You know I wasn’t going to post anything on this thread but after hearing all the c**p about Americans that don’t want to work from our elected officials and the fictitious jobs that we will not do, I am insulted by the premise or even the hint that Americans are lazy.
We, Americans that is, are the most productive people on this earth. We may seem greedy but h*ll who really cares it drives our productivity – what is really wrong with that? When something happens in a far away land, who is the first there to help? We are. Who since the 1940’s has been sending aid to counties to help them? We do. How is the wealth created that helps the rest of the world with their problems? It is all created through our productivity, not our laziness.
OK I will give you all that we have become complacent in many areas but not lazy. Many of us bust our a**es to make a living and no where is that lazy. When you look at other countries, I mean look at them hard, many have no work values or if they do they don’t have much. I find that the people who invade our country work at what they think is acceptable but really they are not building our country up but tearing it down. Many, if not most are uneducated and don’t want to better themselves, just use our country and send money home. But that is all for another time.
We complain that our education system is horrible but if you have kids, it is your fault, not mine. I have an idea what should be taught and how it should be taught in school from my absolute horrible experiences I had in public school but without the kids, I am powerless. I am very tired of parents who think that it is alright to have little Johnny or Janey learn about the arts and other crap that will not do a thing for us as a country when we are in need of people who can think, discover and be true problem solvers. Force a kid to make a decision or make it for them – oh my you are an abuser, how dare you, they must express themselves and be able to experience everything for themselves, yea right. For me it is simple; do something and get your kid involved or don’t complain when your child is the slob behind the counter working at McDonalds – super size that? Get your kids interested in math and science – those are the people we need in this country to make it better. I see a solution, I see what could get kids motivated and take an interest in science and math but at least I am trying to do something – no one seems to take me serious enough to ask what it is all about.
Many of you may have never worked in a global environment like I have. A few of you may have been overseas for the military or maybe for business but beyond that I doubt you really experienced people in a work environment. I can tell you from experience that we are looked down upon because we work too hard, because we have successes with a lot of things we do as a country and because we want to improve our standard of living on our own, not depend on the UN or the EU or anyone else to do it for us. I can also tell you that working with Europeans/Middle Easterns/Asians on projects that had serious deadlines; they did not seem to have the fortitude to do the work that we consider easy. I can not tell you how many times I had to stop and wait for the idiots on the other end of the world to relax and decompress after 2 hours of simple work because it was too d**m hard.
The French, who seem to lead the way with laziness, were the most problematic group I had ever worked with. We missed deadlines because they always had a holiday to go on. I understand that it is mandatory to have 14 days off during the year beside the 100 or so holidays they have to take off. It was nice to learn that an entire department who was critical for a project all went to Italy for two weeks on the morning that we were going to bring a system up in their department. Bastille Day, Revolution in Vietnam day, let them eat cake day, Liberation of Paris Day, King’s birthday, De Gaul Day, Jerry Lewis’s birthday – every d**m holiday you can image and on top of that they only worked 35 hours a week if at that.
The Germans were right behind them and drove us up a wall with questions about insignificant things, like did we have the fan filters on the servers tested to make sure they are to DIN 123-232-234b standards before we accepted them so they could delay things to get out of work - very union attitude. I notice the Germans like part numbers and standards 3 groups of 3 numbers each - I think it is a design to confuse anyone but a German.
The English I could get them to work harder by promising them a pint when I went over there. If we could get past the jokes and the group making fun of the transplant we had in our department who was from Wales – I guess people from Wales are the same as some of our hillbillies.
The Spanish were a pain in the a**, they complained and wanted to change the projects to make them look good but sometimes would not show up with meetings we had at 2 AM our time, telling us that their SEAT broke down on the way to the office (you figure out what a SEAT is). We got less work out of them while all the time looking like they were working than we did with the French – if you can believe that.
The Russians were something else, all they wanted to do was celebrate – I am serious. They held a party while we had a serious worldwide video conference and they ended up all drunk and someone threw up on the Polycom unit cutting them out of the conference. They were happy that they could participate I guess.
The Chinese were ok but they also seemed not to care as did the Japanese, who thought we were too anal about a BILLION $ project and would pull ‘we don’t understand’ to make it a point to take a break even though they all spoke better English than we did.
The Indians we employed tried to get out of work as much as possible, sometimes to the point that all their parents/brothers/sisters/cousins/dogs/rats and cows all died on the same day – this happened multiple times during one project witht he same people. How many parents can someone have? We had to send an American over to New Delhi to supervise them, the Indian supervisor of the department embezzled the Rupees budgeted for equipment and left the country.
The only group I really enjoyed working with were the Aussies, they were right there with us even with the 24 hour tests, never complained (I think they were too drunk on Fosters to care what time it was).
These are all the lighter side of my experiences, there are some that would bother you that had behavior that was insulting. As I had the opportunity to meet some of my French and English colleagues, we discussed productivity during dinner and they were amazed that someone would consider working overtime near a holiday weekend or not take a vacation over a year. They admitted that they were all jealous of us because we had so much –one was even crying when she figured out that my computer room at home was bigger than her flat. She by the way immigrated here legally to enjoy the opportunity.
So when you think about it, are we really lazy?
