s even CRS – chimney recognition software!”

Gizmodo. Covering all the tech Coca-Cola myths could ever possibly want. [Car Magazine via Born Rich]

Apple, Why Must You Make Simon Pegg So Sad?
Twartered by Simon Pegg (star of Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, Spaced, and some movie about spaceships or something) earlier today:

My Macbook Air has been in hospital for two weeks. Please, Apple Store, Brent Cross give me my baby back!!!!!

And later:

Got my old Macbook Pro to fill the void but it’s lost its looks, refuses to behave and is full of shit. Like a teenager. Miss the wee one.

Dear Simon,

I know what you’re going through. My own 2009 MacBook Pro has needed several major repairs since I paid Apple lots of money (so much money) for it five months ago, and each time it’s been a rough separation. You’ll pull through, I know it. After all, I did. Semper fi, brother.

Sincerely,
Dan. [Twitter 1, 2]

Santa: “Ho Ho Ho, Make a U-Turn, You Idiot”
Sometimes I get tired of that stern robot lady from Google that barks directions at me through my Droid, but I don’t know that I’ve ever wished she could be replaced by Santa Claus. But Telenav went ahead and added a $US1 Santa voice for its GPS Navigator, which is available for a host of phones (mostly BlackBerry, WinMo, and PalmOS, not carrier-specific). If you want Christmas cheer in a kind of weird way, it’s available now. [Telenav]

What In God’s Name Is Going on on the USS Enterprise
Okay you guys this Star Trek overdub is so simultaneously weird, hilarious and impressive that I don’t want to spoil it by making any pithy little remarks. Suffice to say, are you for panda rape? Crazy woman! [YouTube]

Sony Updates eBook Store
Sony may think this minor change is an “Important eBook Store Update,” but then, they kind of have to. They changed the name of the store, from “The eBook Store from Sony” (which is admittedly sort of cumbersome) to “Reader Store,” and all new ebooks will be in the ePub standard. So why is it in Remainders? I’d tell you if my face wasn’t slowly sinking into my keyboard out of boredomghhhhhgggggghhhhhhh. [Sony]

[Andrew Colunga via Neatorama]

Apple Announces Last Year of Christmas

CUPERTINO, California–December 16, 2008–Apple® today announced that this is the last year for Christmas. Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, spoke at a joint press conference held with Santa Claus at the North Pole this morning. He announced: “Apple has been honored to work with the North Pole the last several years to make Christmas possible, however, we have decided together that this is the last year for Christmas.”

Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, Christmas has become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways, throughout the year.

Apple has been steadily scaling back on holidays in recent years, including Valentine’s Day, Columbus Day, President’s Day and Grandparents Day in Japan.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

Press Contacts:
Buddy Elf
Apple
elf@apple.com

Papa Elf
North Pole
elf@santasworkshop.np

[Apple Canceled Christmas]

1. Where the fuck did they put that whisky bottle for “daddy”?
2. Rudolph, treat me with love.
3. First your wife, now your car.
4. Man, that Mrs. Claus was such a fat bitch.
5. This number five tastes delicious.
6. My head is bigger than your stool!

Now, you try in the comments.

I know. This is wrong. The web site, I mean. Why pay someone $US9.99 to do a bad Photoshop when you can do that for free? [Capture the Magic-- Thanks Brice, who candidly promoted this site to me over AIM saying: "the internet age, keeping the magic alive! How cool is that!?" So true, dear Brice, so true]