Encountering the opportunity to travel and get paid for it has always been an interesting concept for me, and up until this past year, the concept was just a pipe dream. Over the last eight months I have boarded more than 30 planes and visited more than 12 major (and minor) cities throughout the USA and South-Eastern Canada. Despite what any American may say, the traffic in Los Angeles is not that bad. At least not in comparison to Toronto’s! Also, no matter what the locals say… EVERYONE has an accent! This leads me to one of the more interesting “Social Experiments” I found myself conducting after my first few trips…

Part of the role of a Field Engineer is to directly interact with and deliver training to personnel from the Ground Floor, right up to Corporate – so you can imagine the vast differences in personality types I get to converse with. In the space of an hour, an FES can go from training individuals whose vocabulary consists mainly of four letter nouns, to individuals whose educational costs could have bought them a modest house in any major city.

The thing that puzzled me the most however, had nothing to do with education or vocabulary prowess… I found that no matter who I talked to, no matter how intelligent the content of my presentation or conversation… The more like them I sounded, the more engaged the audience became, and remained throughout my dialog. That’s right, I’m talking about putting your pride aside and using local lingo “Y’all” can “understaaand” when talking “about” (not “aboot”) the “Prawcess” at hand.

Until next Blog, that’s it for now…