tubebender
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I’ll bet your first reaction was WTF!
Or: “is this a belated April fools joke?”
But it’s neither.
Hugo Chavez did help me buy a Super Tenere.
I got to thinking about this because he was mentioned in the thread about Yamaha oil.
I won’t give him my money either, but I’m willing to take it.
Let me explain.
I work for Solar Turbines (a Caterpillar company) and we manufacture industrial gas turbines that are used in the oil, natural gas, and power generation industries.
Two years ago, Venezuela was in bad shape as they could not produce enough electricity because of their reliance on hydro-electric generation. They had been under drought condition for a number of years. They put out a contract request for mobile power generation units that ran on diesel fuel.
My company won the contract, and last year we built 46 Mobile Power Units. Each MPU consists of a power unit, a generation unit, and a control trailer for every 5 units. It really helped our bottom line. We had forecasted a weak year having lost about 1/3 of our business due to the recession.
It helped a lot of other American businesses too; all of our suppliers, Trail King built the 100+ custom 4 axle trailers, Goodyear tires, the trucking company that had to haul everything to Texas, and numerous other people.
Every year we have some financial targets and if they are met, every full time hourly and salaried employee gets an incentive bonus. In 2009, we got almost nothing. Well, not only did this order help meet our 2010 targets it almost doubled our expected baseline.
We all got a nice bonus last year and $500 of it went to my deposit on the S10.
So thank you Hugo!
Funnily enough, it started raining again last year in Venezuela and filled up their reservoirs. We have been told that most of the MPU’s have not been shipped out yet and they are paying us to store them in Texas. Seems Hugo has an election coming up and has diverted the money that was to be used to develop the sites and infrastructure for the MPU’s into building housing. WTF!
Or: “is this a belated April fools joke?”
But it’s neither.
Hugo Chavez did help me buy a Super Tenere.
I got to thinking about this because he was mentioned in the thread about Yamaha oil.
I won’t give him my money either, but I’m willing to take it.
Let me explain.
I work for Solar Turbines (a Caterpillar company) and we manufacture industrial gas turbines that are used in the oil, natural gas, and power generation industries.
Two years ago, Venezuela was in bad shape as they could not produce enough electricity because of their reliance on hydro-electric generation. They had been under drought condition for a number of years. They put out a contract request for mobile power generation units that ran on diesel fuel.
My company won the contract, and last year we built 46 Mobile Power Units. Each MPU consists of a power unit, a generation unit, and a control trailer for every 5 units. It really helped our bottom line. We had forecasted a weak year having lost about 1/3 of our business due to the recession.
It helped a lot of other American businesses too; all of our suppliers, Trail King built the 100+ custom 4 axle trailers, Goodyear tires, the trucking company that had to haul everything to Texas, and numerous other people.
Every year we have some financial targets and if they are met, every full time hourly and salaried employee gets an incentive bonus. In 2009, we got almost nothing. Well, not only did this order help meet our 2010 targets it almost doubled our expected baseline.
We all got a nice bonus last year and $500 of it went to my deposit on the S10.
So thank you Hugo!
Funnily enough, it started raining again last year in Venezuela and filled up their reservoirs. We have been told that most of the MPU’s have not been shipped out yet and they are paying us to store them in Texas. Seems Hugo has an election coming up and has diverted the money that was to be used to develop the sites and infrastructure for the MPU’s into building housing. WTF!
