Working With the Locals

Even though you mentioned work found while on the road, my job occasionally takes me around the U.S. and abroad for a week or so to work with the locals in their plant.

My company manufactures auger filler systems that put someone's product into containers quickly and accurately. I travel to service, repair the equipment, and to train the operators and maintenance people that use our machines.

Spending a week of full work days in a foreign factory is the most concentrated introduction to another culture I have ever experienced. I usually have my first contact with some middle management type who is responsible for my visit and with whom I will spend some part of each day and will have some social contact. The work day is usually spent with the production and maintenance supervisors and their troops. There is always the language fun, looking up odd technical terms, and 'Why do you call it THAT, for Pete's sake?" Even during a week near Liverpool at an old Kodak plant, the differences in British and American English tradesmen's technical/slang words was considerable, confusing and occasionally amusing. Anyone familiar with "bonnet/hood" and "boot/trunk" differences can well imagine what it is like in the construction trades like plumbing where there is about two thousand years of trade history dating from the Romans to deal with!

Even when not at all fluent in the language however, over several days time of observation and asking the English speakers, it is amazing how much of a feel it is possible to acquire for the local people, their feelings, cares and concerns. A week spent at a Xerox toner packaging facility in the Amazonian city of Manaus, just about in the middle of the Amazon jungle was a revelation. Go to work with them, drink their tiny cups of super sweet and super strong coffee, eat lunch in their cafeteria, their foods (the most amazing big pieces of boneless river fish!), their jokes, horsing around. Add in a few evenings and a day or so wandering around the city, stores, watching TV, visiting local sites, and one can acquire a pretty complete, entirely non-tourist and perhaps more realistic view of a people. This has also been true of some several day long or return trips here in the states. When a plant is located in the back hills of some rural state, or a small, grimy, hard times Northeastern smokestack era city, just one lunch with the factory hands in the cafeteria is a crash course in what is important or for that matter, funny to the locals. And you'll hear things that they wouldn't dare tell to their bosses or other locals for fear of it coming back. A stranger is safe, so they tend to let it all hang out!

-Douglas

 

 

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