In Which Trinkets Are Bequeathed and Lairs Are Furnished
I'm here in St. Joseph as of yesterday. As always my sleep loss before important events is legendary. Saturday night was a RHPS live show and dinner thing, that went from 4 PM to about 4 AM. I slept until 10, spent half the day packing and squawking, crashed at 8ish which was already past time....then woke up at 11 PM utterly unable to sleep. Left for the airport at 4 AM, went to Detroit, went to South Bend, rolled into St. Joseph, went to LECO for a couple hours of paperwork, back to the hotel, and crashed out at 11 PM. This morning....6 AM sharp. Tonight, well, it's 9:50 NOW so.
On the bright side.
I have a room for three months, probably a fair bit longer (hoping to just leave my stuff here over Christmas, do NOT want to fly back for two days and go through all the repack unpack bullshit), and I have my desktop, peripherals, and a pretty good sound system. I have a Dell 630 laptop, a brand new iPhone 4S (car charger, Otterbox), and some running money courtesy of the job. I also have a diesel van that I WILL be driving back to Houston. If the previous owner weren't a heavy smoker that'd be great. I burned up half a can of Febreze on it tonight (down the vents, painted the dash and wheel, headliner, just about every interior surface) so hopefully that'll stop it being the 'every day I'm sufferin'" ride. The training class is all of two people--me and my new coworker who just moved from Nigeria in 2008 to finish college here. He's really nice and we get along well.
The job itself...we got the grand tour of the facility today. To give you some idea of vertical integration scope, their R&D is in-house, their engineering is in-house, their machine shop in which they turn sheet metal into all the raw parts is in-house, their glass shop where they blow all the glass is in-house, their electronics shop where they employ people JUST to build patterned wire harnesses is in-house, their ceramics manufacturey is in-house (well, in Benton Harbor but.) The only things they don't make are solenoids and fasteners, and a couple of their machines which are built by the German location and shipped over. And everything is so fucking perfectly clean and modern it looks like something out of How It's Made. I Am Impress. And I don't say that easily.
The people side of things....my predecessor put in 22 years of service in Houston and is only retiring because he's a first-time father at 55. His entire inventory is on a skid, which I will also inherit, so he's already set me up with the EXACT kinds of spare parts my customers are going to need instead of me having to guess-fail my way to prediction. There's 30 field service engineers for 50 states and they're relatively widely spaced. In Texas/Arkansas/Oklahoma/Louisiana there's one other guy in Tulsa and me in Houston, yet my two-up manager said I'll spend most of my time just two or three hours from my house.
Demographics....everybody's old. (From my lofty vantage point of my 30s...oh god, in 10 years I'm going to come back and smack myself.) More seriously, 40s-60s+ is by far the norm except for a few entry-level folks. Coworker has been going around asking people how long they've been working, and the answer is always "15 years", "25 years", "22 years", or in the case of the guy who's teaching us basic overview and theory until Thursday, "45 years".
Oh, and our per diems are $50 a DAY. My grocery budget is about $50 for a WEEK. This is going to be hard work, no fucking lie, but for the third time in my ten-million-job career I'm happy to be where I am and getting ready to do what I'll be doing. Any job that has me questioning whether I'm smart enough is a damn fine challenge and as I surround myself with really high-caliber people instead of glorified box movers and cable plumbers I think I'll come back to actually USING my brain.
Dad, I'll call you tomorrow after work about potential weekend stuff now that I've got wheels and some idea of schedule.
(ALSO I FORGOT HOW DAMN COLD IT IS HERE AND WINTER HASN'T EVEN HIT. I take solace in knowing that co-worker hasn't ever dealt with snow and the term 'lake effect' is a foreign thing to him. Heh. Heh heh heh. Poor bastard.))
On the bright side.
I have a room for three months, probably a fair bit longer (hoping to just leave my stuff here over Christmas, do NOT want to fly back for two days and go through all the repack unpack bullshit), and I have my desktop, peripherals, and a pretty good sound system. I have a Dell 630 laptop, a brand new iPhone 4S (car charger, Otterbox), and some running money courtesy of the job. I also have a diesel van that I WILL be driving back to Houston. If the previous owner weren't a heavy smoker that'd be great. I burned up half a can of Febreze on it tonight (down the vents, painted the dash and wheel, headliner, just about every interior surface) so hopefully that'll stop it being the 'every day I'm sufferin'" ride. The training class is all of two people--me and my new coworker who just moved from Nigeria in 2008 to finish college here. He's really nice and we get along well.
The job itself...we got the grand tour of the facility today. To give you some idea of vertical integration scope, their R&D is in-house, their engineering is in-house, their machine shop in which they turn sheet metal into all the raw parts is in-house, their glass shop where they blow all the glass is in-house, their electronics shop where they employ people JUST to build patterned wire harnesses is in-house, their ceramics manufacturey is in-house (well, in Benton Harbor but.) The only things they don't make are solenoids and fasteners, and a couple of their machines which are built by the German location and shipped over. And everything is so fucking perfectly clean and modern it looks like something out of How It's Made. I Am Impress. And I don't say that easily.
The people side of things....my predecessor put in 22 years of service in Houston and is only retiring because he's a first-time father at 55. His entire inventory is on a skid, which I will also inherit, so he's already set me up with the EXACT kinds of spare parts my customers are going to need instead of me having to guess-fail my way to prediction. There's 30 field service engineers for 50 states and they're relatively widely spaced. In Texas/Arkansas/Oklahoma/Louisiana there's one other guy in Tulsa and me in Houston, yet my two-up manager said I'll spend most of my time just two or three hours from my house.
Demographics....everybody's old. (From my lofty vantage point of my 30s...oh god, in 10 years I'm going to come back and smack myself.) More seriously, 40s-60s+ is by far the norm except for a few entry-level folks. Coworker has been going around asking people how long they've been working, and the answer is always "15 years", "25 years", "22 years", or in the case of the guy who's teaching us basic overview and theory until Thursday, "45 years".
Oh, and our per diems are $50 a DAY. My grocery budget is about $50 for a WEEK. This is going to be hard work, no fucking lie, but for the third time in my ten-million-job career I'm happy to be where I am and getting ready to do what I'll be doing. Any job that has me questioning whether I'm smart enough is a damn fine challenge and as I surround myself with really high-caliber people instead of glorified box movers and cable plumbers I think I'll come back to actually USING my brain.
Dad, I'll call you tomorrow after work about potential weekend stuff now that I've got wheels and some idea of schedule.
(ALSO I FORGOT HOW DAMN COLD IT IS HERE AND WINTER HASN'T EVEN HIT. I take solace in knowing that co-worker hasn't ever dealt with snow and the term 'lake effect' is a foreign thing to him. Heh. Heh heh heh. Poor bastard.))