ford kills mercury

Finally. Perhaps as a young-ish person, I never properly understood either the appeal or historical significance of the Mercury brand for Ford Motor Co. In my eyes, they were a homeless tweener brand that was stuck between Ford's increasingly high-end trim models and improved quality and Lincoln's lowest level of luxury offerings.

From the chart in the WSJ article, this is hardly some recent trend, not even induced by the last two recessions. This has been a long-term decline since the mid-80's with a sharp drop-off in sales starting in the late 90's. I don't understand the automotive business well enough to figure out why this decision took so long to make. Perhaps some bit of silliness called hope egged them on into believing that Mercury would become hip and popular with younger buyers. Or the dealerships and their byzantine relationship with the manufacturer. It was taking nearly 1800 dealerships to sell less than 100K cars a year. Even accounting for many of those dealerships selling other FoMoCo models, that's not enough sales volume for that many dealers.

Anyway, I like Ford, as much as I can like any large automaker. I have no doubt the decision to kill their Mercury brand was difficult, but it seems long overdue. For what it's worth, at least Mercury cars had reasonably normal names unlike the move towards increasingly silly letter combinations over at Lincoln.

Edit: I rephrased a horribly awkward sentence that I had previously thought was exceptionally well written. However, since I rarely proofread my work, it turns out it was quite poorly phrased.

Q1 comedy

I know this is old news by now, but I've been re-listening to the Q1 earnings conference call from April of this year. As always, you can find it available for download on the company's website. If you do download the .mp3 and listen to it, there is a hilarious moment at the 37:45 mark when one of the analyst asks a very long run-on question and the "um" that is initially uttered in response is just epically unintentionally hilarious to me. I'm not sure why it is, but I just laughed out loud in the middle of the office while listening to it. It's such a deer in the headlights moment for our usually polished CEO.

Edit: The shock was not due to the information being asked for in the question, but the astounding way in which the question was asked. At the beginning of the Q&A session, analysts are told they can ask one question and one follow-up question. Most will actually end up asking one question, then an often unrelated second question and then perhaps a short-follow-up question so they often sneak in an extra question, but everyone seems okay with how it all works out. For this question, this was the analyst’s follow-up question, but it was a doozy.

i'm on a plane!

More accurately, I was on a plane. The not-so-top secret company charter that works it's way up and down the West African coast from Angola to Nigeria and back down again (but not in the same day). I could be wrong about where it starts and stops since I've never flown the entire length of the charter route. It's a 30-passenger Embraer 120 complete with drink service. A definite step up from the Beechcraft 1900 that flew out of Farmington.

i'm on a boat! (or ship?)

But maybe it was an FDPSO. Specifically, this thing and whatever you want to call it. FDPSO stands for floating, drilling, production, storage, and offloading. As the very sexy name implies, it floats in the water, drills wells, produces oil, stores said oil, and then offloads the oil into tankers. Here’s a picture of it (that will prompt for download).

Actually, I’m no longer on the boat. They block a lot of websites including blogger which I suppose makes sense since bandwidth is limited. Instead, I’m back on the non-slowly undulating land. It was somewhat reminiscent of the recent cruise I took back in January, complete with pretty decent food, but less onboard entertainment, and the “moon pool” on the rig is not for swimming.

The trip also included my first helicopter ride. In the picture linked above, the tower at the front of the ship is actually the flare stack and it is (almost?) always burning. As we approached the vessel, the music from Jurassic Park was going through my head and I was picturing the scene when the chopper first lands on the island by the waterfall. As a point of clarification, there were no dinosaurs on the rig.

I suppose I could discuss why I was there (work of course), but you know I generally won’t go into too much detail about work-specific matters in this forum.

Indestructible corollas

Taxis here are blue and white. Well, they are mostly blue, with various white stripes and piping, but from what I can tell, no two paint jobs are alike. Apparently, the requirement is to just be mostly blue with some white stripes and make it look however you want. (For what it’s worth, the buses are 12-15 passenger vans that are mostly blue with some yellow. However I did see one with yellow as the dominant color. Blasphemy, the guy who drives it probably gets made fun of by the other bus drivers.)

The preeminent taxi vehicle is the Toyota Corolla, circa late 80’s or early 90’s. From the looks of them, it seems like most are sixth generation or possibly seventh generation Corollas. There are some Nissans and a few others thrown into the mix, but it is the almighty and indestructible Corolla that rules the roads here (since most vehicles appear to be taxis). And they are indestructible. Sure they may rattle and squeak and apparently the check engine light is defaulted to being on when they import them here, but they have taught me you can throw dreadfully awful roads at a car and it will survive, though the passengers and their Faberge eggs may not make it. An added bonus is that seatbelts are apparently dead weight and not to be found in many of them. Much like a taxi with more than half a tank of gas. As to whether or not I should tell some taxi drivers that the giant ‘Turbo’ sticker in the rear windshield will not actually make the car go faster seems a bit esoteric. (Note: Turbo is actually a common brand of beer here).

Truth be told, it seems like most taxi drivers take care of their vehicles as best they can. While I may not care for their choice of music, every car I have been in has been clean with seat covers and a reasonable attempt to personalize the vehicle a little bit. During various times of the day, you can usually see several parked near some water with the drivers washing them and wiping them down, keeping them as clean as possible given the roads, occasional mud, and constant dust. Mechanical maintenance is a bit less clear, though any 20-year old car is often in need of replacement bits and pieces like wiring, switches, fuses, and check engine lights.

There undoubtedly comes a time when these vehicles return to the great assembly line in the sky. Or an abandoned mine shaft. Rest assured that these vehicles have seen every bit of their useful life squeezed from them.

equivalent neighborhood?

I was asked in a comment to compare Pointe-Noire to some US city/neighborhood. I could even break it down to individual aspects if it would help with better comparisons. I don’t think I have seen enough of the United States to find a good comparison to most aspects of this city. Or that’s just my polite way of saying I don’t think there is anywhere in the US that is this poorly developed. You’re not going to find a half-million person city in the US with infrastructure like this. You’d be hard pressed to find a half-thousand person rural town in the US with infrastructure like Pointe-Noire. I think sewage is ok, though it all likely goes into the ocean untreated, but there are occasional power outages, water quality is suspect, food hygiene issues, telephones seem ok, but mobile service seems like it might be over-capacity, internet is less available, and air quality is middling with what I assume are zero emission controls for cars and industry.

As I said before, it’s not a bad city in the sense that it is better than expected. It’s just, as a whole, a still developing (I hope) city. One person who has been here about a year told me he has seen significant improvement in the city in the past year so I certainly appreciate not having been here a year ago. There is construction all over the place, children go to school, and while people are poor-ish (not really sure how poor), food appears to be available.

Part of my inability to really assess to the city is the insular world I live in. I’m at work. I’m at home. I’m out with co-workers. But it’s all an expat world. I’ve seen and been to a couple uniquely local things and I’ll discuss them at some future date, but the vast majority of my time is spent working, sleeping, or eating in an environment that could be transported to many other places. Except for the beach. It’s pretty sweet to eat fresh calamari and crab on the beach just 50m from the water.

The trash is everywhere

The thing I probably dislike the most about Pointe-Noire is that there is trash everywhere. I’ll try to take pictures without looking like a gawker out on the streets, but there are piles of trash of varying composition, size, and decay in just about every slightly lower patch of ground. There’s also a lot of dust or fine dirt or sand that seems to creep into the paved streets with alarming speed, but that’s small potatoes compared to the trash problem. I’m not really sure why it’s all over the place, but I assume it is a combination of poor infrastructure for trash pick-up service, a cultural thing wherein people are not historically accustomed to non-biodegradable trash, relatively recent rise of the city (which is related to infrastructure), and habits from colonial legacy. That last one is not my idea, but one a (French) colleague postulated about since he said much of former French colonial Africa is like this when it comes to trash and he thought it was a French thing. I’m not in a position to compare this place to Ghana, Nigeria, or South Africa, but I suspect it could be a colonial thing, not simply a French colonial thing.

I am doing my best to not dislike the trash. Why? Mostly because I loathe trash on the ground. But there’s just so much of it, I’m better off, well, not exactly embracing the trash, but just accepting it as part of the landscape because it isn’t going anywhere. I’m not planning to contribute to the problem, but I really don’t know if the trash cans I diligently use actually end up somewhere appropriately dedicated for their contents.