Grumpa Joe's Place

Lately, my dreams have been centered on my work life. A week ago, it centered on a bicycle trip taken with an associate. This time, the story takes place in Düsseldorf, Germany. It all started with my reading a technical journal and seeing an ad for a plastics exhibition in Dusseldorf. Touted as the World’s largest plastics show, I thought I should go to see what they had. I placed the journal, open to the page in front of my boss Ross Rippinger and made my pitch. As a plastics manufacturer we should be on top of everything plastic.

At first, Ross commented that we also have the world’s largest show right here in Chicago. He was right, but I argued that many foreign companies don’t exhibit in the USA, and we may be missing ideas we could benefit from. He kept the article and told me he’d think about it. What that meant was he would need to get approval from the CEO-owner of the company.

A week later, Ross told me we were approved to go. Wow! I thought to myself, ‘This is amazing; the boss actually agrees with me, or at least he agrees with Ross.’

Ross had his secretary Joyce make all the arrangements. We flew United Airlines to Frankfurt and were met by Werner, our contact from the Bad Hamburg office. He was assigned to us during our mission. Werner set up several visits with customers who never gave him the time of day, but when he told them the VP from America wanted to visit, the door opened. We spent a week wining and dining with customers and sight seeing with Werner in the evenings.

Ross rented a car to use for the remaining week of our trip to the exhibit. Ross was the alpha male, and he drove everywhere we went; I navigated. Somewhere along the way, I made the sad mistake of telling him that I took German in high school. That made me the resident expert in all things German. The only thing I didn’t like about Germany was the traffic. Everything else, towns, malls, roads, people were distinctly different from the USA. I loved the autobahn, because it didn’t have speed limits except inside cities. All the autobahn roads were three lanes wide. The inner lane is for very slow moving vehicles, the center lane is for passing and moderately fast cars. The left most lane was for passing and traveling at the speed of light.

Our routine was to commute twenty miles from the hotel in Cologne (Köln) to the Messe (exhibition center) in Düsseldorf. The autobahn was solid, with three lanes of traffic for the entire time, and regularly took us over an hour to negotiate. The place was mobbed when we arrived. It seems the locals knew to get there early. Ross and I split the Messe, which is comprised of thirteen buildings, and agreed to meet for lunch. He was the expert on molding machines and controls. I specialized in mold making and molding which constitutes the conversion of solid pellets into fluid and delivering the fluid into the cavity. The one difference I spotted immediately was that most of the foreign molding systems were slow. They relied on heavy runners which take forever to solidify enough to eject, but at the same time they ejected parts onto a conveyor under the mold. Our systems used skinny runners and our cycle times were very fast. Instead of waiting for the shot to cool we used human operators to strip the hot shot from the mold and to position it into a degater. I didn’t see technology better than ours on that first trip. Several years later I began to notice technology that was more advanced than what we used.

Ross and I spent each day exploring and re-exploring technology until the show shut down at six. Then it was party time. Our routine was to head for old Dusseldorf and look for a fun place to eat. With an hour long drive ahead of us we didn’t drink much at all. One night we decided to take a different route back to Cologne and we followed a road along the Rhine river through the city. I could see the tower of the magnificent cathedral within one block from our hotel. Traffic was heavy and became slow, very slow, it was stop and go slow. After thirty minutes of this crawling line I began to figure out what was happening. We were in line to go to the hockey stadium and were only a few minutes from entering a garage parking lot. Luckily, we were able to make a u-turn out of there and back to the road to our hotel. On another night, we missed the exit leading into old Dusseldorf and wound up speeding into the darkness of the countryside. This time, I used the glow of the city lights to direct us back on track. We spent our sightseeing time driving in the darkness of November nights. Once we got into the outskirts of the city we decided to ask for directions and stopped at a gas station that is best described as two pumps in front of a darkly lit building. I had a map in hand and used my German to ask for directions, but got hung up on a single word. The man kept telling me with his hands to go toward a point on the map and then, using his hands to turn linx. It took me twenty minutes to remember that the word linx means left. Eventually we found our way out of the outskirts and into the city.

The dreams are so vivid and detailed, I feel I am there again.

Filed under: Aging, Biography, Memories | Tagged: Cologne cathedral, Dusseldorf Plastics Expo |