Shouzer

This week, the Obama administration gave GM 60 days to establish a plan for viability and Chrysler 30 days to accomplish a merger with Fiat, otherwise, both would be forced into bankruptcy. In addition, Rick Wagoner was forced to resign from his position as CEO of GM, and he was replaced by Fritz Henderson.

Firstly, I think Rick Wagoner was a bit of a scapegoat here. He really didn’t do anything wrong to merit the forced resignation. Most of the damage done to GM happened before his tenure, and he has done some good things to turn it around. However, CEO of a company the size of GM is a rather unique position. Decent really isn’t good enough. Rick accomplished some good things, and had the economy not turned sour, he might have righted the ship over the long-haul. During the last few months of this crisis, he has not really shown a great sense of expedience in fixing the mistakes.

The new CEO, Fritz Henderson, did an employee broadcast a few days ago, and I was greatly impressed by him. He seemed to have a great sense of urgency about him, and he is clearly intelligent and tough. He is certainly more charismatic than Wagoner, though I don’t know how important that is for a CEO. It is obviously too early to judge him, but I would hire him for the job if I had the power to do so. So while Wagoner got a pretty bum deal, I think they did the right move by giving the job to Henderson.

GM was given 60 days to submit a new plan for viability. Really, though, this is a bit of a misnomer. GM has a lot of constituencies who negatively affect their balance sheet. These are the bondholders who fear they will have to take pennies on the dollar for the debt they hold; the union who fears their contract will be broken; and the dealers who fear the national network will be greatly reduced. The 60 days is not to create a plan; it is to get concessions from all of these groups. The threat of bankruptcy in 60 days is a means of holding the proverbial feet to the fire. Or else it is a means of forcing those concessions as GM obviously cannot survive without them.

GM has no negotiating power with these constituencies, and I think the 60 day deadline will provide that power. If some group is unwilling to give concessions, they will be forced to risk bankruptcy which seems to be an enigma. Without the deadline, they would have no incentive to give in, and this mess would drag on endlessly on the taxpayer’s dollar. The deadline hurts, but it has to be done.

I also think the deal they are giving Chrysler is appropriate too. Chrysler was gutted of its ability to make cars when it merged with Daimler, and now that they stand alone again, they are doomed. Sadly, the merger is their only real hope.

I check up on Shouzer several times a day, and there has been no activity for almost 2 weeks. That makes me bored, and I suspect that the same holds true for whatever readers we do have. For me personally, I’ve been trying to come up with stories to write about, but I’m drawing a blank. Not much has happened over the last 2 weeks either. Life is settling into a groove, which is nice, but it is not conducive to story-telling.

There are some news articles that have come out recently that I feel are worth mentioning. The first is GM’s quarterly earning release, which is important to me. They lost $15.5 billion last quarter. Ouch. From what I’ve heard, my department won’t be going through any forced layoffs, despite a 20% company-wide reduction in salaried “expenses”. There will be a few people leaving my area through early retirement. I could go for some of that. I’d probably take it if I got the offer.

In much, much better news, the death toll in Iraq in July was at its lowest since 2003. It’s nice to hear some good news coming from that region after years of bad news. Honestly, I have become a bit numb to it. I am at the point where the news of a suicide bombing in Baghdad does little to pull my heartstrings. That is honestly a sad reflection on both me and the situation as a whole, I think.

The other big question I hear a lot is, What exactly do you do at GM? (I think it’s mostly my parents that ask me this.) Well, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure yet, but I am starting to get a grasp of it. I am a controls integration engineer on the 6 speed transmission platform. My group manages the releases of software for these transmissions, and troubleshoots any problems that come up. We are the go-between for the core software people, those who write the code, and the calibrators, those who test and tweak the code in the vehicles. I am mostly on the troubleshooting end of that spectrum.

For example, I am at a plant right now helping with a problem with the transmission output speed. We are getting some noise on the signal related to the sensor that is used to measure said speed. Lots of people from many different groups are involved in the troubleshooting process, but my group is spearheading the effort. It’s what we do. I have a few other responsibilities, including tracking CPU utilization on all of the software releases and handling serial data communication mismatches. Often, a test car will be put together with a hodgepodge of components. Sometimes, the controllers for these components are using different versions of the serial data protocol, and I have to sort that out. I haven’t done too much of this yet as I am not fully trained in this area, but it will become a big part of my job.

I had my advanced drivers training today that will allow me to drive on the proving grounds roads. It consisted of a lot of evasive driving techniques.

First, they put us in a high speed lane change situation. Basically, we had about 60 ft to change lanes at high speeds without touching the brakes. We’d drive down this little lane of cones with a wall of cones in front. The instructor would yell, “Left!” or “Right” and we would change to an unobstructed lane accordingly. It’s much harder than it sounds. The wall of cones is actually very close, and the car slides a bit when you change lanes. I actually lost control of it completely at 65 mph. It felt like the car was going to flip over.

We did a slalom course along with this test, but it was pretty uneventful.

Next was the low friction surface. They have a skid pad there that they spray with water to simulate ice and snow. We drove onto this skid pad and then immediately started sliding around. This was pretty fun. Basically, they were teaching us to regain control of a car with the back end fishtailing. My driving partner was pretty bad at this, unfortunately. I was in the back seat, and we did numerous donuts on this surface. The crazy part, though, was when the car returned to regular pavement and violently corrected itself. I was flying all over the place back there. Then, we did some ABS brake tests. They had us do 2 wheels on/2wheels off and then slam on the brakes. With no ABS, the car just spun like mad. With it, it was pretty well in a straight line. Lucky for me, my new car doesn’t have ABS, so I could be having some fun this winter.

The last test was stopping and maneuvering under a locked-brake condition. It was pretty bland compared to the other two. Nothing really worth writing about. We finished up by taking the car on and off the pavement at highway speeds to show what this is like in the real world.

Basically though, I had a blast doing this. I wish I could go out and do stuff like that every day.

In other news, I’m going to another meetup tonight. There are 13 people RSVPed to come. Hopefully more than one person will show up this time. I’d hate to be in another blind date type situation over dinner. That would far more awkward than the movie theater. On the other hand, it could result in a very good story.

I got to the office this morning, and the intern in my group told me he got access to the IM program we use at the office. I had been told that I could not get an account. I called the help desk for IT where I was moved around 3 times. I’m still waiting back for an answer.

I then recalled that the intern I was sitting next to yesterday at a training seminar told me she did her advanced driving class within a week of being hired on. I’m still waiting on that as well. Advanced driver training is required before you can use any vehicle on the grounds. It is usually supposed to be one of the most fun days of work in your life. They take you to a big, open area and teach you how to control a car under critical conditions (like low traction).

The kicker though, was that I calculated today that I actually made more money as an intern. Obviously, my salary was lower then, but they paid for my housing. If you take the money I pay for my housing and then add the taxes I pay on that money and add it to my inflation-adjusted internship salary, it’s actually about $200 than I make now. That’s a bit of a slap to the face to be honest.

To be fair, I live in a much better housing situation than I did then. I was sharing a 2 bedroom apartment with 3 other guys. The apartment I’m in now is a bit smaller, but I like it more. I also have it all to myself so I have loads of space. Actually, I still haven’t figured out to do with the extra space in my bedroom.

I just though you all would be amused by this new realization.

So,  my second year of grad school just started…a full week after my first year ended.  Talk about a crappy break.  It seems that lately all I see are the walls of Rush when I get here every morning around 6 am and leave by 6 pm.  Then its off to some building on UIC’s campus for another 2.5 hours of fun: MCAT prep.  The test date is quickly approaching, and I’m starting to get more nervous. 

I guess I can only blame myself for how things are right now.  I made all the decisions that got me where I am…it just really sucks.  And now I have to seriously buckle down and start thinking of my thesis and getting that ready to go.  Here’s the crappy part:  I’m given some dedicated research time during my second year, but it isn’t until April.  I am required to give my final defense sometime in May.  What does this mean?  It means I have to do the “exhaustive lit review,” design a protocol, give my preliminary defense (hopefully only once), collect my data, give my final defense (again, hopefully only once) and then write my final paper. 

Of the 7 other grad students in my program, I am the only one with research time scheduled in the final quarter.  Talk about drawing the short end of the stick.  So this means that while taking classes, doing my rotations in the clinical lab, working in the ICU and hopefully going on med school interviews, I also have to squeeze in time for research.  I didn’t even factor study time and me time in there.  Something tells me this is gonna be fun (yeah, right).

Hope everyone else is enjoying summertime.  Me….not so much.

Well, I’m finally getting around to writing this post now. Sorry for the long absence. I’ve been terrible about keeping in touch the last few months. According to Juvers, it’s been two months since my last post, so I’ll start there.

The term ended at the end of February, and we’re on summer holidays now. I already miss my kids a lot, and I also miss the routine of going to my schools. Since then, I’ve been doing a wide assortment of things, including teaching holiday programs at schools, holiday club at the office, volunteer teaching, and teacher training. I suppose that’s all a bit boring though, so I’ll skip the details.

Last week was Song Kran, which is the Thai new year’s. They celebrate in a variety of ways, but the most fun is by having a nation-wide water fight. You walk down the street, and people just shoot you with water guns. I didn’t go anywhere special within Thailand for that, but I did get shot by some kids on my street. I guess you could say I enjoyed it.

I went to Malaysia and Singapore during the week I had off. During this trip, I visited Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Melaca, and Singapore. Penang is an island in the north of Malaysia. The highlight there was an Indian restaraunt which was highly authentic. KL is the capital of Malaysia, and the highlight there was the Petronas twin towers. They are featured in the movie Entrapment. Melaca was an old capital of Malaysia, and it had lots of historic stuff. Singapore was pretty cool, though it was insanely expensive. I was excited because they had Mt. Dew, and I have been craving it.

The big news, though, is that I will be starting work at GM, probably in July. I am going to be a controls integration engineer in a team working on the 6-speed transmission. Don’t ask what that means, because I don’t really know to be honest. I’m going to be in Milford, MI, which is just outside of Detroit. GM’s test facility is there. It’s called the Milford Proving Grounds.

I’m not sure when I’ll be coming home. It’s the million dollar question. I finish my contract here on May 30th, and I will leave Thailand shortly after that. I would like to go traveling for a month, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to afford it. I’m trying to find some work at a summer camp or something, but it doesn’t look promising.

That’s right, I’ve got more pictures for you. The first set is an update of my ever-expanding Bangkok folder. Enjoy:
Bangkok

I think the new ones are towards the end, but not quite the very last ones. The last pictures in that folder came off a different camera, and the pictures are sorted by name. I’ve tried to change it, but I’ve never been successful. Basically, I just don’t care enough to do anything about it.

I recently made all of my travel pictures public here. However, I took some shots of my kids today that won’t show up there. It seems somewhat wrong to put those on the internet for all to see, like an invasion of privacy or something. Anyway, if anyone wants to see them, I will email you the link to the private album, assuming you aren’t a known child pornographer or something, then you can’t have them.

I started writing up a post on our company meeting, but I couldn’t put anything together that I liked.  It’s not for lack of material either; there’s plenty I’d like to talk about.  Rather, it’s a matter of not know what–if anything at all–I can talk about.  So I decided to just throw up a couple quick pics I snapped during the event.

I got my first ever massage today after work. It was a traditional (I think) Thai massage. I think that I liked it, but I’m not entirely sure. It was really relaxing, and I felt great afterwards. However, I’m not sure why because the individual bits of it were painful at some points. Part of it was the novelty. Full body massages are something I’ve always associated with loads and loads of money, and in fact, this place was pretty swank. It cost me less than $10 for an hour though. If I was paying American price for that action, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it so much. Oh, and before anyone says anything, it wasn’t one of those kinds of massages.

There was a lot of stretching involved. She also rolled my muscles around a lot, sometimes it felt like she was trying to pull them off the bone. It was a bit strange, and that part hurt a bit. The stuff she did to my feet felt great though. If I ever go back, I might just get a foot massage.

I’m also finding out that there are some unexpected consequences to being a kindergarten teacher. One is that every time I see a kid on the street, I just want to run up and give him/her a hi-5. The other thing is that I have found myself making sound effects even when I’m not in the classroom. This can be somewhat embarrassing when dining with friends or whatever. I can just imagine myself going to a job interview and making a little “bing” sound when I produced my resume.

I officially finished my probation last week, and it’s pretty awesome to be done with it. They have a two month probation here at Fun Language to make sure you don’t suck and that you’ll actually stay. You are observed at the end of the two months and if you pass, you get a pay raise. I am now making a whopping 2000 baht more per month, which amounts to about $65. That does go pretty far here though. You could do a weekend trip to the beach for that price if you were conservative about it.

Anyway, my probation judgment was much easier than I expected it to be. One of the Thai trainers came to observe my TT a few weeks ago. The head foreign trainer was there teaching at the school that day as a substitute, and after talking with the Thai trainer who had just seen me and my TTs (I happened to work with all 3 that were at the school that day), she decided that she would just pass me. They were already overdue on judging me, and they are extremely busy right now. Normally, one of the two top trainers comes out to watch you for a day, and you get this major formal feedback. It sounded quite nerve-racking to me, and I’m glad I don’t have to go through it. Plus, I didn’t really know I was being judged at the time, although it still made me nervous for her to be there. I actually assumed the Thai trainer was there to observe me because my TT is really experienced, and I saw her filling out an observation form. It scared me a bit; I won’t lie.

I got the first fruits of my probation pass today though. I was reimbursed 2000 baht for my travel expenses to Cambodia. So, to recap, I got a day off and a 2000 baht bonus to take a vacation. Nice. Hopefully I can pull off something similar next time around. My visa runs up in October, and I want to go to Vietnam. I’ll be getting reimbursed for my initial hotel stay next week as well. It’s always nice to get paid a little more money.

When I moved to Thailand, I knew I would have to adopt some of their customs, but I never really expected their culture to ever rub me the wrong way. Unfortunately, sometimes it does. There is just a different perspective on what is rude and what is not here. For example, titles are quite important here. Older people should have the title “P” in front of their name (I’m not sure how it’s spelled), and those in power get the name “Khun”. They are pretty lax about this with me though. I am one of the youngest teachers, but I use the “P” prefix with very few people. Most of the foreigners don’t bother with it unless the age gap is quite big. I’ve mentioned before the necessity of “Wai”ing all the time, which can get to be a pain when I’ve got stuff in my hands. I usually don’t do it in that case. Still, I bust one or two off every time I enter and leave a school and then multiple times throughout the day when I see teachers or admin in the halls.

What strikes me as odd though are the things they find perfectly acceptable that I would normally consider very rude. For example, no one seems to mind interrupting other people. The number of times a taxi driver has interrupted me when I was having a conversation with a TT is unbelievable. I’ll be in the middle of talking, and the taxi driver will just butt in and start a 5 minute conversation. They also have no qualms about speaking in Thai in the presence of a foreigner. By this, I mean if I am sitting at lunch with 3 Thais, they will speak in Thai the whole time while I sit in silence. I never really saw this as much of a problem until I was in Cambodia with 2 Germans. They practically refused to speak in German when we (myself and an English girl) were around. There were times that the conversation had nothing to do with us, and they were having problems communicating. We had to practically coerce them to speak German to each other. It was nice to have someone be so concerned about my presence. On the other hand, the Thais sometimes talk about me in Thai. I called some girls out on that a few days ago because it honestly does bother me. They tell me its never anything bad, but I still don’t like it.

Obviously, it is my place to conform to their culture. I am living and working in their country. This is just not an area I really expected to have any trouble with. It is tiring to have to constantly adjust myself to fit into a new culture, but I love it as I like challenges in my life.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Once work started, I haven’t had a ton of free time, and what time I have had has admittedly been spend on tv. This weekend, on the other hand, has been spent on Harry Potter, which I finished earlier today. I’ll get to that sometime later, though.

So yeah, I started work last week. The first two days, I was in orientation with about 150 other people who were also starting. They definitely had a lot to tell us, and hopefully I remembered most of the important things, haha. The next few days were spent setting up my computer, talking to my manager quite a bit, and things like that. I only got around to doing any real work toward the end of Friday, and even then the stuff I was doing was more or less insignificant.

This next week I’ll be spending in a class, actually, so I won’t be doing a whole lot then either, haha. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before I get to that point, but it’s still somewhat frustrating. Such is life, I imagine.

We have Monday July 30 off from work because of a national holiday (Buddhist Lent Day), and, as you would expect, I’m taking the opportunity to travel. I’ll be heading off to magnificent Cambodia to see the world renowned Angkor Wat and hopefully a few other things which I’m not sure about yet. I’m going to book the trip tomorrow so I’ll find out then.

I was supposed to work on Tuesday, although all of the area schools are closed. For some reason the administration wants us to come into the office. I’m not sure what everyone will be doing. I, however, will still be in Cambodia doing a “visa run.” Our visas must be renewed every three months which means you must exit and reenter the country. The office pays for the trip out of country and gives you a day off to do it. I pushed my run up a few weeks early so that I can have this 4 day weekend. They are even going to pay for part of my trip since they pay for people to do their visa runs. I’m pretty excited.

The work is actually getting better this week. I am on standby on Mondays, which honestly kinda sucks, but I’m looking at it as a wild-card day. It’s also nice that I won’t have to do student reports for those five classes. Tuesday was really good. I work at a kindergarten all day, and it is a great school. The kids are adorable, and they are really smart. They have gotten used to me and my TT, so now they know our signals, even the K1s who are only 2-3. We we tell them to hush, they actually do it.

Today was a pretty good day as well. It used to be a totally crap day for me, but I laid the smack down on my bad classes last week. This week, they were quite well behaved. It was really nice to see the discipline being effective. There were three other teaching teams from Fun Language at that school today as well, and one of them was threatening to send naughty students to my TT if they were bad. Apparently, it worked. She is pretty feisty.

Food was really good today as well. I had this garlic chicken thing at lunch which was really nice. I was getting tired of eating fried rice so I got some of the Thai teachers to recommend me something. This is surprisingly hard to do. Every time I’m out with them, I ask them what to order. They almost always say fried rice or basil chicken. Both are good, but I like a little variety. The restaurants don’t have menus, and when you ask a Thai person what they have, they generally say, “They have everything.” I tell them I want a burger. I had some Greek food in my apartment this afternoon which was a welcome change as well. It was just feta cheese with olives, tomatoes, onions, and bread, but it was quite nice to eat something besides rice. I went to a Japanese place with some friends at the night, and that was one of the most amazing meals I have had in a long time. We shared pot stickers, fried pork, and some sushi. It was amazing.

Tomorrow I’m heading to a new school. For some weird reasons I haven’t been to this one yet. It’s another day of all kindergarten, and I’m teaching phonics the whole day. Hopefully, it will go alright. Friday is my super fantastic day. I have four classes; I’m done before lunch. It is magnificent.

Have I mentioned how good my Fridays are? Well, they rock the house. I only have to teach four classes, and they are all before lunch. I’m back to the office by noon. I spent the afternoon writing next week’s lesson plans and cataloging my new phonics flash card set. I can leave if I want to, but I wanted to take advantage of the time to do the lesson plans. To make things even better, I get to teach two K3 classes, which are by my favorites of the week. The kids are old enough that they can play games and have fun, but they are young enough that they still like stupid jokes and silly songs. They are a lot of fun.

Yesterday, my regular school was canceled, so I went out to observe some other teachers. They each had 5 classes, and they were teaching them all the same lesson. I’m glad I don’t have to do that every week. Variety is the spice of life. The cool thing about this school, though, was that all of the buildings surrounded an inner courtyard, and the kids had recess in there. We came back from lunch, and they were out playing basketball, so we joined them. They were just shooting hoops, it wasn’t like 5 on 5 or anything. It was still pretty fun to play with the kids in an unstructured environment though. Plus, towards the end of recess, all of the kids were standing outside of their rooms overlooking the courtyard, and they were watching us (just the teachers now) play. They were all cheering when we made shots, which was rare for me. One of the other teachers started hamming it up a bit, trying to get more cheers like Randy Moss in the end zone. I have to say, it was a pretty good time.