More Factory Days

(Thanks to one of my coworkers for the pic of the previously discussed mural...)

Day two at the factory was only slightly more productive than day one. I wandered around quite a bit, just trying to learn the process and gain some insight into how our products get built. Hopefully it will help me to understgand in the future when the factory dudes call screaming because we used some type of part that requires the line operators to do a handstand while holding a 15 pound piece of plastic with their feet for it to be installed.

We had another great lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Juarez. I'll try to track down a web address for it later. What I really want is the ability to do those "zoom from Earth to an individual car" on Google Earth like they do on CNN, since I can pinpoint these places I've been on those maps. Perhaps I'll get that figured out soon.

For dinner last night we ventured out to a place called Jaxon's here in El Paso. It was good, basic brewpub food with a Southwestern flair, which mostly means that everything came with a chile or some type of extracted rattlesnack venom as a spice. It was too late for me to care whether the food was good or not, and I ended up eating a spinach salad and a couple of beers. I did get some sort of continentally sized brownie with ice cream for dessert. My coworkers marveled that I would pass on another beer in favor of a brownie. How little they understand about me.

I'm now stuck on an hour flight delay waiting to leave El Paso. Given the mess with the airlines over the past few days, I guess I'm glad that it's only delayed because the flight crew is trying to get the FAA required amount of sleep before the flight. My coworkers are/were booked on flights from El Paso to Chicago on the dreaded MD80. They're not expecting to get home on time.

I will say that this trip made me appreciate my Mexican brethren in our factory. They were organized, efficient, and hard working, as near as I could tell. I spent yesterday in a room doing an assembly with four guys and a girl from China, three guys and a girl from Mexico, and me. When the Mexicans and Chinese took their hands off each other's throats, it was a model of world economy efficiency.

(I ended up getting home safely this evening... Good to be back...)