"You look like a guy I did some time with a year ago"

As I was consuming, yet another cup of shitty coffee this morning, to keep my edge at the office,(making tiger faces in the mirror at 7 am just wasn't having success this morning) I had the opportunity to meet some of the guys from the plant. This is an an unusual interaction for the work I do, as I spend about 80% of my time in my office in the corporate section of the building and the other 20% in conference rooms, however I learned today from my conversation with these hard working, blue collar guys that I have been missing out.

The first thing said to me by Bob, an man in his 40's with a grey pony tail, a beard, and a a couple mean looking tattoos was "Hey, you look like a guy I did some time with a year ago, you ever been to county." I responded "umm.. not that remember." Obviously jokes from both ends.

There was nothing fake about the conversation with these guys, not that conversation in the office is not real, but its different. I felt like I was talking to my uncles when I talked to these workers, and learned some new things about the company, from the engineering/manufacturing end that is relevant to some international marketing issues we may face as we continue to go global.

I have concluded that the value of the president, executives and other business types of a company are very important as they are sort of the face of its success, in terms of profits and stock price, however men like the 2 guys I drank coffee with this morning are clearly the backbone, and companies who value their American workers, like the one I work for and also specifically Kalamazoo's infamous Stryker, will continue to have excellent growth in their earnings.

And then there is GM, but Ill let Michael Moore speak on that issue, as far as I'm concerned, that company is a lost cause, and it is unfortunate that through their stupidity of lack of continuous environmental scanning (before producing substandard cars that people aren't driving anymore), thousands of more Americans will be canned, Delphi is going under, and pension holders that used to work for GM are going to get screwed. There was a headline in the New York Times talking about how the fall of GM will destroy the middle class. I don't really know much about that, though Ive heard that GM is the reason we have a middle class, because of the initial benefits and rewards they offered their employees in past years. Are they going to go from one extreme to another? Delphi, who was part of GM in 1999, re-hired this girl I'm friends with, to do some marketing work for them. Of course they are not paying her for it, unlike the $12 an hour she got last summer for much less intensive work. Is this going to be the trend for managing human resources with American auto companies in the US? I just hope GM isn't going to follow this behavior, and expect everyone, especially guys like who I had coffee with this morning, to work for free, or close to it, or not work at all.