Did I ever tell you I got a job at Chrysler, back in the day? Yeah, I don’t like to tell a lot of people about it. No, it’s not just the connotations, though those certainly were there. The truth is that I bombed out on my first big project, and by the time I returned home, they didn’t have a job waiting for me anymore.
What do you mean, where did I go? There could be no other place that Chrysler would send an up-and-coming badge engineer than to Mother Russia herself. By the time the smoking gypsy minibus rattled to a stop outside the VAZ factory, I had already made up my mind that I was going to get out of this country as quickly as possible. I just didn’t know how I was going to do it, yet.
In the project update meeting, I could see the VAZ representatives were already very cross with me. They spoke angrily, and then my interpreter, who I was increasingly learning was not on my side, would haltingly burp out a five-to-ten word summary of what I had just been screamed at about.
As the hours wore on, I slowly began to realize what had happened. They were angry about the Chrysler Sebring, which we had sub-licensed to them and they began to construct as the Volga Siber. Initial quality indications were extremely negative, to say the least.
One junior engineer spat on me when I asked him if it was at least better than his 40-year-old VAZ 2101 daily driver. It was inferior to walking, he screamed at me, and spat again, this time with a bit of blood mixed in. I took note that this guy was very detail-oriented. He was going places, I felt.
Eventually, things came to a head and the VAZ factory management decided to hold me for ransom until Chrysler would deliver to them a better car to knock off. My growing command of the Russian language led me to believe that my captors hoped for perhaps a Dodge Neon or one of those K-cars, like they had expected.
At the very mention of the legendary K-car, all members of the engineering staff would assemble in a huddle, in a dark corner of the factory floor, and speak excitedly about talking dashboards for up to fifteen minutes. I began to use this tactic to stall in negotiations, as otherwise I feared they would discover I knew little or nothing about automotive engineering and was as a result only in the top 1% of Chrysler engineers.
Eventually, I was loaded onto a cargo plane in the middle of the night and woke up lying on the runway at Bishop International, no longer wearing pants. I checked into the office, expecting a hero’s welcome for the brave sacrifice I had made to keep the winds of international trade going. My boss, however, was not pleased.
“We had to give up the secrets to Lean Burn technology to get you freed!” he shrieked. “Lee Iacocca had to cancel his campaign for President - there’s just no way he could possibly do deals like this with the Russians and still get elected!”
