Other people (that’s you) probably will not share my fascination with the subject of this post. Please consider yourself forewarned.

Recently, while in Boulder, Colorado, I had a chance to visit the headquarters of the Celestial Seasonings tea company. I took a tour of their offices and factory, and was asked explicitly not to take any pictures, please, while I was on the tour. I could not, however, resist the temptation to take a shot or two from behind pillars and such, especially of a contraption referred to as the robotic palletizer. It was an autonomous machine responsible for picking up sets of boxes of tea and employing a camera to place them onto pallets for delivery. For some reason, I was struck by how awesomely futuristic and even slightly creepy it managed to be. I took a short, haphazard movie clip (728k MPEG-4) of it in operation, which some like-minded people might enjoy as much as I do.

My sincerest apologies to the person the back of whose head features prominently in the clip.