JaBbA's Hut

Well, it's been interesting here at Lincoln Electric the last few days. On Monday, a bunch of people in the plant were pulled off whatever they were doing and started cleaning things up. Wednesday, new display areas were set up at the entrance to the plant, and Thursday, the painting started. Everything that didn't move was given a fresh coat of paint - we tried to look as busy as possible to keep from getting a coat of yellow. New posters went up, including a "We're Hiring" sign in the front lobby.

Turns out that Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans and Ohio Governor Taft were here to announce the creation of a report on American Manufacturing. It was a pretty big day for Lincoln, lots of good PR. Evans didn't actually say much, but he took a good hour to say it. And Lincoln's pretty manufacturing plant got some good face time.

A video feed was streamed from here, so that gave us a little something to do this morning...especially since at first they just couldn't get it to work. We discovered that the machine was trying to portscan the internet (and failing, since our firewalls are configured appropriately), and when I got my hands on the machine, I found it infected by at least one and probably more viruses and trojans. No anti-virus, no anti-spyware (apparently, someone had decided that the software was causing problems and deleted McAffee and AdAware).

Anyway, once we got that figured out, the feed worked great. The company does a lot of Congressional hearings, and usually gets 10-12 viewers. They got 204 for this, the largest they've done, so that was pretty good.

Anyway, everything Evans was saying was good for Lincoln, good for me personally....and bad for this country and for my kids. They kept talking about making the tax cuts permanent. And I kept thinking about my kids paying off a multi-trillion dollar debt.