November is going to be a busy travel month at work, and I started off with a trip to Nashville/southern Kentucky for my first ever product demo. My main takeaway from this trip is that there is no cell service in southern Kentucky! None whatsoever! I will not be moving there any time soon.
The demo was at a metal manufacturing plant, and it went well (I had an experienced bus. dev. guy with me, so that much was expected). What I didn’t expect were all the rules you have to follow and precautions you have to take when visiting a manufacturing plant.
Coming over the hill out of Middle of Nowhere, KY, we spotted the HUGE plant in the distance. It was easily big enough to fit my high school building inside it three or four times. It had its own railroad! Comparatively, the parking lot was pretty small for such a huge building. I guess those cranes and melting furnaces take up most of the space.
When we arrived at the visitors’ entrance at, we presented ID, filled out visitor forms, and watched a 30 minute (!!) safety video about walking around the plant (the gist of which was that cranes/forklifts/automated metal-carrying train robots/golf carts/bikes all have the right of way over people. After the video, we got our gear which consisted of a neon yellow safety vest (in case we missed that part about all vehicles having the right of way), safety glasses, earplugs, and rubber steel-toed outershoes that went over our regular shoes and made ever step sound like it was being taken by a shod horse. Very stylish over my business casual clothes! I figured it would rather unprofessional to take a photo of myself, as much as I wanted to. It was all standard manufacturing gear, so it’s likely not the last time I’ll be dressed that way.
As for Nashville, I didn’t see much of it aside from the inside of this restaurant (Merchants). At least it was a nice restaurant!
For Science! 