The Machine That Time Forgot

This documentary tale is based on real events. Muahaha – Happy (almost) Halloween!

This tale comes from the shadowy recesses of 2013, a year marked by an unsettling project that still haunts my memories. As a consultant, I was thrust into the twisted web of a warehouse automation project based on Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. The client was a well-known European retailer of home appliances and electronics, but beneath the surface of its shiny, consumer-friendly exterior lay a dark, unspoken secret: a vast, unfinished warehouse built far from the safety of the city.

This warehouse, cold and looming, was meant to be a distribution hub for all the stores, focusing on a category of goods that still clung to life—CDs and DVDs. Back then, these discs held a strange and stubborn popularity. Orders for them trickled through AX2012, feeding the insatiable need of more than 30 retail stores. Each store placed its demands, and to meet them, brilliant engineers introduced a mechanical monstrosity—a robot designed for a singular, eerie purpose: to automate the sorting and distribution of these fragile relics. I’ll try to describe its operation.

At the core of this beast was a conveyor belt that endlessly moved, like a cold, heartless artery of the machine. Boxes of CDs and DVDs were unceremoniously dumped onto it. They rolled into the dark maw of a scanning and measuring chamber, where the robot's unblinking sensors sized them up to apply a label—one of those little marks that sealed their fate.

The barcode told the robot which store the disc would be sent to, like a ghostly whisper from Dynamics AX2012.

It was my first time integrating with such a creature, and at first, I was intoxicated by its precision. The discs moved along the line, and with a sharp, plastic clunk, they were swept into boxes—boxes that would soon be dispatched to the waiting mouths of the retail stores.

For a time, the robot worked perfectly, almost too perfectly. I watched in eerie fascination as it sorted the discs with unerring efficiency. But then... the problems began.

The first cracks in our perfect system came from a poorly written technical specification, a flaw that would prove far more sinister than we had anticipated. No one had foreseen the oddities—the boxed sets of The Lord of the Rings, or the towering collection of Friends.

The robot’s scanning chamber, built for standard cases, couldn’t handle these grotesque giants. They were too large, too bulky, and the robot couldn’t adapt. We were forced to process these outsized relics by hand, though this was only the beginning of our descent into nightmare.

Then came the dust. The warehouse was still under construction, and the air was thick with swirling clouds of it—more than any machine could handle. The robot’s sensors became choked with the relentless grime, its vision clouded, its movements erratic. The arms that once moved with eerie precision now faltered, either hovering too high above the goods or slamming down with a destructive force. The shriek of metal on plastic became a common sound, and I watched in helpless horror as its cold, mechanical fingers crushed the fragile packaging beneath it.

But all these technical malfunctions were mere inconveniences compared to the true horror that awaited. The robot’s demise didn’t come from malfunctioning sensors or crushed cases—it came from something far more inevitable and sinister: progress.

You see, while our robot toiled tirelessly, the world outside was changing. The rise of digital content—a silent, creeping force—began to erode the need for CDs and DVDs. Orders dwindled, until one day they all but ceased. The robot’s conveyor, once busy with the movement of goods, slowed to a lifeless crawl. The gleaming steel that once symbolized technological triumph now stood still, abandoned.

And so, the robot, a marvel of engineering worth hundreds of thousands of euros, was left to rust, forgotten in the silent corridors of a shuttered department.

The integration with Microsoft Dynamics AX2012 that I had painstakingly crafted became nothing more than a useless relic of a bygone era.

And this, dear reader, is the ghastly tale of how progress devoured its own creation—a monstrous irony, where technology itself was consumed by the very march of advancement. The robot's once-whirring heart fell silent, leaving behind only the cold echo of its demise, and a chilling lesson: even the most advanced creations cannot escape the creeping hand of obsolescence.