An Ocean of Coca Cola
I haven't been doing a very good job keeping this blog up-to-date lately. My sense of humor has been in a lull lately since my wife started watching Nancy Grace every night. I'm not blaming her, I think Nancy Grace does an excellent job of keeping us outraged all the time. That's her purpose. She keeps the gruesome details of crime in our faces for one hour each night (repeated every other hour after that first hour). As much as I hate to, I think we need to keep it fresh on our minds daily. With as many rapists, murderers, child abusers, extortionists, etc. that are walking amongst us it is easy to believe that 1 in 15 Americans will spend time in jail. Crime Statistics Enough of the depressing stuff.
Several years ago I worked with a number of Ukrainian engineers who immigrated here when the Soviet Union fell. They were an interesting group. I think the most interesting thing was that they had nothing to do with one another. Personally, if I were thousands of miles from my homeland and starting a new life, I would want someone I could at least have a conversation with. But they rarely spoke to each other.
The first day for one fellow, Leonard, the boss brought him to the engineering department and introduced him. I had no idea my boss was such a talented linguist. It touched your heart to see the big boss standing there with his hand on Leonard's shoulder extending a warm welcome to our new comrade. "THIS...IS...LEO-NARD!!!...LEO-NARD...WILL...BE...WORKING...WITH...US!!! LEO-NARD...IS...FROM...RUSSIA!!! WEL-COME...LEO-NARD!!! Leonard didn't speak one word of english, but was all smiles as the boss called his name repeatedly in his loud and slow english version of the Russian language.
Lazar was the funniest of the our new Russian friends. Since the US had never established an exchange rate for dollars to rubles, Lazar made all of his price comparisons based on Coca-Cola. He would tell you how many cokes a pair of jeans cost or how many cokes a hamburger cost. Once we asked him how much a new American car would cost in Russia and he seriously replied, "Oh, that would be an OCEAN of Coca-cola!"
Lazar had a great sense of humor. Once, while another engineer and I were working on a project, some subject came up and the engineer suggested we ask Lazar since he was working on that particular part. Off-handedly I said, "Lazar doesn't know...he doesn't even know what planet he's on." With that the other engineer called out to Lazar, "Hey, Lazar...what planet are you on?" Lazar came walking over to us with a puzzled look on his face and asked, "Planet? What is planet?" We had a chuckle and went on with our business. The next morning Lazar came into work and when I asked him how he was doing he replied with a smile, "I am as fine as a frog hair and I am on planet EARTH!"
Lazar spent all of his time doing cad work on the computer with AutoCAD. This was before we had fast computers, so to keep things moving along, you didn't let AutoCAD do an autosave on its own. If you did, it would take several minutes on a large drawing and would break up your "creative flow", so to speak. So we made it a habit to manually save our work every quarter to half an hour or when we got to a good spot. During the summer we had a number of power outages and the office we worked in had no windows what so ever. One morning the lights went out about ten o'clock and we were suddenly plunged into total darkness. From the darkness we heard a familiar voice with a strong Russian accent say, "BAD NEWS!" We burst out laughing because we instantly knew who it was and what had happened. Lazar had been working all morning and hadn't saved his drawing a single time!
Several years ago I worked with a number of Ukrainian engineers who immigrated here when the Soviet Union fell. They were an interesting group. I think the most interesting thing was that they had nothing to do with one another. Personally, if I were thousands of miles from my homeland and starting a new life, I would want someone I could at least have a conversation with. But they rarely spoke to each other.
The first day for one fellow, Leonard, the boss brought him to the engineering department and introduced him. I had no idea my boss was such a talented linguist. It touched your heart to see the big boss standing there with his hand on Leonard's shoulder extending a warm welcome to our new comrade. "THIS...IS...LEO-NARD!!!...LEO-NARD...WILL...BE...WORKING...WITH...US!!! LEO-NARD...IS...FROM...RUSSIA!!! WEL-COME...LEO-NARD!!! Leonard didn't speak one word of english, but was all smiles as the boss called his name repeatedly in his loud and slow english version of the Russian language.
Lazar was the funniest of the our new Russian friends. Since the US had never established an exchange rate for dollars to rubles, Lazar made all of his price comparisons based on Coca-Cola. He would tell you how many cokes a pair of jeans cost or how many cokes a hamburger cost. Once we asked him how much a new American car would cost in Russia and he seriously replied, "Oh, that would be an OCEAN of Coca-cola!"
Lazar had a great sense of humor. Once, while another engineer and I were working on a project, some subject came up and the engineer suggested we ask Lazar since he was working on that particular part. Off-handedly I said, "Lazar doesn't know...he doesn't even know what planet he's on." With that the other engineer called out to Lazar, "Hey, Lazar...what planet are you on?" Lazar came walking over to us with a puzzled look on his face and asked, "Planet? What is planet?" We had a chuckle and went on with our business. The next morning Lazar came into work and when I asked him how he was doing he replied with a smile, "I am as fine as a frog hair and I am on planet EARTH!"
Lazar spent all of his time doing cad work on the computer with AutoCAD. This was before we had fast computers, so to keep things moving along, you didn't let AutoCAD do an autosave on its own. If you did, it would take several minutes on a large drawing and would break up your "creative flow", so to speak. So we made it a habit to manually save our work every quarter to half an hour or when we got to a good spot. During the summer we had a number of power outages and the office we worked in had no windows what so ever. One morning the lights went out about ten o'clock and we were suddenly plunged into total darkness. From the darkness we heard a familiar voice with a strong Russian accent say, "BAD NEWS!" We burst out laughing because we instantly knew who it was and what had happened. Lazar had been working all morning and hadn't saved his drawing a single time!
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