Chapter 9: Training

THE REST OF OUR WORK WEEK was thankfully less dramatic. Mr. Martin was back on Wednesday afternoon and we met to go over the system and the plan for our jobs. He was impressed that I’d already talked to Polaroid and Ronda had made my reservations already. He looked at our world map that was beginning to take shape as Josie typed up the embassy and consulate names and placed them on the map.

“I honestly didn’t expect any less from the two of you,” he laughed. “Next week, Nate will be in Boston. I want Ronda to take the official travel training course so we know arrangements are being made according to the right procedures. You’ll also get a full introductory letter to your contacts at the embassies and consulates. I like the idea of getting everyone in the office here a badge. I’ll put out a notice that we’ll do that the week after you get back from Boston. Other than that, I’d encourage you not to take too many initiatives on your own. I know that sounds idiotic, but we’re a big department and following the proper chain of authority on things keeps us from tripping over each other.”

“I think I understand, sir,” I said.

“Ronda, as soon as you have taken the training, I want a proposal from you regarding how to attack the rollout. Let’s meet early next week to set a strategy. Nate, management of your tour is in her hands. Your job is execution. I’ll need to see a training outline when you get back from Boston. I’m not sure why you are spending five days training on this equipment. It’s what George told me you needed. I’d like to see us get training and installation down to two days tops, so we can do two a week. If we can make three in a week, so much the better.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

“I know you will. Any questions? You’ll both go through protocol training Thursday and Friday this week. Good luck.”

I wasn’t certain if we’d been congratulated or reprimanded. I guess it was both. I didn’t ask anything about the news from Munich and he didn’t volunteer any information. We didn’t really need anything more than what was broadcast.

Anna drove by to pick us up after work in the VW and we headed up to the new house. The bus was full of household goods and supplies. She’d gone one direction shopping and Patricia had gone another. She’d brought us a change of clothes, so we could dress down to help move things in and clean things up. We picked up Chinese food on the way and had our first meal in the new house. We didn’t have any furniture yet, so we ate on the deck as if we were having a picnic. Toni was happy about that and still loved seeing the water.

After we’d gotten the day’s shopping put away, we went back to Jordan and Nadia’s house where all our clothes were. We figured we’d be able to move into our new home on the weekend, if the furniture was delivered over the next two days.

“I’ve decided to take the job Jordan has offered,” Anna said. “It’s part time and I’ll only be working three days a week most of the year. At tax time, I’m likely to be putting in a full forty or more hours a week. I just don’t see how Patricia and I can really have full time jobs and look after the two of you, though. We all have to admit that you are our primary wage-earners. And as Patricia gets along in her pregnancy, she’s going to need more help.”

“Is that okay with you, Patricia?” I asked.

“Yes, honey. I don’t expect you all to take care of me all the time, but you were so supportive during my last pregnancy, I hope you’ll continue that. I have the advantage this time of not looking forward to being a single mom. I have three wonderful spouses and I know you’ll never abandon me. On the other hand, I don’t have parents and in-laws hanging around to wait on me or rush me to a doctor,” Patricia said. I held her in my arms with a hand on her tummy as we sat in the little third floor sitting room at the Marshes’. “I’ll take some time tomorrow to get Toni over and registered for pre-school, then see what I can find for a local job. Also part time, I guess.”

“I’m so happy Nate and I come home to a loving family after a day at work. I know it will be even harder when we start traveling. Nate will be gone all next week already,” Ronda said. “But we will always be coming home to our beautiful family.”

I worried a little about that. Ronda and I would usually be traveling together. Patricia and Anna would usually be home with Toni. I just hoped we didn’t get too much into the mode of having the daddies go off to work and the mommies sitting at home with the children. I was pretty sure that would cause a breakdown in our family relationships.

I could already tell there was going to be a lot more getting home to go to bed exhausted instead of going to bed to make love. All four of us were beat.

By Saturday, we had two bedrooms and the kitchen furnished, including a table and chairs. We had a sofa and two chairs arranged in our living room area so they looked out through the windows at the lake. My task, after we’d moved our clothes from Jordan’s up to the new house, was to go to Sears and get a grill and deck furniture. We’d only have a few more weeks to enjoy the outdoors before the weather closed in for the winter. In fact, some of our neighbors were winterizing their homes to leave for the winter. I guessed a lot of the property out here was still summer homes.

Sears was a bust and they suggested I try Ace Hardware. I lucked out there. It was end of season and they were trying to get rid of some pieces so they could start putting Christmas stuff out. Already! But as a result, I got a nice set of white iron patio furniture and a charcoal grill and felt lucky that I got out of there for under $300! There were even cushions for the chairs.

I picked up a bag of charcoal, too, and some lighter fluid. Of course, with the microbus loaded as full as I could get it, I still stopped at a supermarket and got hamburger to put on the grill.

When I got back, the girls had our clothes put away and the beds made. The kitchen had dishes and pots and pans. I knew we’d be adding to what was there for weeks or months to come. We were spoiled in Stratford. When we need something, chances were that we could find one of whatever in the store under our apartment. Need a cast iron frying pan? Sure, there was one in the store. Set of silverware? Do you want stainless or sterling? Melanie kept a steady stream of second hand stuff in the store.

I was lucky I remembered a long-handled spatula so I could turn the burgers on the grill.

Monday morning, Anna joined Ronda on the train downtown. Anna would stop by Camera Warehouse and touch base there before reporting for her first day of work at Jordan’s company. Patricia and Toni took me to the airport and I caught my flight to Boston.

It was kind of funny to kiss my wife and daughter goodbye when they dropped me off at the curb. We’d kissed our other wives goodbye at the train station. I always thought of Chicago as being around halfway across the country from either coast. I realized quickly that we were a lot closer to the East Coast than the West. The flight time to Boston was about half that of my flights to LA.

I was thankful for that. I was no longer flying first class. Not on Uncle Sam’s dollar. I collected my bag and found the taxi stand, giving the guy the address of my hotel in Cambridge. Then I just cowered in the back seat until he squealed into the drop-off at the Holiday Inn and I paid him for getting to the hotel with both of us still alive.

I checked in, but had to wait until the room had been cleaned before I could go to it. Janet met me at 12:30 and took me to lunch at Legal Seafood.

“You can see that I’m not wining and dining you in a high class restaurant,” Janet said as we sat at a picnic table with our paper plates full of fish and chips. “But there is scarcely anything that is more Bostonian than Legal Sea Foods. Their slogan is, ‘If it isn’t fresh, it isn’t Legal.’ I just thought it would be a nice way to introduce you to our culture here at Polaroid.”

“And how did it get the name?” I asked.

“Trading stamps,” Janet laughed. She was a very pleasant woman, in her early thirties, I guessed. Reddish brown hair and a nice shape. I could see photographing her. “In the early 1900s, there were Legal Trading Stamps. When the original market opened in 1904, just a couple of doors down from here, it was called the Legal Cash Market. The second generation opened the Legal Sea Foods market next door in 1950. They sold fresh fish and fish and chips. And, like traditional fish and chips in England, they were only served for take-away and were even wrapped in newspaper for a while. A few years ago, they expanded the menu and put in the picnic tables so people could sit and eat.”

“Pretty cool,” I said. “So, what’s the agenda for this afternoon?”

“A lot of backslapping and saying hullo. We’ll show you the equipment with a quick tour and a tour of Polaroid. I understand you are a photographer and Mr. Taylor has a project he would like you to work on as well as learning all the intricacies of the new equipment. That will all start tomorrow. Our commission from the State Department is that you should be able to fully tear down, troubleshoot, and repair the equipment, in addition to just knowing how to take the pictures and laminate the passports.”

“They have great expectations,” I sighed. I didn’t know I was supposed to be able to tear the equipment down and repair it.

“Well, why don’t we head over and get the grand tour started.”

Janet showed me around the Polaroid facility and introduced me to various people. We finally got to George Taylor who welcomed me and joined us on the way to my introduction to the ID3 System. Along the way, I saw various posters still in the building decrying Polaroid’s involvement in South Africa posted by the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement. I stopped at one and pointed it out to George.

“So, how goes the great experiment?” I asked. Janet gasped as George turned to address it.

“You’re still watching, aren’t you?” he asked, holding a hand up to Janet so he could stop and talk to me. “It’s frankly a disaster. I can see no difference in the state of affairs between when we last met and today. We do not do business with South Africa, its government, or its military. But their program of requiring passbooks for black Africans continues. Apartheid continues. Are we bringing pressure to bear? Yes. Other corporations have joined us in refusing to do business with South Africa and applying pressure to improve the lot of black Africans. If you ask me, it’s a doomed strategy.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

“So am I. We have made other positive steps. We are no longer manufacturing the ID2 system. The system you’ll be trained on replaces it. There is no longer a boost button and it is no longer as portable a system—though you will discover that it is portable and you’ll be carrying one around with you. You won’t be able to stop on the street and imprison a black person in sixty seconds,” George said.

“What’s the next step?”

“There is a pretty popular concept in the treatment of alcoholism and drug abuse that says a person must hit rock bottom before he can begin to recover. I don’t quite buy that. There can be steps along the way. What we refer to as raising the bottom so when a person drops, he doesn’t have as far to go. That is what we’re engaged in in South Africa. The country is going to crash. All we can really do is try to put in place systems, education, jobs, and support that will keep the crash from killing everyone. If you’re asking me if we’re succeeding, I have to say, I don’t know. We just keep shoveling to fill the pit they are going to fall into.”

“I wish I’d heard that message at the symposium a year ago,” I said. “It helps to understand.”

“Yes, but outside of this ten square feet where you and I and Janet are standing, this message does not exist. It is my own analysis and has nothing to do with any stated company policy. If it did, it is likely that the regime in power would find a way to retaliate, even more than they already have.”

“You mean by requiring that companies not pay a black employee as much as a white employee, even if they have more responsibility? Not allowing a company to hire more blacks than whites? Taxing companies who raise the pay level of blacks?” I asked.

“You’re better informed than I expected,” George chuckled.

“I attended a special intersession in January on location portraiture in England. One of my fellow photographers was from South Africa and I believe is related to someone at the distributor there,” I said.

“You’ll do well in your new position. Continue to collect those important people in your portfolio. They will be important in the future,” George said. He looked over at Janet who was tapping her watch. “Ah, yes. We need to get into the presentation room so we can all get the official presentation out of the way.”

We walked into a small theatre-like room where a couple dozen others were gathered and found a seat.

The presentation started with a slide show of the issues that were being addressed with the new ID system. It was pretty much like the prototype I’d used at the symposium last fall, but this had a few bells and whistles that were customized for use by the government. It could be set to accept the standard badge-size template and laminate a stiff photo ID, or it could be set to expose a passport-size page and laminate only the half that contained the photo and personal information. It would be signed after the passport was assembled.

The assembly process was the “plus” part of the system, and actually wasn’t manufactured by Polaroid.

“Our challenge in creating a passport stitching device was mostly to make all the features compact and portable,” the presenter said. “Thread stitching in bound books is well-known, so the mechanics were not a problem. You will see four stages in the bindery. First, the collated pages are fed into the stitcher and are precisely stitched together. Notice the booklet is still flat, unlike what you would find in saddle-stitching machines and most book binderies. This is because step two is pressing the cover onto the flyleaf page. This process is done under heat and pressure to create a tight permanent bond between the cover and the booklet. Note that this conceals the stitching from the outside of the book. There is no way to unstitch and restitch the pages. Third, while the book is still hot, it is fed into the folder. US Passport books resist bending and folding, so the process of making it a booklet has to be done under intense pressure. Finally, the finished book is fed into the trimmer and burst cut, meaning it is aligned and trimmed all in one die cut. The rounded corners of a passport book, while a seemingly minor detail, make counterfeiting a US Passport an order of magnitude more difficult.”

So far, we hadn’t seen any of the equipment. It was time for the live demonstration of setup through finished passport. Of course, they were not using official passport pages or covers for the demonstration. I was amazed. There was a low table next to the podium. The Polaroid guy put a suitcase on it and flipped open latches. He then removed a cover to reveal the entire photographing and laminating system. It wasn’t more than two feet wide and less than that high. He showed the form and inserted it into the camera, then got one of the guys from the front row to stand up and took his picture. Forty-five seconds later, the fully laminated and processed photo ‘passport’ page was ejected from the machine and he handed it to the bindery guy.

The bindery was no bigger than the camera and laminator. He took the page, lined it up with half a dozen ‘interior’ pages, and fed it into the stitcher. He literally fed it into one end of the machine and the finished booklet popped out of the other end in less than a minute. He handed the booklet to the volunteer who had his photo taken and it was passed around. Just totally cool.

When I got to examine the booklet, I noticed the page with his picture was all one image, the text printed onto the same paper as the photo. This was laminated. They explained that this meant the page could no longer be cut apart and a new image inserted—a common way of counterfeiting passports in the old days, I guess. There wasn’t a separate image to be replaced.

There was a dozen of us who got to go through the process of taking a picture and creating a booklet under the guidance and supervision of the two manufacturer reps. The process was pretty straightforward and I thought the lowest level person at the embassy could probably operate the machine. Training on it should be a breeze.

That was it for day one. Janet dropped me off at my hotel and told me she’d pick me up at eight for my first ‘real training’ day. Hmm. I already figured I could operate the machinery. I wondered what ‘real training’ was going to involve. Then I remembered that I was supposed to be able to troubleshoot the devices.

I was going to call home right away, but realized that at five o’clock in Chicago no one would likely be home yet. I checked at the front desk and found out there was a local bar about three blocks away that had a good reputation for food and was the only place that was in walking distance.

It was really a local dive tavern, but the food was great and I even enjoyed a beer. Unfortunately, I was beginning to discover that a lot of local places didn’t accept American Express. I paid cash, as I had at lunch, and carefully retained my receipt. I was going to have to be careful about making sure I accounted for anything I spent that wasn’t a normal daily expense. I was making a good salary, but there was no sense spending my own money on things the government would reimburse me for.

I got back to the hotel about seven-thirty and called home. We must have talked for half an hour. I had to tell Toni a story and love my wives. I stretched out on the bed and was asleep before I knew what hit me.

The hotel served a hot breakfast to guests, so I didn’t worry about going out to eat. I was ready to head for the office at 8:00 when Janet stopped to pick me up. We were there in half an hour and she showed me where the training would be and where coffee and sweet rolls were. I didn’t really need a sweet roll, but they were right there. Sure, I ate one.

At nine o’clock, a guy in a blue lab coat came in and introduced himself as Ray Engle, the tech who would be my trainer. No one else arrived.

“Okay,” he started. “I’m Ray. I assume you’re Nate and you’re going to learn how to disassemble and reassemble the new ID3US.”

“I guess so,” I said. “Aren’t there any others in the class?”

“Uh ... Why would you think that?”

“There was a couple dozen in the demonstration yesterday.”

“Oh. The others were all prospective customers. I don’t expect we’ll start filling orders for any of them for six months to a year. Things move slowly with the government, no matter what country you’re from. We had the demonstration we went through yesterday with the State Department two years ago.”

“Wow! I’m still not used to the government timetable.”

“Well, how much camera repair have you done?”

“Nothing beyond cleaning and adjusting my personal cameras.”

“What are your personal cameras?”

“Nikon 35, Hasselblad 2x2, and Linhof 4x5.”

“You’re a professional photographer?”

“Yes.”

“Bit of overkill for learning this little charmer. You could probably read the manual and figure it all out. I’ll try to show you some of the tricks and what is most likely to break or fail. Since these are being shipped all over the world, we’ve tried to make them bulletproof, so to speak. But there’s always something.”

Ray started in with a guided tour, showing me the tech manual and pointing out all the parts. Then we got into the case and he started taking it apart. He’d show me where something was, take it apart, reassemble it, and then hand me the tools to repeat what he’d just done.

Getting inside the camera and the laminator was really a trip. He explained what each little part would do and how to fix anything that was likely to go wrong.

Lunch was brought in and Janet joined us again at that point.

“So, all the guys at the demo yesterday were from different countries?” I asked.

“Pretty much. The customer and then his customer rep. You wouldn’t believe how primitive the passport system is in some countries,” Janet said. “Not to worry, though. All of them have been vetted before we were cleared to contact. It wouldn’t surprise me if in a year or so, you were offered a job or contracts to install and train the equipment in other countries.”

“Not likely. I’m on a two-and-a-half-year contract with Uncle Sam.”

“How’d you get that?”

“Got drafted. My work for the State Department is my alternative service.”

“That’s cool. I have a friend doing alternative service in a mental hospital. They just seemed to try to find the shittiest jobs they could to shove guys into who wouldn’t fight their shitty war,” she said.

“Sounds like you have an opinion on it.”

“I’m not supposed to talk about it in the office. Please don’t tell anyone. It took me a long time to get the assignment to rep to the government.”

“Lips are sealed.”

“Tomorrow, after official work, I’m to take you to dinner and then introduce you to the team making the giant camera. It’s off the record, but you can spend as much time as you need getting familiar with the equipment and take your pictures.”

“Who’s my model?” I asked.

“What? Um ... I assumed you have a model. But you didn’t travel with anyone, did you? You don’t have a model here in Boston? Um ... I’ll have to check with George about that. He’s really talked up your style with the development team.”