A day in the parking lot

I really like words. I like to talk. I like to write. I like to describe situations. Up to this point in my life, words have generally not failed me (you could make a pretty good case for me using too many words, but rarely too few). Now as I sit here, I'm not sure that I will be able to do justice to 'car safety day' here at JCI China. I can't imagine that words could possibly capture what happened last saturday, but here goes. . .
So 5 years ago nobody in Changchun had a car or a drivers license. You could argue they weren't real great at riding bikes since they seem to go where ever their bike and their little hearts desire. Now a small percentage of folks drive, but a small percentate of 8M people is a pretty big number. JCI has decided it would be good for everyone then to provide a safe environment to learn some driving skills.
HR planned a perfect day of for driver skill devlopment by having everyone who has a car at JCI(I think the number was 16 out of 3500 employees) spend the day doing races through obstacle courses with their own car. To keep it interesting, we would learn safe driving by getting timed driving through obstacle courses as fast as we could. One could argue that we would be learning reckless driving on this day, but you have to start somewhere.
So the day began with a review of the prizes. First place would be a 12 volt dust buster that you could use to keep your car clean. 2nd place was a feather wand that everyone here uses to ‘dust’ their car (reference earlier blog post about pollution). 3rd place was a tool box to keep your cleaning supplies. The consolation prize was 2 gallons of radiator fluid. As a frightening side note, at the end of the day, everyone poured one of their 2 gallons of coolant into their radiators. Not sure how all 16 cars at JCI simultaneously needed a gallon of coolant added, but it was clearly the thing to do.
Then it was time for the practice rounds. Since I didn’t have a car, I was offered another guys car to use. I’m not sure what kind of car it was, but the owner used it to race once per month in this parking lot going through these same obstacles. He apparently had been one of the organizers for the day. So it was a 20 year old car with a 1.3l engine. But it had sweet racing seats with4 point harnesses and significant lateral support on the seat. It was small, but it was used to the course so I thought it would work fine. We walked through the 3 obstacle courses on foot to begin, because you don’t want to rush right in and start driving. The organizer explained how pylons worked and how to move from the outside of a lane to the inside as you pass through corners. I’m not sure anyone was listening.
The course:
Race 1: Basically a counter clockwise track with significant hair pin turns and a slalom course through 3 flags.
Race 2: Seashell shaped course with reducing concentric circles until you reach the middle. 3 point turn around and then drive back out.
Race 3: Figure 8 course with a plate of ping pong balls in the back seat. Go to fast and get penalized for losing the balls. Go to slow and lose the race.
After the first practice round in the morning, my chariot was nowhere to be seen. I ended up have to use another JCI car for the rest of the warm-ups. At lunch the owner of the ‘race car’ told me his car would be unavailable for me to drive. I asked him why and he said 2nd gear didn’t work anymore. He said that his car was Chinese and it was not built to survive the way I drove it. Still not sure what I should have said to him at that point. I settled on “huh. Bummer dude”.
Lunch was when things started going from strange to crazy. First the dancing girls. I’m not sure who’s idea this was, but there they were. Portable stereo system and all. Sequin blouse/pant combos. And doing some sort of half cheerleading, half belly dancing routine. There’s only women who work in HR and they put this program together. How they thought it would be a good idea to hire dancing girls as entertainment escapes me. The other strange thing is that no one thought this was strange but me. I told a few people that we don’t normally have dancing girls at our work outings in Holland. They all looked at me the same way (you know the look: “what world do you live in white man”) and said something like “huh, why not?”.
To add to the ‘did I drop acid on my way to work this morning’ feeling, they also had 2 adult stuffed animal mascots walking around. I think they were both mice but I’m not sure. They never really did much, but they definitely added to the atmosphere.
After the dancing, it was time for the driving competition to fire up in earnest. This particular Saturday was a working day (this is a long story that will require a different post) so all the important people couldn’t come to driver safety until after lunch. So the VW CC and the Audi Q5 were not part of the morning training runs. What followed can only be classified as bizarre. Like twilight zone bizarre. I literally pinched myself a couple times and asked out loud ‘am I really awake. Is this really happening?”
People were ‘driving’ through the courses. Some were going painfully slow. Some were running over pylons, and some were going ‘so fast’ that they couldn’t keep the car in between the pylons. The 3 point turn around was a highlight for me. Forward. Stop. Wait. Reverse. Stop. Wait. Forward. Stop. Wait. Etc. . . “Look mom, I’m racin’”.
Needless to say I fared pretty well in the prize department. It felt a little awkward taking 3 of the 4 first place prizes. It would have been 4/4 except my driver insisted that I use his minivan for the final race through the obstacle course. The Audi Q5 beat me 44.5 to 44 seconds. This was probably good for my career as beating the general manager in his $75,000 car with my chevy venture could have been career limiting.
The day ended with one more dance from the girls and the mice, everyone filling up their radiators, and then everyone picking up the pylons and going home. I’m still not convinced this day actually happened except for all the dust busters in the apartment and the pictures on my laptop. Kinda wonder what JCI is going to be doing next month.