The Work Experience (in a vague, not allowed to tell you anything secret sort of way)

Working at PUMA has been a really cool experience, or, well it’s shaping up to be one.  The first week and a half my boss was on vacation so it was really slow and I spent time reading stuff, surfing shoes on the internet and getting familiar with materials to kill time.  I did learn some important things, but mostly the tedious parts.  Let me explain what my department does and how I fit in in boring ways at first and then in the cool ways that I’m starting to get involved.  So some group at PUMA makes a shoe design and starts selling these awesome stylish PUMA shoes.  The a company that sells shoes in the states for example says, “Wow, those are great! but Americans prefer obnoxious colors so could we get that shoe in orange with a green stripe?”  My department is the one that says, “sure, let’s change the colors in the design description document, get the designers to update the design, and then we’ll get them to you.”  That’s pretty routine and pretty boring...  The fun part is when they request all new materials along with the colors.  Then we have all sorts of design challenges to sort through.  We get a prototype made and check it out to see what works and what doesn’t.  We suggest changes, run them by the customer, and go through the next round of samples until we’ve got a shoe that passes all our tests, looks awesome, and the customer likes.  That’s problem solving related to both structure and design and I think it is terrific.

I’m just starting to get involved in the fun problem solving side of things.  Additionally, I spent a lot of the day yesterday honing my adobe illustrator skills.  The designers were overloaded and so I got to do some of the design updating.  Rendering tweed fabric was a blast.

On an unrelated note, I went rock climbing today with some people from work.  The first few climbs were fun, the last was terrifying.  The rocks jutted out at the top which was where the rope was attached.  The last part was really difficult and I needed to rest so I sat back in the harness forgetting that because rope jutted out, that sent me swinging back 6 feet from the wall... well out of reach.  I was swinging from a rope 90 feet off the ground.  My only consolation was that if I fell it was instant death and wouldn't be a drawn out painful experience.  I hear that after a while you learn to trust the rope more.  It was a good rope and I made it safely to the ground.


By the way, this is why rock climbing is awesome, also on [ http://jwitwer.blogspot.com/ ]