Critters

It's October now and the weather here in Mexicali is getting cooler and more pleasant every day. I can once again enjoy the chance to sit out on my patio with a book and a cup of tea or a glass of wine, depending on what time it is and whether I'm looking forward to the day or recovering from it. The jasmine is blooming now and the air is heavy with its scent early in the morning or as the sun is setting. I have a fountain on a wall of my patio but I have to keep it empty unless I have the time to skim it daily for feathers. Yes, feathers. We have a plague of pigeons in our neighborhood and they never fail to think that the fountain is their personal spa when it's full of water. "Gee," you're thinking, "what's wrong with that? Can't the little birdies have some fun splashing and getting a drink? Aren't they fun to watch?" You might think so at first. And, in fact, it does take a little while to realize just how disgusting pigeons are when you have to live in close proximity to them. I had them nesting on my roof and on a window sill in the front of the house for the first year that I lived here. Finally, I had to get someone from work to come and clear them out and put strips of nails where they land on the house and rolls of chicken wire in the spaces where they were nesting to keep them out. But this was not before they had covered the front yard and the back patio with copious amounts of pigeon poop. We also have a neighbor who gets so frustrated with their constant cooing noises and nesting habits that he often spends his weekends hunting them down and shooting them from the rooftops. It's a little scary and I have found several of them bloody and dying in my yard and patio since he's been focused on reducing the population. I even came across one (evident by the gagging smell) that had crawled behind a cactus and died several days, at least, before I found it. I love animals and I have a special fondness for birds as pets. I've owned several parrots, including my favorite, Bongo, an African gray who is a much loved member of the family. But I confess to considering pigeons as something less than real birds. They are more like flying rodents. Thankfully, they are not nearly as much of a problem now as they once were. I still have to sweep up a couple of piles of feathers every week, but I can live with that.

Pigeons are not the only critters that I've had to deal with for the past couple of years. I spend my weekends in Long Beach, California, when I'm not commuting here to Mexicali for work. My husband and I have a house there on the edge of the city about 4 miles from the ocean. It's in the center of a huge metropolitan area, not far from a confluence of freeways, shopping centers and a big city park. The first critter problem we had was opossums. We had hordes of them over the span of about two years. At one point, we had one give birth to a litter of babies in our garage. I called the city's animal control department, hoping that they would help us to get rid of them. That was when I found out that they are protected animals and you can't do anything about them or to them, and the city won't help you at all. Their answer to the problem was "just leave your garage door open and eventually they will go away when they're ready." In the meantime, which turned out to be weeks, they stole the laundry for their nest, smelled up the gargage forever and made an unholy, nasty mess. So we bought a friendly trap and we proceeded to catch over 25 of them that we took to the park and released. A park ranger saw me once as I let an opossum out of the cage and he told me that it would be better if I didn't let him see me let "that poor little guy loose to get attacked by the mean crows in the park." Honestly, I don't believe even a crow would bother with an animal as unappealing as an opossum. Here is a link to a little video about someone who confused an opposum with a cat, which is hard to believe, but very funny. http://rocksoft.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/thats-not-a-cat-thats-a-possum/

After that, we thought we were finished with critter problems. Guess what? As soon as the opossum population went down, we had a bigger problem. Bigger, as in a bigger animal. Next we had raccoons. Now everyone knows that raccoons are cute little animals who are very smart and so clean that they even wash their their paws after they eat. Right. Their cute alright. But they are as big as a medium sized dog, with huge claws and a menacing attitude that is downright scary when you meet up with one or have one on its hind legs looking at you through your window almost at eye level. And they are so destructive that they almost made me wish to have the opossums back, even though they are stupid and smelly and annoying. At least they don't rip all your plants out by the roots to get at grubs and worms, destroy your garden and tip over all your potted plants on a daily basis. The opossums never got in the garage the day before Halloween and tore the wrappers off all the candy that was stored in a pantry cuboard and threw them and pieces of Baby Ruth and Snickers everywhere. We did notice, though, that the raccoons seemed to particularly enjoy the Snickers bars. . .

This year, the critters won't get any Halloween candy at our house. I hope any of you who read this and are ready to go Trick or Treating watch out for critters and don't feed the pigeons, the opossums or the raccoons.

Plastic Bags Ban --

I was pretty stunned when a friend and co-worker in Mexicali emailed me that Mexico City had just enacted a ban on all plastic bags in grocery stores. Honestly, if someone had asked me, I would have probably insisted that Mexico City would be one of the last places on earth where such a law would be considered, much less put into effect. It is the second city in the western hemisphere to ban the bags. San Francisco passed an ordinance in 2007 giving stores 6 months to 1 year to stop using them in the city. I've been to Mexico City, briefly on a two day business trip and several times in the airport on my way to other points of interest. It's a hectic city and when when viewed largely from taxi-cab windows (see the image to the right taken from a cab on my way to the airport) it is difficult to imagine as a place of urban neighborhoods and influential environmental action. http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/08/19/mexico.plastic.bag.ban/index.html

Even though Mexico also has a 1 year grace period before they start to crack down on violators who distribute the bags or don't use a biodegradeable alternative, it is impressive that they have the foresight to move ahead of so many other urban centers. Consider some of the facts about plastic bags: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0902_030902_plasticbags_2.html:

• We use 500 billion - 1 trillion of them every year. Before the economic crisis made these kinds of numbers commonplace, it would have been hard to comprehend such a quantity of trash.
• Estimates vary from months to over 400 years for a plastic bag to degrade. If the latter is true, we may all be buried in them before they go away.
• More than 100,000 marine animals and birds die each year because they think the bags are food. Sea turtles, who think the bags are jellyfish, eat them and then die of starvation.
  
• The bags that end up in landfills actually represent a small percentage of the total number of bags out there. Estimates I found are less than 5%. The truth is that many of the ones that don't end up in the ocean as trash or hanging from trees or blowing around on the freeways to catch on your car's fender are being reused by many of us. And that's not a bad thing. If you haven't yet made the decision to purchase reusable cloth bags, there are other things you can do. Keep a bag of bags in your car to take to the store and reuse. They don't take up much space when you compress them. You could even put some in your purse or your pocket. In that way, you can cut down on the number of new bags that are in circulation. If you do decide to buy your own reusable bags, don't get discouraged at how hard it is to make using them a habit. Remember when you had to learn to always fasten your seat belt after years of never doing it (that is if your old enough to remember that. . .)? Well, like anything new, you just have to practice doing it over and over. You will definitely get to your turn at the grocery counter and have to make a mad dash to your car more than once before you think of them when you first put your foot in the parking lot. But it will happen once you have done it 10 or 12 times. Thinking about the poor turtles like the one in the picture above will make it easier.

Instead of the Dust- the Heat

We are right in the middle of the summer here in Mexicali, and even the crickets hide out during the afternoon when the temperatures reach 115 degrees or more. It is true that you get used to the heat, more or less, but we all try to stay where the air conditioning is blasting whenever we can. We can't run the air conditioning in our manufacturing area for several reasons, and the heat is palpable. Especially when the humidity is between 40-50%. Five minutes on the shop floor and your hair is dripping. Not exactly a pretty sight. The fans are blowing and keeping the air moving a little. In order to minimize the astronomical cost of electricity supplied by the federal government here in Mexico, the employees start to work at 4:00 in the morning and the equipment shuts down just before 2:00 pm. Since that is also just reaching the hottest time of the day, at least some of the workforce gets to go home early.

The heat is as much a part of life in Mexicali as crossing the border into the US. It's hard to say which one is the most difficult to handle but the latter is definitely worse when the weather is hot. If your car's air conditioning is good, the hour and a half wait is aggravating, but if you have to turn it off and open your windows, that wait can be hell. It seems to me that every week, the amount of time taken with each car gets longer, but I'm sure that's a relative judgement. I do remember that several years ago, the crossing hardly ever took more than 20-30 minutes, except at the peak hours in the morning and afternoon. Now I feel lucky if it only takes an hour. One of the most frustrating experiences is when you are almost to the crossing gate and the guards decide to take a break. They put a red cone in front of the next car and walk away, leaving whatever line is queued up waiting until an agent returns to take over. I have seen and heard angry, frustrated people futiley honking their horns and getting out of their cars to rail in useless anger at other drivers. I confess to holding on to my steering wheel and screaming inside my car, hoping no one actually hears me, in order to release my pent up rage for losing so much time waiting and waiting to get to the other side of the international border. Ah well, it's just something you have to deal with. . .
Here's a link to a posting that has some good information and pictures of the border crossing: http://www.ericrench.com/MEXICO/MEXICALI/BORDER/bordercross.htm.

Employees are an Enigma, Part II

I don't think there will be a part III to this line of thinking. I wonder if I was just having a bad day when I wrote about the inability of our employees to be good team players or if I just couldn't admit that it's not really their fault. Anyway, since I posted that some things have changed a little. First, I've decided to change my approach and I think I convinced a couple of other people at work to do the same. You know, they always say you can't change someone else's behavior, you can only change your own. And that's how you make change happen, for better or worse.

When we hired this new group of 'managers' we said we were going to let them do the job we hired them to do and spend our time coaching them and helping them to be successful. Don't think we planned to do this for purely altruistic reasons, but our plan wasn't fiendish either. It was pretty normal and reasonable, considering that we have been working at making our company grow successfully for over five years. We need to have a team ready to take over when we are just too old and feeble to go on or maybe just when we want to take a couple of weeks off and go to Acapulco. At first, we were spending most of our time with the new group training them on the basics of the company and the organization. How the processes work, who the other employees are and what are their jobs, the different policies and procedures and the general conditions and daily routines. After several months, we began to expect that they would automatically start to take over and act like us (probably not a good thing anyway). Sometimes when they made a mistake, we spent more time telling them what they did wrong than showing them how to do it right. Other times we held them by the hand and walked them through different scenarios so they could make a more informed decision in the future. In other words, we were inconsistent and we didn't have a standard so that we could hold them accountable. They responded by becoming less and less willing or able to make the decisions we were demanding and everyone was frustrated. They also never wanted to be the "bad guy." It's so much nicer when everyone likes you and wants to be your friend or when you can be someone's hero (without trying to figure out who the victim is). We call that tendency the "Chanito Syndrome" and it's a common problem everywhere. A couple of people quit, for undisclosed reasons, and that made it even harder to get things done. Not just because there were fewer people to take up the slack, but because the roles kept changing.

I think the most important thing we have done to change in the past few weeks is to leave the new managers alone. Not alone in the sense that we have abandoned them, but freer to make decisions that will allow them to succeed or even to fail. If they succeed, we will reinforce them and if they fail we will be there to pick them up, dust them off and help them learn from whatever went wrong. I think it's already starting to work, but I could be dreaming. . .

I also found a cool website that has some really useful information, like a very succinct employee handbook. You can enjoy it here http://punkrockhr.com/punk-rock-employee-handbook/

"Employees are an Enigma" or "The Great Cultural Divide," Part I

When we first started working in Mexico, we had a group of people with us who had lived and worked in the US for a number of years. As they drifted off to other places and we had to hire new people, we chose to access the local universities to provide us with educated and talented employees. At least that was our plan. Prior to graduation in Mexico, students are required to spend some time in either a public or private organization to complete their 'practicas profesionales.' We hired young engineers who spent time with us as students, as well as those who had just graduated. We believed that we could train them to be a strong, committed management team with a special understanding of the processes and capabilities of our new company.


What we didn't fully appreciate, was the difficulty of transferring our 'gingo' cultural ideas of leadership and teamwork to a group of Mexican workers. After more than five years, we have to concede that a degree from a university doesn't guarantee an understanding of the meaning of responsibility, discipline, communication, authority, commitment or any other word that conjures the basic elements of work. Our expectations were based on our cultural paradigms and experiences gained from working in companies in the United States. Our new reality in Mexico is about as similar as walking on the moon. I don't really believe that the differences in expectations and outcomes are deliberate or intentional. People accept a job and get up every morning to come to work because they want to do a good job and get paid for it, no matter where they are in the world. At least that is true at first. Later, after personalities and conflicts come into play, there are probably more reasons to show up every day, or not, but getting paid is still number one. But once they get to work, how do they make themselves productive and valuable? When we interview and hire prospective candidates, we tell them that we are looking for people who will help us to build our new company. We explain that it is an opportunity to be creative and innovative. We discuss the challenge of starting from scratch to develop new processes and build new teams. We get excited about the prospects and show them our passionate belief in what we are doing. And in doing so, I think we probably scare the hell out of them. Their eyes start to glaze over and they begin to nod their heads in agreeement to anything. "Yes, yes," they say, as they accept our offer to build a dream. But when they arrive at work, they put their heads down and wait for someone to tell them what to do. So we explain to them and train them in the processes and procedures that already exist, fully expecting them to get as excited as we are and to take up the gauntlet of continuous improvement and world class ideas. We wait for them to charge ahead and make a glorious new contribution. And we wait. And then we wait some more. And when we ask them why they haven't done what we asked, why they haven't implemented the disciplines we laid out for them, why they haven't communicated the policies and procedures to all the people, where is their initiative, we just get that same glazed look we got when they told us they wanted the job.

It is disappointing. It is frustrating. It can sometimes be endearing. Sometimes it makes you want to cry. Sometimes it makes you laugh. But is it always part of the complex and diverse culture that is Mexico.