company visit

On Thursday, I was invited along for a visit to Mexico's (un-named insanely popular washer/dryer/stove/oven/etc company) factory. In a brief synopsis, it was pretty cool. I love checking out assembly lines and job sites and the like, so I was excited to go. After procuring an appropriate pair of shoes, I woke up (way too) early on Thursday to get moving...

Sad side-note: I've found almost acceptable coffee. It's absolutely pathetic that this coffee comes from a mecca referred to as 7-11. Ugh. Sad. So sad. I may need to call it Siete-Once so it sounds more exotic than a place that sells Slurpees and questionable-looking hotdogs. Annnnd, for the record, there is a Starbucks near by, but I'm not that desperate yet. Let's hope it doesn't come to that...

Back to the visit...a bus ride and PowerPoint show in a meeting room later, we were ready to check out the plant. We hit a huge snag before we even departed for the tour, when a risk-management guy caught sight of our flats. Six or seven of us did what we could to follow the rules, only to discover that "no high heels" loosely translates into "steel-toed work boots". AGH! After a bit of bitching and heckling, we snagged some socks from some of the boys on our tour to shove our feet into...somehow that was enough protection...

Let me tell you, wearing another person's socks can teach you a lot about them, or better yet, confirm/negate things that you already knew. After scuffling around the plant with Tanner's socks stuffed into my new flats, I successfully broke 'em in and streched 'em out.

It was cool to get a behind-the-scenes look at how things that we more or less take for granted are created. I imagined what that plant might have looked like 50 years ago...thank God for technology!