Life on the Rails

[Savonarola]

The Warehouse

While I was in Colombia I read a story on CNN about how a number of the companies in Silicon Valley offer so many amenities that their workers spend all their time on the corporate campus.  Their work and their social life are all done at the office.  The article described this as a "Hotel California" company; they can never leave.  GE in Santa Marta was more along the line of "Lord of the Flies," there was no way out and it was filled with crazy people.

That analogy first occurred to me when watching one of the battles between Mike, the lead on board engineer, and Bill the project manager.  Mike's background was in oil and gas.  He believed that we needed to have complete kits and detailed instructions before we started work; that is how it had been done in his previous projects.  That's not how Colombia works, though, even under the best of circumstances, and GE was determined not to give us the best of circumstances.

Our warehouse in Missouri had ordered equipment and shipped it as it arrived to the warehouse in Colombia.  The Colombian warehouse was badly disorganized with pallets placed everywhere, and no system to find goods.  The warehouse workers would try to assemble kits from this jumble of pallets and ship them on to the ports.  The kits were always missing pieces, but we had no way of knowing if the missing pieces were with the suppliers, in the rail yards, in our Missouri warehouse, in customs, or buried at the warehouse in Colombia.  The best we could do was go to the warehouse and root around stuff until we found what we were after, or wasted the day.

One time Glen was asked to do an inventory of an on board controller.  He was supposed to go train by train and see in which one which device was located.  He got a print out of all the serial numbers, and seeing a few of these were in the warehouse he went over to inventory those first; only to find half of them weren't on the list.  When he asked the warehouse supervisor about this she explained that before a certain date everything that had come into the warehouse was inventoried on a laptop.  The head of operations for our Colombian work crew had taken that laptop home, and it had been stolen right off his couch.  So we had no records of anything that had arrived more than a couple months previously.  Glen was deeply skeptical about that story, but there was nothing we could do.

Mike complained about the state of the warehouse to Bill non-stop.  Every meeting, every breakfast and every dinner turned into a brawl about the warehouse.  From Mike's perspective this was a colossal waste of engineering time.  From Bill's perspective waiting until the warehouse was organized made our already impossible deadline even more impossible.  One night, shortly before Mike was to return to the United States, Mike suggested that, since Bill had the greatest knowledge of the project as a whole, Bill should be the one to organize the warehouse.  This argument lasted well into the night.  I wasn't there to see it; but Max said that had truly given Bill something to think about.  Apparently it did, because Mike was asked not to return to Colombia. 


In truth we frequently made our own problems worse.  One day when we were at Drummond shop Jeff needed a set of cables; but he didn't know the part number.  So he described what he needed and sent the driver out.  The driver returned with the wrong cables.  He sent the driver back out with a new description and the driver again returned with the wrong cables.  Again he sent the driver out and again he got the wrong cable.  I gave him the part number after the second attempt, but he didn't give the driver that, just a description.  So he called Sofia to tell me to go to the warehouse to get the cable.  I knew better than to tell Sofia "No," so I went to the warehouse, gave the attendant the part number and got the cables a minute later.  Jeff had wasted his entire day in order to avoid a 30 second part number look up.

Alejandra was sent to the warehouse to clear things up.  It got organized well enough to get the parts we had out and the kits into a more organized format.  It wasn't perfect; given the circumstances it couldn't have been, but it was much better than what we had before.

[Savonarola]

Food

Every port has a cantina (or "Casino" in Spanish, which led to some double takes from the gringos) where they provide lunch to the crews on site.  The meals always begin with a soup flavored with guasca, a green plant that everyone but the Colombians thinks is a weed, lime juice and whatever leftovers are available.  This provided some humor as Glen and Fenton got a bowl of soup with tripe.  They both took one bite, and ate nothing else that day.  From then on they refused to eat the "Asshole soup," that the Colombians were so fond of.

The main meal is usually beans, rice, carne asada (thin sliced and grilled beef) or pechuga (chicken prepared the same way) and a plantain.  The plantains could be grilled or fried (patacones.)  Since we were in a banana producing region sometimes the patacones were made out of green bananas.  Sometimes a green salad, or a salad made of beet root will accompany this.  There are all sorts of warning not to eat raw vegetables, which I strictly adhered to my first time there.  Afterwards I found myself thinking "To hell with it, if I die, I die, I'm eating that tomato."

This was the usual meal at almost every roadside stop in Colombia.  In Santa Marta and along the coast fried or grilled fish was available, as was the rice and shrimp dish common to the Caribbean.  They also had a stew like bouillabaisse.  At some restaurants they would cook it in an iron bowl, and heat up a second iron bowl in the oven.  When it was presented the hot bowl was placed underneath and the stew would boil and bubble.

There were more exotic dishes as well; I had iguana eggs at the Hotel Jorlin.  They're small and round and have a creamier taste than hen's eggs.  They're usually eaten with salt, or with sausage and mustard.  Sofia explained that they were available only in the winter months.

There are a large number of fruits available.  One of the most prevalent is the soursop, which looks like an orange, but has an inside made of membranes and seeds.  I thought it was delicious, with a taste similar to passion fruit.  Other members of our team thought it looked like mucus with seeds and refused to touch it.  Corozo is another unusual berry found in Colomia.  Usually it's used to make juices; but the Colombians will stew them.  They taste vaguely like cranberries, but are much more fibrous; so much so that they turn into a dense, fibrous mass in your mouth.

Fresh juices of all sorts are widely available; they can be served with either milk or water.  The greatest invention of the Colombians is limonada (which is limeade, not lemonade.  In Colombian Spanish, limon is the word for both lime and lemon.  Max said he didn't know there were such things as lemons until he came to the United States.  He called them limon amarillo.)  The Colombians frappe their limeade with ice for limonada natural.  They'll also mix it with all sorts of different flavors, limonada de cerezada (maraschino cherries), limonada de albahaca (basil), limonada de menta (mint), and limon de coco (coconut milk.)  The latter was the star; all the gringos loved that.

Usually we would get breakfast at the hotel.  Arepas were almost always served with breakfast.  The ones at the Irotama were baked with parmesan cheese; I thought they were good, but most of my coworkers did not.  They also had an unusual dish of an egg fried inside an arepa shell and served with sour cream.   They made some other Americanized dishes as well, they had a hot dog, but they served it in a hard roll with parmesan cheese.  There was no mustard to be found only catsup or mayonnaise.

One time I did get breakfast on the road; they served something called Peto Rico.  My driver insisted that I had to try it.  It was like rice pudding, but made with corn rather than rice.  It was delicious.

Coffee is always present.  All along the roadside the Colombians would have thermoses filled with coffee for sale.  Colombians would drink coffee even in the heat of the midday.  They drink it American style, not like espresso and they usually add sugar to it.  The blends they have tend to be bold (fuerte.)  One peculiarity of the language is that Colombians refer to coffee as "Tinto."  Black coffee, for instance is tinto solo.  However in Spain "Tinto" is red wine.  I imagine there's some surprised Colombians at breakfast in Spain, or disappointed Spaniards at dinner in Colombia.

[Malthus]

Heh, fresh fruits and drinks made with local ice: any interesting days on the toilet involved? 

[Savonarola]

Heh, fresh fruits and drinks made with local ice: any interesting days on the toilet involved? 

The fruits all had a peel (although Colombians will eat the mango skin and all) so there wasn't so much danger there.  Ice was something to be concerned about; when we got into small towns even the Colombians would throw away the ice that came with their drink.  I only had the frappes at reputable restaurants, but I did eat raw vegetables everywhere.  After days of 100 degree temperature on a locomotive I developed a more fatalistic outlook.

One of our company, Ken, got some nasty stomach bug.  The Irotama doctor gave him some medicine and Ken couldn't figure out why he didn't seem to get any better.  Later on he realized the doctor had given him a bowel stimulant, and it wasn't  until he stopped taking medication that his symptoms disappeared.

[crazy canuck]

it wasn't  until he stopped taking medication that his symptoms disappeared.

[Savonarola]

Freddy Panda

There weren't a lot of options for our electrical, civil and mechanical subcontractors in Colombia.  For the electrical group we ended up with a company called ET Solutions.  They ended up being a really good group; to our amazement we had no problems getting the wiring installed.  The only issue is that all four members of the team went everywhere with each other.  Even tasks as simple as getting parts from the Home Center would be done by all four at once.  It was like working with a Clockwork Orange gang.

The mechanical and civil work was done by a group called Jovega.  The Jovega project manager was a rotund man named Freddy.  Freddy always had a mournful look and always had a meandering story as to why he was so far behind.  One time when Jeff was relating one of Freddy's stories, Gary added "And that would make me a sad panda."  The nickname stuck.  Freddy did actually look like a panda.  One of our team members found a stuffed panda at the mall and bought it using the GE Purchase card.  That  became our office mascot, Freddy Panda.

The reason why Freddy's group was always so far behind is that Freddy never came out to the field.  So the team rarely worked.  Whenever I'd encounter them in the field the entire team would be sitting under a tree, trying to escape the hot Colombian sun.  If Sofia or Bill was with me, about half the group would get up and try their best to look busy, the other half didn't even bother.

That was often for the best.  When they did work, Jovega would usually mess things up badly.  Bill would demand that the person responsible would be kicked off the project.  Freddy would tell Bill that they had been fired; but "Fired" means something different in Colombia than it does in the United States.  Within a week or two we'd see them again, back on the project.

We had them construct a couple new towers for us.  We have a shelter with our equipment next to the tower.  In order to communicate to the radio antennas they need to run cable between the shelter and the tower.  Usually there's a rugged cable tray that connects the two, so that the cable can lie on it without concern for the elements.  They didn't get that, instead they got a wire rack that looks like it came from El Office Max.  It was too flimsy to be run straight, so they sunk a couple poles into the ground to support it; only they sunk the poles too deep to support the tray, so they attached the tray to the poles with twist ties.  Jovega the quality you've come to expect.

Eventually Freddy found another job.  It wasn't a surprise since he had sounded each of us out about a job with GE.  I think everyone told him something along the lines of "We don't have a lot of open positions here in Colombia."  After that the pace picked up and we met our extended schedule. Our mascot went to a good home; the warehouse manager had a young daughter.  Unlike us she was delighted to have Freddy Panda.

[Savonarola]

News

Jeff told me one time he had seen a newspaper that showed a fatal traffic accident on the front cover.  This photograph on the front page showed the victim in full color blood and gore.  His driver told him that was a sleazy, low class newspaper.  In respectable newspapers they would blur the victims face out.

Colombian news was tabloidish, filled with gossip and investigative news reporter hunting down the mundane.  I once saw a story about people who jumped the turnstiles on Bogota's subways.  The news people tried to shame the ones who would talk to the reporters and chase down the ones who ran away.

Some of antics of the Colombians were the stuff for tabloids.  Around Christmastime there are a number of fiestas.  Some of the towns celebrate their fiesta with a bull fight.  In one little town by Bogota the aquardiente was flowing a little too freely.  Some of the townspeople grabbed posts and stones and beat the bull to death.  There was video of this and for about a week all the news channels kept showing this.

Even tabloid news stories outside the country, if they were wretched enough, made the Colombian news.  I saw a story about a wedding in Lima where the bride and groom were confronted at the church doors by the groom's ex-girlfriend and two of his children.  The newly married couple had to flee on foot as the couple's family and the ex-girlfriend shouted at one another.

[Eddie Teach]

  The newly married couple had to flee on foot as the couple's family and the ex-girlfriend shouted at one another.

[Savonarola]

Un Amour de Jeff Swaan

Derrick was from Cuba's northernmost province, Miami.  His grandparents had fled during the revolution; but he still identified with his Cuban heritage and talked it up all the time.  He did things a certain way because Cubans did it that way.  He made snap judgements, because Cubans made snap judgements.  He didn't take measurements because Cubans were good at eyeballing measurements.  He got reassigned to another project because the measurements he didn't take were wrong.

Even before that final incident Derrick's Cubanness annoyed Jeff to no end.  In those days the team would regularly get dinner at a restaurant called "Crepes y Waffles."  It was an Americanized restaurant, clean and air conditioned.  The only person who ever got sick there was Javier, but he seemed to get sick everywhere.  Every breakfast for him was toast and coffee as he was trying to get his stomach to settle.  He's a Spaniard, so we assumed this was the curse of Bolivar upon him.

While they were at Crepes y Waffles one night Derrick started talking about how he loved women with big asses, because Cubans loved women with big asses.  In fact all Hispanic men loved women with big asses.  There was a skinny waitress there named Laura whom Jeff and Bill started talking up.

"You guys are crazy," said Derrick, "She's got no ass.  No Hispanic man would like her."

They started going to Crepes y Waffles all the time.  Bill and Jeff would flirt constantly with Laura at first mostly to get Derrick's goat.  It moved into more serious territory and Laura started sending Jeff pictures of herself.  She was fully dressed in the pictures; just not in her Crepes y Waffles uniform.

We stopped going to Crepes y Waffles one night after having some extraordinarily bad service.  Jeff and Fabio had ordered a chicken stuffed crepe.  Two hours after they ordered it our waitress came by the table and told us they were out of chicken.  Jeff was livid.  He wouldn't order anything else.  He wouldn't consider ordering anything else.  He complained to the waitress (with Max translating.)  He had her bring over her manager and he repeated the complaints (again with Max translating) about the horrid service.  The manager listened very politely, and when Jeff finished asked, "Is that it?" She didn't care in the slightest.

The rest of us got our food shortly thereafter, but it was quite late by the time we left.  Jeff and Fabio went over to the frozen yogurt stand in the same mini-mall.  The server said they were closed.  As they were walking away, three young ladies came up and ordered frozen yogurt, and he promptly served them.  Jeff went back and said "You wouldn't serve us."

"Yes, but they're girls," the waiter said; but begrudgingly agreed to serve Jeff and Fabio.

We didn't hear anything else about Laura for a long time; then one night I saw Jeff sneaking a woman past the lobby (so far as a 250 pound man can sneak a woman half his age and weight without attracting attention.)  It was Laura.

The word spread like wildfire through our team.  Gary, naturally, took this as a great source of fun and would wait for about an hour after he saw Jeff slip in to Irotama with Laura, then he'd start texting him.

"You texted us in the middle of the act," said Jeff.

"I thought I might be," replied Gary

"Every time my phone would ding she'd open her eyes and look around."

"It's a good sign when they open their eyes.  It means they're still conscious."

Jeff got kicked off the project and Laura was left in Santa Marta.  Jeff had asked her to get a passport and visit him in the United States, but she didn't seem all that eager.  It was probably for the best as Jeff also has a stewardess girlfriend.  He told me not to date stewardesses as they keep odd hours and constantly have computer problems.  I told him I didn't think my wife would let me anyway.

[Malthus]

I take it the uncaring bad-service Crepes y Waffles waitress wasn't Laura?

[Savonarola]

I take it the uncaring bad-service Crepes y Waffles waitress wasn't Laura?

Yes, she wasn't working that night. 

[Savonarola]

Un amour de Ken

Ken had a marriage that had been on the rocks for some time.  When we met on this project the divorce was going through.  His wife had moved on and her new boyfriend was a plumber.  Ken is from Connecticut; he was in Colombia during the cold snap during the winter.  The pipes in his house froze so he had to return.  Back in Connecticut he and his wife's boyfriend replaced the pipes.  It's a tight knit community up there.

Ken had gotten a girlfriend of his own.  She hardly slept and would text him all hours of the night.  They did crossword puzzles together.  She had sent her pillowcase with him; he wore it under his hard hat like a kepi.  It was all so cute that I resolved not to outlive my wife; no one should have to go through that twice.

Their relationship continued through the time we were in Colombia.  On my last trip I worked mostly with Ken.  As we were on the road he told me that he had started a short story to her.  He read it to me; it was a suggestive story, probably like something you'd find in a romance novel. 

"She wrote the ending to it," said Ken, "I'll give it to you to read, it would be just weird if I read it to you."

"It's pretty weird already," I said; but read it anyway.   She gave had given his short story a happy ending in graphic prose.

"What do you think?" asked Ken.

"I think you'd better go home pretty soon," I said.

"Yeah, it's like she's saying you've got a job back here and it's in my pants.  Though, I like it when she talks dirty.  The only dirty talk we had in our house the past ten years was about the laundry."

[katmai]

Poor CB and the "erotic" stories Sav sends

[Valmy]

Poor CB and the "erotic" stories Sav sends

Tell her I feel bad for making fun of Michigan State Sav

[Eddie Teach]

I feel bad for making fun of Michigan State

Why?