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/ ]

So a theme often on my heart is serving God well with my finances.  I definitely think God calls different people to do that in different ways.  For me, it definitely means not living extravagantly, and I haven’t felt like I have been living a particularly luxurious life.  God started poking at my lifestyle though a lot in this past week, and pointing out things in my life.  I was talking with another foreigner in a much less fortunate situation than myself.  She, her mom, and her daughter were living on 120€ a month from the government, and it sounded like that was really their only income besides some they could gather begging.  I thought I was being stingy when I budgeted 120€ for food my first month (the first month is more expensive because you’re stocking up on basic ingredients that will last a while, plus detergent, and toilet paper and all that jazz).

God pointed out to me that while I haven’t been super extravagant, depending on the standards you compare me to, the key was that I have always been living right up to the edge of my means.  God wants me to practice living under my means, even now when my means are very small.  I need to stop a habit that could be dangerous in the long run.  My mindset has been to look at what I have and then use it.  When I get a raise, I use it.  When I graduate and get a real job, I use more.  As I begin making more money, I begin to live extravagantly just by following the unextravagant pattern I’ve been living now of using all of my means.  I need to be able to have extravagant means without an extravagant lifestyle.  God pointed this out to me by throwing a forgotten 50€ visa expense at me.  Suddenly my food budget went down to 70€.  That means this month I am still living to the edge of my means, but through it all, God was able to point out this habit in my life so that when the money does begin to come in (hopefully at the end of the month) I might be able to continue living as I have this month, so that I may be a blessing to others with my coming abundance (I didn't even realize it was abundant until now).

Don’t let your lifestyle keep rising to your income.

Define your lifestyle and then do something awesome and unselfish when your income rises.

Welcome to PUMA

So I reckon it’s about time to talk about PUMA.  First impressions, very classy, stylishly designed buildings.  Bold, but not obnoxious.  Lot’s of red, white, and dark grey.  Everything clean.  I can’t just take pictures everywhere for secrecy’s sake, but I’ll get some up over the next few days.  There are two main buildings in Herzo.  I’m in the one on the edge of town that is larger, and conveniently attached to the PUMA store and Factory outlet store which I just visited today finally.  I do have a discount, but I won’t have money till my paycheck comes at the end of the month so I’ll just have to wait.  Difficult I must say!

Second impressions, at my desk and explored the nearby rooms, it was overwhelming how many shoes were everywhere.  Boxes of shoes and prototypes.  Shelves labeled country after country after season after year after category of shoes at different stages in development.  I’m sure there are over $100,000 worth of shoes on my floor of the building when you consider that most of them are prototypes.  That basically just means only 3 pairs were made for testing etc, and since they aren’t at the stage of being mass produced yet, they cost a fair penny to make.

As I was walked around the office and introduced to people, it was amazing to see that the daily work of such a small group of people (relatively) could be recognized and known by so many millions.  I mean, I would say there are at least 1,000 pair of PUMA’s at the RIT campus alone, and I’ve met the people already who have designed over half of them as well as the however many million other pairs around the world.  The downside to all of this is, that to run such a big system so well, there is loads of bookkeeping and database organizing etc...  That’s what I’ve been learning this week.  There is a lot of dry, necessary, background understanding required before you can do anything interesting.  My boss is on vacation this week and his boss is sick, but when one of them gets back, I can expect to learn more about what will be expected of me over the next 12 months.  I don’t expect to really know anything until next week.

Here’s something cool.  I guess in Germany you’re supposed to work 39 hour weeks, but PUMA says, “no, let’s do 40, but we’ll save up those extra hours you’ve worked and give you extra time off at Christmas.”  That way, everyone has off from Christmas to New Years, without even using vacation time!  

the South Side - Erlangen style

Here's a look at my side of town.  I think it used to be a small city that got swallowed up by Erlangen.  These are on a walk I took from my house.

Construction on the church. excuse the lighting.

There was a guy in that car staring at me.

Typisch.

The river through town.  The line across it is the Herzogenauracher Damn.

We're on the upstream side.

I came back and saw this shoe on my landlords car.  Also the hideous chair in the back? 

Yes, it was in my room but I told him he could give it away =P

Did I mention that I work at PUMA now?  Those shoes are 5 years old.  Also turns out the standard sample size at PUMA is a US 9 for men's shoes, which means I can get lots, my size cheap before they are on the market.  Even other PUMA employees with bigger feet have to weight for production =)

I'll blog about PUMA soon.  For now I'm just getting comfortable.  Everything is fairly slow since my boss is on vacation this week and his boss is sick.

Bye,

Erlangen at Large

My body is still freaking out a little about being off schedule apparently.  Saturday night I went to bed at 10pm and then woke up, wide awake at 5am... so I got up and ironed 8 or 10 things including a pair of new pants I’ve been fighting to get the creases in the right place.  I think I worked on those an hour, changing the crease at least 6 times.  I have a much better understanding of the way fabric is fit together into pants now!

Tip for gentlemen, your mother-in-law will be impressed if you can iron.  You’re going to need her to like you, especially if your father-in-law is the shotgun type.

Anyways, I don’t have very many clothes here, but the things I do have look much better ironed (that includes a few nice T-shirts), so I may take this year and iron everything and become a pro. So after ironing forever I had breakfast, espresso and müsli, went for a walk then came back and crashed on my bed for an hour nap.  Post expresso? Yes, I told you  my body is still freaking out. woke up with 15 minutes to get dressed, in freshly ironed clothes, and make the 7 minute skate to a church I wanted to visit at 10:30.

The church was called ‘International Jesus Gemeinde.’  The service is in English and German.  I met a few cool people and enjoyed it overall, but still plan to visit other places.  I might want something more German intensive to challenge myself more.  Regardless, the guys there play soccer indoors once a week on a nice turf field starting up in a few weeks.  I’ll definitely be in on that!  I was surprised how many folks from the UK were there and had been there a few years, still without learning much German.  Then someone mentioned that SIEMENS is headquartered here in Erlangen.  The company operates in English and often has employees from branches come to Erlangen for three year stints.  Almost 1/3 of Erlangen’s population consists of SIEMENS employees.  Another 1/4 are students (many of whom are gone the month for vacation sadly).  In a city of 100,000 people that makes about 30,000 SIEMENS employees and 25,000 students.  That explains a lot of the city set up and architecture.

Years ago, Erlangen was a much smaller place, back when they built those classic old German houses with the dark wooden frames with white ...stuff... filling the gaps.  The university takes a very central location in the city bordering most of the oldest buildings.  The campus has lot’s of impressive looking buildings itself and a huge garden for lack of a better term where this time of year there are quite a few people sitting out, picnicking, and all that jazz.  Outside of that you start getting some skyscrapers (I use the term loosely, this is still Europe).  I was out exploring and found myself quite lost amidst a cluster of ominous 7 story buildings (I think there’s a code that says buildings can’t be taller than that).  All I could see in every direction was SIEMENS.  It was actually kind of intimidating.  Once you get passed that you get to my area, which is Erlangen now, but used to be a small neighboring town until it got swallowed up.  Here are some pictures from my skate around the city.  I also want to post some from where I live, and eventually some of Herzo where I work.  Time is limited though so be patience, as my sister would say.

By the way, I write these at home when I’m free and then post a day or two later when I get internet.  I can’t afford to waste internet time writing, so you’ll always be a few days behind.  Monday is my first day of work, and I won’t get to posting this till my work day is done, but from my blog’s perspective it’ll still be Sunday.

 Here is the lovely "Deutsche Bahn" train station where I arrived.

A very typical German intersection between the architecture,

sidewalks, poles, rocks etc.

Yard in the university.

Continued - lovely.

Germany is clean, but add on these sort of buildings and it just

emphasizes it even more.  So crisp! 

Typical city center street.  It's Sunday and all is closed, otherwise it's full of bicyclers.

Even the McDonalds looks nice.

This is where I want to go to church next week.  I'm not sure if E-werk is a club, or theatre, but 

that's where Jesus-Life Gemeinde meets.

Approaching SIEMENS territory!

SIEMENS

Living Quarters

So here is where I live.  It’s quite comfortable I find.  Not everything is in good taste, but it is almost all good quality.  There is a huge grandfather clock too, although we don’t run it because the bells would chime through the whole night.  There is a beautiful original painting on top of the wardrobe (pictured).  The center of the wardrobe has three shelves fronted by glass - the optimal location to showpiece my shoes.  On top is also a radio that would have been terrific back in the day.  It has preset channels, can adjust the highs and lows, gets FM and AM plus 2 other frequency ranges, that I don’t know the names of.  There are also lace curtains, which bothered me at first because they offer zero privacy.  I found that peculiar because Germans are super into their privacy (in order for google to bring ‘street view’ to Germany they had to provide individuals with the option to blur out their houses!).  Well, the landlord was showing me some things and pointed out the steel shutters that can be lowered like blinds on the outside so that even in broad daylight I cannot see my hand in front of my face (with the lights off of course).  The only things really missing?  internet and dryer.  I’ll manage just fine without those I think though

Other bigger picture details, I live in a house on the edge of town.  The house used to belong to a grandmother with two daughters and a son.  Daughter 1 grew up and moved north to Bremen for work I believe.  She had a daughter named Muriel.  Daughter 2 bought half of the duplex next door to her mother.  Grandmother’s son, Reinhard, moved into the other half of the duplex with his wife and son.  Daughter 1 came into possession of her mother’s house, presumably upon her death, but still lives far away.  She rents out half of the rooms to her brother Reinhard, and half to her daughter Muriel, who just moved in 2 days before I did.  Reinhard wanted the house for his office because of the 30 yard commute to work.  He doesn’t need all the space though so he is subletting one of the rooms to me, plus bathroom and kitchen access thankfully.  Before Muriel came, Reinhard had been renting the whole house would would sublet to 4 interns/students at a time.

Oh and I almost forgot, they like spiders in the corners because they keep down the fly and mosquito populations? yes, that’s what he said.  I always thought screens were a better solution for that but... they don’t believe in screens here.  They do believe in fresh air though so the windows are all open year around.  I don’t have any spiders in my room so I’m not too concerned.

 Black and gold - duvet and sheets (I can store things in the box spring).

 Painting, wardrobe, shoes, radio.

The view kneeling on my bed.

Ankunft und Alles

I think I already mentioned, but Irene put me off two days so here comes Wednesday, August 31st.

  

Anecdote 1:

On my way to the airport with my dear mother at 7:30.  I ate a banana on route, and just as I wanted to throw it curbside across a lane and a half of traffic, my mom goes and changes lanes to take the fun out of it.   It still flew into 3 pieces as the wind took it before hitting the ground though =)

Anecdote 2:

I fly to Newark, and with the rescheduling of my flight, I ended up in an ‘extra legroom’ seat.  Sadly it was about 1 hour in the air and hardly necessary.  The guy sitting next to me was about 65, turns out he’s flown to over 100 different countries and more than 3,000,000 miles.  That’s about 121 laps around the globe!  Over a million with Delta Airlines, and a million with Continental Airlines.  He says he likes Continental best.  I think I’ll keep flying Continental (regretting forgetting to register my last 3 flights on their frequent flyer program).

Antidote 3:

5 hour layover in Newark! I was sitting at a table for 4 with my chinese food and I see three people muttering in German, looking for a table in the packed food court.  I offered  the seats at my table and they joined me (it’s not peculiar in Germany to sit with strangers like it is in the States).  It was great to hear German again.  Turns out they were on their way to Vegas.  They were from Munich and should have had a Bavarian accent that I couldn’t understand, but they didn’t.  Despite the warnings I got from Osnabrückers last time I was in Germany, I have been able to understand everyone’s accents here just fine (well, admittedly a bit rusty, but otherwise fine).  Also, did you notice that I titled this section ‘Antidote’?  Sorry just messin’.  I’ll continue.

Anecdote 4:

I hate flying across the ocean.  It’s not the ocean per say that bothers me, more just that whole 8 hour in a plane thing.  As I’m boarding there, the flight attendant says ‘go there,’ pointing to the second row of first class.  I had just read on the website about first class seating reclining into a bed 6’3” long and was getting ready to be stoked.  When I asked for clarification, he meant that I should cross in front of that seat to get to the other aisle since my seat was over there =’(  Tragedy.  My seat didn’t even have the extra 5 inches of the previous flight. I watched TV shows for an hour, talked to the nice little German lady next to me for a minute (who was lucky enough to get hit by the hurricane on her visit).  Breakfast and dinner came and suddenly (well not really suddenly), with a few hours of sleep and a legion of goosebumps to my name, I arrived in Munich.  Note, somewhere between cold and sleep we passed from day 0 to day 1.

Breaking from anecdotes for a bit, I took a 30 minute flight to Nürnberg, jumped onto the subway for the city center (with 100 pounds of luggage), grabbed a train to Erlangen, and then found the right bus to get me near my apartment.  I walked the brief quarter mile and found the address I had written on notebook paper.

Anecdote 5:

I knock on the door, hear a shuffling upstairs, a window open, a head comes out of the window looking rather like Einstein with his wild gray hair, “Ryan? I’m Reinhard Völkel-Prohaska.  Just a minute, I’m taking a very important call.  I’ll be there presently.”  He then comes down in a bit, welcomes me, shows me around.  I’ll get to descriptions later.

Anecdote 6:

So I’ve made it to my appointment at the bank in Herzogenaurach (Herzo), the next town over where PUMA is located.  The young man helping my to open my account looked only slightly older than myself, was wearing one of the best looking suits I’ve ever seen in person, and had great English.  We decided to meet in English just so I wouldn’t miss any important details.  After the account is set up, he takes me to the teller to get me some cash, but some issue with my travelers checks she claims she can’t do it (and is quite obnoxious about it).  She was maybe 50, with dyed yellow hair (I think it was supposed to be blond).  They are bickering in German for a bit very fast and so I didn’t catch everything but she musters up her meanest voice and says something like “I’m very sorry, but I won’t do it!”  He steps it up immediately and says, “ I’m very even more sorry, because you have to do it!”  She turns away finally and gets my money.  With way too much cash in my pocket, I hurry back to my apartment to pay the landlord for the deposit and rent.  I grabbed some food from a nearby store, unpacked my things and hit the sack at 8pm, turned into day 2 and woke up at 8am.  Much needed since I’d only had 3 hours in the last 42 hours.

Day 2 is exploring the apartment, sorting out details with my landlord, skating 2 or so odd miles to the city center to get my bus pass (that PUMA is paying for, score!) that let’s me take all the buses in my city, Herzo, and anywhere in between.  Admittedly there is nothing in between besides 20 minutes of my life for twice a day, 5 days a week, for the whole next year.  It’s about $80 a month.  For those of you with cars, I assume it costs more than that?  Tried the scenic rout home, which was cool, for a while, until I was lost.  Fortunately I’d just acquired (Edward A. that word choice was for you) a map at the bus station and righted myself pretty quickly.  Longboards are the best thing ever for exploring.  Here are some of the sights along the way.  I’m pretty sure there were much more beautiful parts of the city, but theses are the pictures I took.  I’ll do more over the coming weeks.  Overall, a very lively and pleasant place.

Note: I don’t have internet, but I can get it for free at the mall in town so... I’ll be slightly less prompt than you’re used to.

Here is the air near Nürnberg.  Not the best location to shoot but it was more 

gorgeous than most country sides.

Here is my Landlord (Reinhard) with wife and Aunt.  

All three like wearing socks and sandals.

Here is the mall where I get internet.  Super nice.

 Walking down the street in the city center.

 The city hall, 'Rathaus Erlangen.'

 Playground in front of the Rathaus.

 Typical scene just outside of the city center.

On my way to getting lost.

Cool clock!