I’m two weeks into an eight-week residency in ‘beautiful’ Port Allen, Louisiana. For those not up to speed on their American cities and states, Port Allen is on the other side of the Mississippi from ‘beautiful’ Baton Rouge (and about an hour up the coast from New Orleans – you’ve heard of that, right?). Both Baton Rouge and Port Allen pretty much exist only for the petroleum industry (hence my being here), and both sides of the river are chock full of refineries, tank farms, and barge moorings. Both cities tend to prepend ‘beautiful’ to any mention of their names in what I assume is some kind of tactic to insinuate a state of willing suspension of disbelief into anyone who lives, works, or passes through there. But it’s like the village idiot telling you over and over again that they’re not an idiot, they’re an idiot savant – you’ll never believe it yourself, but after a while you’re feeling sorry enough for them that you just say “of course you are, sweetie”, and leave them to their delusions.
I’m in Port Allen to conduct end-user training for our new warehouse management system (basically the same thing I did up in Cicero, ILÂ last year). Because we’re here for such a long period, and it’s a relatively small location (at least the office building – the warehouse is huge), they gave us a purpose-built facility. Which is actually a trailer (portakabin). Actually, two trailers, bolted together. So officially I am now living (given 18 hour days) in a double-wide trailer in Louisiana. All I need now is a busted up sofa in front of it that I can lounge on in my wifebeater (white vest top) while swigging from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag, and I’ll be a fully-integrated (white trash) American.
Given that this is a warehousing project, most of my users are forklift operators, many of whom probably don’t even have a high-school diploma, and several of whom have never even touched a PC before – and now we’re giving them SAP and mobile PCs on their forklifts. Its just got success written all over it. I’m pretty bad with names at the best of times, but give me 35 new people in the space of 6 hours and expect me to remember all of their names, and I’m seriously floundering. My other trainer, Ida, just has to be told their names once and she has them down. Me, I need to be told a dozen times and I still won’t have it. When we’re discussing the trainee’s progress after the class, a typical conversation between Ida and myself goes like this: She: “DeLeon seems to be struggling a bit”. Me: “Which one’s he again”? “Black guy.” “Err…” “Tattoos and gold teeth.” “Um…”. Thankfully many of them have their names sewn onto their shirts (which I’d happily do myself if the company wanted to pay for my workclothes – would at least stop all of the trainees just referring to me as “Yo!”), but the others I’m now just referring to as “Doo-Rag Guy”, “Scary-Looking Dude”, “The Guy That Looks Like Omar Off The Wire“, and so on.
Ah, I’m only messing with the stereotypes. I don’t mean (or believe) it. But that said, I did manage to lose some of my color-blind kudos this week. In a blatant attempt to curry favor I offered to bring in Krispy Kreme donuts the next day if they all managed to complete their exercises on time, and added that I was prepared to do this for them “even though the Krispy Kreme shop is in a dodgy part of town”. I got some angry looks. “Man, whatchoo talkin ’bout? That’s where I live! That’s a real nice neighborhood.” Okayyy, well if Hollywood and Polk is the nice part of Baton Rouge then I sure as shit don’t want to go to what they’d consider the dodgy area. It may as well be the Bronx to a middle-class skinny white boy like me. Anyway, they foregave me when I turned up with the Krispy Kreme the next day (including a couple of their new glazed pies…mmm!), so it’s all good.
Names aside, I’m getting to know them all pretty well, and they’re good people. Five-Kids Guy even invited me to his upcoming 20-somethingth birthday cook-out. I would have gone, as I heard from one of the other guys that he has some hot cousins coming down for it, but sadly I’m back to Houston at the weekends. I also learnt that one of the trainees carries a shank he fashioned out of a turkey bone around with him. And this was the token white guy on the shift, so there goes the racial stereotyping! OK, so the full story is that it is a tool he uses (very effectively by all accounts) for peeling misplaced labels off drums, because he’d seen on the Discovery channel that bone is less abrasive than metal, but even so, a shank is a shank, and I wouldn’t want to get him all riled up by flunking him or anything.
All things considered, this training is going well, and I’m enjoying it. I like this level of training; on most projects I’m training office-based employees all of whom have degrees or MBAs, and their existing skillset kind of makes you lazy because they grasp everything right off the bat, so there’s no challenge. With the forklift operators I’m having to work a lot harder to get it all to sink in – lots of visual aids (I even built some 6″x6″ pallets and stacked them with tins of black beans, and printed barcode labels on magnetic business cards to stick to them), drawing stuff on the whiteboard, and going over the conceptual stuff again and again and again and again in a dozen different ways until I find something they can relate to. I’m also having to teach basic computer skills and typing as well as teaching them a new system – and SAP at that: clearly not a system for the faint-hearted – and all-new processes, too. It’s hard, but ultimately rewarding when you see that light go on above their heads.
Anyway, it’s the end of another long (5 x 17-hour days) week, and I’ve got another 4 hour drive home tonight (Friday) before heading back on Sunday. Maybe I should spend the time trying to memorize those 35 names. Or maybe I can just listen to one of the ‘Urban’ channels on XM Radio so I can learn the lingo try and ingratiate myself back into their favor that way…
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