Thursday

Got up, thanks to Dana's phone call, no thanks to two wake up calls I had set that never came, had some breakfast (chicken sausage and mushrooms again) and went to the airport...

Took off and I snapped this picture of something big burning on Mumbai's coast...

Flying into Mangalore, looks pretty rural...

Very rural...

Nice country side though...

Opened a bank account... (no, not really ;)

Neat town, lots of nice buildings and shops...

Red dirt reminds me of Georgia...

Dogs are free to do whatever they want...

Some sort of shop I captured while driving by...

It's a college town! Actually it is, sorta. There are quite a few small schools here.

There is a little bit of everything here, but not as hectic as the city...

Sugarcane Juice? No clue...

Billboards...

Cow, mentally directing traffic...

More local shops...

View out of my window and the Taj...

Same view, pan to the left a bit...

It was a great day. Everything went as planned. We visited the customer site and they were very happy. This particular customer had received an instrument a couple of months ago but it had some very strange shipping damage. I had already helped my guy make the repairs remotely from the US, and everything was working fine, but I wanted to check it over for other possible damage anyway. We checked everything over thoroughly while also training my guy and the customer on the inner workings of the machine. Nothing else was wrong, so I started doing a little free training on how to run it since we had plenty of time left. The training revealed that the customer had no idea how to run the instrument properly! They had played with it some, but it was more of a show piece to impress the big bosses than it was useful. Several hours of training corrected that and they now understand how to use it and why it is so valuable to their product development. It was neat to watch these guys learn about it's operation. Once they got the basics down they went ahead and ran some comparison tests on their competitors product vs their own product, and it clearly showed that their product is far superior! Before today, they had no idea where their product stood as far as quality in the market place. They just knew that some of the buyers (the first customer I visited) liked it better, but had no idea why (and neither did the customers for the most part). Slapstick development and marketing by the supplier, and trial and error on the part of the end user. That is what makes the world go around over here. Introduce a little science of product testing into the equation and these guys might actually know what they are doing in a few years...
...might.

I'm basically done over here, and actually considering to see if I can change my flight out of here to a day early.
My guy doesn't care either way.
We are planning to tour Mangalor tomorrow, buy some gifts. Then fly back to Mumbai in the afternoon, where I will once again stay at the prestigious WABA (Wakeup calls Are Beyond our Ability!). Then I would have all day Saturday to tour Mumbai, but I'm not at all excited to do that.

Not sure at this point if there is even a flight, so we'll see...

-Scott