Holy hell did I over-pack.
In truth, this was my first time off the North American continent and save for a few trips into Canada and Mexico - none more than 50 miles past the border - I'd never traveled abroad.
I was excited. And nervous. Hence the over-packing.
Fortunately, I was extremely lucky to be accompanied and guided by Matt, my manager at the time. I couldn't think of nor have asked for a better first-trip partner, not then nor in hindsight now.
Unfortunately Matt wouldn't be able to stay for the entire trip which would cause some significant anxiety for me, but we'll get to that later.
Apple had their own travel "agency" who took care of all the bookings etc., but we did have a choice of airline. Among two, but still, it was a choice.
And that choice would affect your route. Cathay Pacific was well-known (both internally at Apple and broadly within the airline industry) as the better choice over United, but to get to Shanghai on Cathay required going through Hong Kong first as it is their worldwide HQ and primary hub on that side of the planet.
It didn't matter though, as Cathay's offering was just that much better. So that's who I flew from then on.
This first trip was predominately focused on the as-yet-unreleased next generation iPod Touch (N18). It was being built at Changshu Manufacturing Company (CSMC), a Quanta subsidiary, so we'd need to head east-north-east(ish) from Shanghai by car for about two and a half hours.
A great chance to pull out the new Nikon D100. At least that part of the over-packing wasn't for naught. Though I wouldn't ever bring it again.
Building the iPod Touch wasn't as glamorous - nor high-volume - as the iPhone and CSMC was accordingly smaller than the massive Foxconn facilities. In fact they'd recently won the contract for primary N18 production (the previous model, the N72, was built by another CM in Shanghai... I think it was Pegatron or a subsidiary?). They worked hard and deserved the contract, but CSMC itself definitely gave off a "third-rate" vibe:
Regardless of the aesthetics or upkeep (something else we'll get to later), this was still an Apple mass production facility, which meant volume. High volume.
Accordingly, and knowingly, one of the first things Matt did once we arrived was to tour me through the production lines. (MP facilities like these are organized into duplicate "lines", a single one of which takes raw BOM material as input and outputs a completed product. To produce higher volumes, they scale horizontally by duplicating lines. As you can probably also guess, there was always a reference "golden" line, known as exactly that: the golden line. You did not fuck with the golden line.)
It had the intended effect: there is nothing comparable to seeing modern mass production at full tilt, and I was blown away.
And this was one of the smaller-volume devices that Apple made at that time! Later, I would spend ample time at two of the largest (at the time) facilities they used. Talk about mind-blowing! But that's for a later chapter.
I noted earlier that this was my first trip so it stands to reason I was pretty new to the company, but in reality I was still bright green, only a few months into my tenure.
Accordingly, I knew the grand total of jack shit about most things at this point, and was heavily reliant on Matt to have all the context & institutional knowledge I lacked in order to make sense of anything happening around us.
Imagine my abject terror when I woke up to a message from Matt saying "I was up all night with terrible kidney stones, went through 15 bottles of water, and decided I need to go home." He had sent that message from the airport and I was reading it as he was already speeding towards the western hemisphere.
Oh, fuck.
I don't remember much else about the rest of my time in Changshu after Matt left, which is a good sign: nothing worth remembering, positively or negatively, must've happened.
So Matt's absence remained primarily a business concern, as I'd at least become comfortable enough with the routine and logistics of Changshu.
Then came the second bomb: there was trouble at another factory in Shanghai proper (ironically, the one that had lost the contract to CSMC for N18, the very factory and product I was currently at/working on) and they needed someone from our team to go help debug it.
Excuse me?!
渔人码头, "yú rén ": the first four Chinese words I ever learned!
The night before I needed to leave a few of us headed "out on the town" courtesy of Bryan who had spent years in China for Boeing before Apple and was perfectly fluent.
A very common name for bars & restaurants in China, in our case it was a great little bar with dark wood properly tying together the "wharf" aesthetic.
The name was also great learning opportunity given the simplicity and usefulness of all words involved.
| Simplified | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 渔 | yú | fish |
| 人 | rén | person, people |
| 码头 | mǎtóu | pier, wharf |
渔人码头: "Fisherman's Wharf"!
I futzed and floundered during the day I spent in Shanghai, just trying to gather anything that seemed relevant while deferring to a CoreOS colleague who happened to have flown in to look at things as well.
That was a massive lucky break and not just for the professional assist: as would happen many times in the future, I would become much closer with those colleagues I traveled with than those I hadn't.
For the record the product was N72, the previous Touch. I do not recall what the actual issue was, but I do recall it required oscilloscope tracing so it must've been deep indeed.
And that's how the first trip ended.
Curiously enough - and something I only just realized as I'm writing this now - while I would return both to Shanghai & Changshu many times in the future I would never return to that particular factory. One and done!