The Smart Thing to Do

 

It just made sense at the time to build the foghorn factory down by the bay, that’s where the fog always was.  Why ship materials in from someplace else?

 

***

 

Of course, it made sense — every great industrial empire begins with one bold, slightly fog‑dampened insight like that.

Down by the bay, the foghorn factory practically built itself. The workers didn’t need to imagine fog; they could simply reach out and touch it, taste it, let it bead on their clipboards. The raw material was already in the air, drifting in on little ghostly pallets. Why haul in pristine, sun‑dried fog from some inland warehouse when the local stuff was right there, fresh, organic, and ethically sourced.

Besides, the bay fog had a certain terroir — a briny undertone, a hint of seaweed, a whisper of gull complaint — that gave the horns their signature resonance. You couldn’t replicate that with imported fog. The inland stuff always sounded a little too cheerful, like it had never truly known despair.

And the logistics department loved it. Their supply chain diagram was just a single arrow pointing straight down:

Fog → Factory → Foghorns → World.

Elegant. Efficient. Moist.

If anything, the only real oversight was not building the cafeteria closer to the boiler room, where at least the sandwiches stayed warm. But that’s how it goes in visionary enterprises — you solve the big problems first, and let the tuna melts fend for themselves.