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Inside the Lego Master Builder Search
blackdefiance writes "As most self-respecting geeks know, Lego is currently searching for a new Master Builder to hold the enviable position of building with Lego all day and getting paid for the privilege. One applicant describes the nerve-wracking experience of going through the first-round interview."
They should look at hiring this guy. The comedy more than makes up for any lack of technical skill.
...Zack, the Legomaniac? I think he's available.
Ok, enough with those bionicle, tenticle, barbie Lego sets. They need to release a line of Lego toys like no other. Call it "Lego gun set", when you get to assemble M-16, AK-47 and rocket propell grenades with Lego blocks.
Of course they don't actually fire, but wouldn't some kid feel great loading clips and clips of ammo and tweaking with sniper scopes. Hey you can even have belts of ammo so kids walk around the living room feeling like Rambo.
"The top model builders from each city will be invited to Legoland California in Carlsbad for a chance to become the eighth Lego master model builder and build and maintain the huge Lego sculptures in the park. The winner will be paid $13 to $15 an hour."
Thats pretty good pay for doing something you were do at the age of 5, or for some of us still doing today.
Clicky (Washingtonpost.com)
- It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them. - Alfred Adler -
Yeah, their strategy is to replace all the the yellow bricks in their building with green ones. Also, all employees must give up their black plastic hairpieces.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Post about it, including detailed notes about the process and interviewers, on the internet. Then, just to make sure it gets maximum attention, send the link to a large news page. Seriously - this is not going to help the guy get the job.
Harrrumphhhh...real men build with Lincoln Logs or Erector Sets.
It's easier to wear the spandex than to do the crunches. --David Lee Roth
This has got to be in the top 5 Coolest Slacker Jobs...right up there with "Beer Taster" at Budweiser.
d00d... http://drew.corrupt.net/bp/
What LEGO needs to do is reposition itself to compete in today's marketplace. Currently, the best strategy for doing so is:
(a) Fire anyone who produces anything and dump your whole production line. (b) Hire a large team of lawyers to work on contingency. (c) Shore up your IP. (d) Sue anything that moves. (e) ??? (f) Profit.
OR
(a) Launch a branded online music store with excessive DRM and no price advantage. (b) Compete directly with Apple. (c) Hide under a pile of coats and hope everything works out for the best.
yeah, great 'toy'.. just wait until you step on one of them sharp LEGO creations in the middle of the night..
If this is Heaven I'm bailin out! I cant tolerate this ol tin-tub, so fulla trash and rats...
So the interview with LEGO was Saturday...
:)
:)
Ugh, my nerves were all over the place. I ended up re-writing my cover letter prolly 6 or 8 times Saturday morning before finally heading up to Boston with my belly full of butterflies--and Smores Cereal
The setup for the whole event was pretty cool. They had very impressive LEGO models all over and filled the place with people wearing LEGO shirts. It was nearly impossible to tell who was from LEGO and who worked at the college hosting it.
So I show up and register and am told to go into this room where I can mingle with some of the other applicants and LEGO folk. They had two buckets of brick which they explained could be used if I needed to "warm up" for the building challenge which was about to take place. OMG, if only they knew that I had been up the whole night before building like a bandit, trying to prepare for anything they could throw at me...lol
I ended up swimming my hands through the pieces anyways. At first it was just for a soothing moment of Zen, but then it ended up turning into a full-blown building event once a little kid that someone had brought along started building with me. We had a blast. He had a modified foam beer can holder over one of his wrists which he said helped him build. It's always fun to see Budweiser helping to foster children's imaginations.
As we're building, one of the LEGO shirts comes over and joins us. Then this other girl in a LEGO shirt stands behind him and watches too. Then another applicant sits down at my table too and began to build. We all had some small talk and smiles and then another LEGO shirt comes out of the blue and asks me if I'm ready for my building challenge. Oh, ya betcha!
I get escorted with applicant #10 to another room. (They gave us all numbers during registration-I was #9. Damn, I wanted to meet #2 so badly!) There were two chairs at a table with two separate covered buckets each containing 2000 basic bricks.
"Don't worry about color--We're more interested in how you build and what you build rather than how well the colors match up" announced Pat who was in charge of the competition. He then says "The theme is sports. You have 45 minutes-Go!"
Sports?!?! Of all the frikken topics, I get SPORTS???
#10 immediately lights up and starts feverishly building away. Again, I start swimming my fingers through the bricks before me-but this time I'm swimming like I've just been shipwrecked with my fingers searching for a lifesaver of an idea to build.
I had to have wasted 5 minutes of my time just thinking. I looked down at the green base plate and immediately thought about building Fenway Park. I mean the baseball diamond was already there. All I'd need to do was build the walls around it. That was too easy, though and I knew it would be tough to make it interesting given the bricks I had to work with. So scratching my head and kinda sneaking out a smile and a laugh in the otherwise sterile room, I figured why not build a mascot. I have lots of yellow and black brick--I'll build a bumble-bee mascot.
Ok, ok, I know you're prolly thinking who the hell are the Bumble-Bees??? I have no idea either, but I figured it had to make sense somewhere in the country. Maybe it was an expansion team along the Mexican Boarder. I didn't care-it was going to work!
45 minutes later, Pat comes back in and starts talking to #10 about his creation:
"So, it looks like you made a baseball park-is that the green wall here at Fenway?" LOL...OMG, I thought that was too funny that he had actually built what I almost built. It was pretty decent, but again, the details were hard to make out and with the exception of the green monster the colors definitely worked against it. He asked a few questions and then invited the guy to head back to the mingling room where he was welcome to check out some more of the models before he could head home. He says "will be in touch soon." #10 leaves relieved.
Then Pat
not noisy?
depends on the kid's imagination... I gave a duplo kit to a friend's kid for his birthday, and one week later I ask my friend what kind of stuff his kid is building.
he said he had to put the duplos away, because his kid kept throwing them around randomly, and scratching the paint off the drywall in his home.
My first task as Master Builder would be to reinstate the Hard Core lego set. Makes a great gift!
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
reminds me of how my and my lil bro used to play "Spaceship Crash Landing" with legos when we were kids.
The Game: Build the most bad-ass spaceship, and then throw it downstairs to see who gets the most spectacular crash-landing.
Yes, but will your love for Lego persist when you howl in pain after step on an overlooked block left on the floor by your Lego prodigy? My dad threatened, multiple times, to throw all my toys away if I didn't clean up, and he actually succeeded once. Being a kid sux.
BTW, 'Clikits' is much too phonetically similar to a word that ends with 'oris'
One of my friends and I did exactly the opposite. We would build super-indestructable cars (they had to roll, and had to have a mini-fig inside them). Then we'd crash them together drop them on pavement, throw them down stairs.. and whichever one could still roll, and still had the mini-fig in it the longest, won.
I didn't know legos could get so dented until we did that. (:
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Lego Spirit Rover
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
I'd much rather see a kid playing with blocks or lego than with most of the electronic toys nowadays. For one thing, they're far quieter...
My mother encouraged us to play with Legos because she thought it was better and more "family-oriented" than television. This lasted until the next Christmas, when my brother and I received 4 or 5 big Lego sets apiece, and within and hour were banished to our rooms when playing with them. There aren't a lot of household sounds louder than a bin of Legos being dumped out onto the floor and rifled through (except maybe the sound of Dad stepping on a stray 2x2).
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
Oh, yeah!
My kids are really into Legos and Bionicles! We spend a hefty amount of money on them!
My son says his goal someday is to work for Lego (or perhaps, Pixar). He'd absolutely LOVE to have this job! When he told me he wanted to work at Lego, I told him, "Well, you know, at Lego, they don't pay you to play with Legos all day long!"
I guess I was wrong!
We've all heard the standard flamewars:
vi vs Emacs;
Gnome vs KDE;
Linux vs BSD;
Free vs Open;
Windows vs Anything.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present the granddaddy of them all...
Lego vs Meccano
They also interviewed a bunch of little kids who were all very uninterested in Legos. What a shame...
I know first hand that thats not entirely true. On christmas I "played lego" with a young cousin of mine. We put together a basketball court where the lego people stood on a spring platform so you could bend them back, let go, and pray the ball goes into the hoop. While I first saw this as another example of specialized bricks and commericalization of a creative toy, it soon became fun to give people more than one head.
There will always be room in the marketplace for toys that allow children to make creatures with more than one head.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Toss the instructions, dump the contents of the new kit into the common bucket, and build away.
But... make sure the common bucket doesn't look like a cat litter box. I have bad childhood memories of digging around in the lego box only to find the cat had been there first...