59 – World Turning – Leo Kottke – 1997

World Turning - Leo Kottke 

This is Kottke’s cover of Lindsay Buckingham’s song from his Fleetwood Mac days, and like the other covers by Leo on my Zune, I prefer his to the original. It has a great vocal and Kottke plays a little sitar on it as well.

I was not a big Fleetwood Mac guy, though I feel that Lindsay Buckingham is one of the great guitarists, up there with Leo and John Fahey, as a finger picker. One of my favorite albums is “Out of the Cradle,” which begins with a 25 second instrumental which showcases his virtuosity.

I’m thinking back to 1997 when this song came out and the main memory it brings is my short stint at Ibiden Printed Circuits, a Japanese owned company about a mile from our house here in Elgin. I left Tingstol, which was in Elk Grove Village (about a mile from where I work now), for a chance to work closer to home, but had never worked for the Japanese before (or since).

When I got there they said I needed a passport, because at some point  I would be sent to Japan to work in the main plant  for several weeks to learn how to do it their way. After a couple weeks I was told that Hitachi was coming in for an audit and we had to get ready in one week. I looked at the documentation they had on file and saw everything was translated from Japanese into English, but not easily readable in that it was too literal.

I saw that we were trying to get ready for a full blown ISO audit in one week, which is kinda crazy and I told the Japanese president it would be impossible to do so. His response was, “But we must try.”

And try we did, I worked several night until midnight or one AM (starting at 8 AM), translating the literal English into readable English, line-by-line, then going in to the president’s office and discuss whether I had got the true meaning of the sentence.

At 10PM each night the whole shebang would come to a halt as they (all the Japanese managers) would go into the president’s office and call the Japanese plant since it was 8AM there. Other Japanese office workers could not leave until the president did, so they actually slept at their desks as these all-nighters went on.

When the audit occurred, we failed and I saw more frustrations like this on the horizon, along with that totally unsupervised trip to Japan that loomed ahead.

So I did something I have never done, before or since. After calling my old boss at Tingstol, to make sure I had a job to go back to, I waited one morning until the 9AM production meeting started and I took a box, swept everything from my desk into it, and walked out the door. I went home and told my wife not to answer the phone and I never went back.

I’m not proud of that moment, but I have never felt so frustrated and lost with any job I’ve ever taken on.