Burgers The Excruciating Way
For anybody who has worked in a kitchen or watched a professional cooking show, you know efficiency is possibly the most important trait one can bring to the table, er, workstation. Just the opposite in the annual Rube Goldberg competition. This year, contestants built machines whose sole purpose seems to be to make the heads of people like Gordon Ramsay or our old restaurant boss Larry explode in a burst of professional fury. Ha.
The winning entrant and home team at the Purdue University-hosted event took 156 steps to construct a hamburger, using a patty that had already been cooked. Hilariously, the machines seem really bad at making their burgers while taking way too long to do it. But the competition isn't about making burgers, it's about making teamwork and ingenuity, which gets done in spades.
By the time they're done working on these contraptions, the teams in this competition could probably knock out breakfast for a couple hundred people without breaking a superfluous egg. Maybe they can come down to our local diner and give a lesson. Larry should come, too.
A hamburger in 156 easy steps [Slashfood]
Purdue's 156-Step Burger Maker Wins Rube Goldberg Contest [Gizmodo]
Rube Goldberg Contest At Purdue [Purdue News Service]
