One person can very rarely convince a crowd to change directions or course. It typically take a chorus of those in agreement before the masses will move away from the normal inertia on status quo thinking before making a serious changes. So when I strived to tell the world 10 years ago about the maintenance and skills crises, many ignored, scoffed, or just exclaimed that I was an alarmist.

Tomorrow all across the country our nation will be celebrating Halloween by encouraging another generation of kids to become candy beggars or hoodlum threats by tricking or treating their neighborhoods.

Amazing how much has changed in the last ten years. With the signing of NAFTA and future off-shoring of manufacturing, technical schools were shut down and law schools were opening up in every major city across the country. It was called progress. DC thought leaders pushed the service economy as being the superior economic approach for the US to follow. Over a million US manufacturing jobs liquidated, many projected that the US would no longer have manufacturing in the 21st century.

Making kids read books or do math problems does not inspire them to become engineers. However, if you give them permission to blow something up, they get really excited and invest all of their energies. Below is an article about an upcoming event that I dreamed up 8 years ago and several of past students have went onto get their engineering degrees and now work as engineers and technicians.

This year we are going to add smoke bombs to the pumpkins to see them sail and we are hurling Big Bird to see if he can fly on his own without public support.

Forgive me for making this post a personal elevator speech, but since my family, friends, classmates and industry contacts have expressed confusion about what does a Maintenance Evangelist do, I figured that this may help clarify and unearth more supporters once more understand the efforts underway to advance our cause.