A holiday-season scramble exposes how “always on” offshore manufacturing ideals collide with real-world AXI limits.
A Yuletide surprise, courtesy of The Anthill. The same Anthill that wouldn’t answer emails, phone calls, texts or carrier pigeons the other 332 days of 2025. Things change, and snubs become embraces overnight when year-end revenue is threatened. Lucky us. Their AXI machine was down indefinitely; ours was definitely up. Meanwhile, an impossibly unrealistic, unreasonable, irrational name-brand tech superstar du jour was expecting results, no excuses, to fulfill a product launch.
This being the season of sharing, the Anthill proposed sharing their misery with us. They asked if our small, energetically earnest staff (13) would drop everything else and forego sleep for, well, the next six weeks. At least until Lent, but in pagan time: forget Christmas, and observe abnormal work hours. You’ll sleep and find leisure when you die, goes the motivational thinking, and, apparently, the Anthill practice. Through unremitting toil shall you be saved is progress made. Scrooge lives. Joy to the world. For the right price.
Once upon a time, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and youthful male tech leaders were still admired (2011), a leading fruit-emblemed toy company CEO told an inquisitive American president that 24/7/365 mass production of certain specialized electronic devices was impossible in the United States. This visionary supplied indigestion to our president, in the form of dinner table examples of the other side’s manufacturing superiority. Deeper supply chain. Better engineering support. Faster response time. Greater flexibility in making changes. Ability to scale from prototype to pilot build to production faster than anywhere else. Regimented social structure. Unquestioning willingness to work 3000 people 36 hours straight to implement an ECO. Worker docility in the guise of hyper-attentive customer service, a techbros’ wet dream. All the attributes of an anthill. This, proclaimed the famous CEO, was manufacturing as it should be. He insisted to our incredulous president that such characteristics could not be replicated in the United States. The implied truth: we’re lazy, as he defines the term, and they’re not.
So, it was with some measure of irony laced with schadenfreude that we observed the Anthill showing up on our front porch one Tuesday afternoon in a mood distinctly inappropriate for caroling. More like lamentations. And begging: Jesus, Mary and Joseph, desperately looking for a manger that can produce at scale.
They supplied an inkling the evening before, with a 7:10 p.m. Monday voicemail inquiring about our AXI capacity that very week. They were experiencing a sudden demand spike and had been referred to us by another high-volume manufacturer as a potential relief valve for said spike. This and the fact that their own machine elected to take the week off (a needed part was at least one week away from installation) made a stressful situation hair-raising. They wanted to talk with us urgently about our programming and inspection capabilities, as well as the response times for each. The anxious edge in the tone of the voicemail carried with it a strong hit of “immediately.” As in “tomorrow.”
Normally, I’d save my response for the following morning. Overnight rest gives me time to meditate on a calibrated response to match the customer's ineptitude. Call me old school, but I tend to go off duty somewhere between 5-7 p.m., and request that crises be held until dawn. Something about nourishment. Plus, I reserve my evenings these days for experiments in quantum computing (everyone needs a hobby). But this was the Anthill, and Anthill management believes sleep and regular hours are for weaklings or the habitually indolent (to which their management, by their overseas production decisions, apparently lumps the majority of our American workforce). This same Anthill that said “no” to our approach eleven-twelfths of the year, now hints in their message that “yes” might be a better basis for discussion in this season of giving. I called them back, waiting until after dinner, about 8:30 p.m., when they least expected a call. Then I called. You could hear the surprise in my counterpart’s voice, as if he was trying to process an un-stereotypical reality. “Wow, this guy’s still working.”
Once my voicemail counterpart recognized me and audibly acknowledged my presence, muffled voices could be heard, growing in number and volume. He must have been silently beckoning nearby colleagues to gather as soon as my identity was established. Or perhaps the word “RELIEF” on his caller ID carried its own strange magnetism. Either way, the talismanic effect made people talk loudly and frequently over each other. In its own strange, collective, coercive way, like an anthill.
“Do you have a 5DX?”
“Do you have a programmer? Do you have multiple programmers? Do you have multiple programmers who can program around the clock?”
“Are you open 24 hours per day?”
“Can we drop off product to be inspected at all hours of the day or night?”
“Can you run – inspect – product 24 hours a day?”
“Can you run existing programs developed here by us?”
“How fast can you create new programs?”
Reader, you might have the impression from the order of questions given above that they were asked in an orderly way. You would be wrong. All seven questions listed above were asked simultaneously, creating the verbal equivalent of spaghetti, each question representing strands of pasta, intertwined and not al dente. Nothing stuck. Each strand at a different volume, rendering the whole barely intelligible. Cacophony, thy name is Anthill. Anxiety in the face of immutable laws (making the tech titan customer happy, or else) does that. Seven almost-simultaneous questions mostly produced white noise. No word on the blood pressure of those asking questions, but on my end, I could feel the tension rising.
The disembodied voice of their leader asked for silence. Having achieved nothing, he decreed we would meet at our office the following morning. He didn’t ask for other meeting options.
And so we did. Four nonsmiling killjoy faces arrived the next morning, all wearing their Anthill windbreakers, transporting their grim world of inflexible deadlines to our seasonally festive conference room. An aroma of cigarette smoke permeated the room. Accompanying them, a minder from the OEM, their customer. Also nonsmiling. He was the Grand Mute: for the next two hours, he barely spoke. Mostly grunts and the occasional facial twitch, signaling approval or opinion, in subtle auction house style. Otherwise, his visage was indecipherable, concealed under a baseball cap, to, I suppose, mask suggestive or overly-exuberant reactions. All part of the act. A different kind of drone. A new way to spell “distrust.” Joy to the world.
You could feel the anxiety as they filed into the room, like schoolchildren reluctantly returning to class from recess, having just been informed that milk, cookies and naptime had been cancelled for the duration of the semester. Introductions barely finished when vociferous interruptions worthy of a White House press briefing started in force. Multiple variations of the same questions from the previous night, with two underlying themes: stay open for business around the clock and allow us access to your facility anytime. Clearly, innovation allows no fixed time schedule. Work/life balance? For the birds.
The minder, silent, observed.
First question: Can we bring boards at all hours of the day or night? It is not uncommon for our production line to finish at 2 a.m. Can we deliver boards to your facility at 2:30 a.m.?
Our answer: Yes. Longer answer: Let us know in advance that this will happen, so we can arrange to have proper personnel on standby and prepared to work.
Second question: Can you take the existing AXI programs we’ve developed and transfer them to your machine?
Answer: Only if your machine matches our machine (nope). Otherwise, we’ll need to make a new program.
Third question: Can you create, debug and tune an AXI program for one of our representative boards (60 layers, 16" x 18", 600-line-item bill of materials, 20,000 components) in less than four hours?
Answer: Nope. It takes a few days, possibly more, even if we work around the clock.
Fourth question: Really?
And a comment: Our customer won’t accept that.
Answer: Really.
Plus our comment: Your customer doesn’t have a choice. Whether they accept or not is irrelevant.
At this, the minder’s sphinxlike appearance was interrupted by a slight upward curl of the mouth at either end.
Fifth question, regrouping: Can’t you give us what our customer wants? This is what they want.
Answer: No, we can’t. Better to tell you now. Either your customer doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or they’re testing you. Only you and your customer know the answer to that. We’re just test engineers, and life’s short. Tech prominence can only push the laws of physics, machines and human beings so far.
The minder remained impassive.
Our unspoken thought: We know an initial negotiating position when we see one, so get real.
Sixth question: Can we sit with you when we choose to do so, and can our customer do the same? We’d like to observe the programming and inspection process in detail.
Answer: Yes, if you insist. Why do you, and especially your customer, want to do this? It’s about as spine-tingling as watching tariffs getting paid (note contemporary reference in case we are taken hostage).
Their answer: We want to learn from the process. Maybe you have some tricks or techniques we can apply to our own work.
Real answer: We don’t trust you.
Seventh question: Can you give us hourly status updates?
Answer: Do you want us to do the work assigned, or do you want reports? Choose only one.
Their answer: The work, obviously.
Our comment: Good answer.
Thus ended the inquisition. The minder made notes, but otherwise looked serene, mental checklist complete. Feeling supreme at another shining example of cause-and-effect.
We showed them our AXI system. Explained why it could beat up their AXI system. Told them we were ready to respond with resources, energy, experience and shop time forthwith. As in, now. They liked our style and promised to carry this back to a meeting with their customer to obtain final approval to proceed, which they hinted would come quickly.
The minder gave no hint about his recommendations to management. He departed silently with the Anthill team into the festive afternoon. Quietly terrorizing a supplier was his specialty, and as far as production was concerned, it was the most wonderful time of the year.
To all, a wish for the proper and profitable ruin of your holidays in 2026.
Robert Boguski is president of Datest Corp. (datest.com); This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. His column runs bimonthly.
