The company that manufactures some of our electrical equipment is based out of Germany. After some repeat reliability issues and unacceptable service from the American based support team the company has sent in an “expert.” I’m a little confused as to why the American support team does not include any of these so called “experts.”
As such I spent most of today with a technician from Germany. He never mentioned his name and from the paper work it seems mostly unpronounceable, I’ve been calling him Expert (he seemed to like it). There was a lot of red tape that I had to cut though in order to get Expert into the facility – a process that could have been made easier in my opinion had any member of my team ever escorted a foreign nation into the building before. I can just see it, this is what all of them were thinking: “Just let that summer student figure it out, if he gets a security infraction it’ll matter less.”
Throughout the day I learned a bunch of cool stuff about Expert.
1. He speaks three forms of German – Regular conversational, formal written, and technical.
2. He has a daughter my age that is much better looking than any of the girls we ran into today.
3. His wife is over-weight, the diet pills don’t work for her.
4. His first car was a Renault (french - what the hell, wheres the german pride), now he drives a Passat TDi.
5. He becomes upset if a restaurant (Quizno’s) doesn’t serve beer.
6. He carries a book in his tool box entitled “German Humor” all pages of which are blank.
In the end he did not have the right tool with him to finish the job and it will have to be over-nighted from the American support company.
I was afraid to ask but I speculate that the reason he did not have the particular tool with him was because the required storage space was taken by the blank joke book.
