We are receiving a good number of business inquiries from the French speaking portion of Canada. Would love to work with anyone here who can speak the language.
We will "hold your hand" during the process and quote directly to you for the customer. You would get a distributor or OEM discount from AutoDrill and we would send French speaking customers to you when necessary.
Basic knowledge of machinery would be good. Knowledge about drilling, reaming, tapping, etc. all a plus.
Thoughts? Interest?
Google translate works for me with the basic jobs, but anything beyond the basics needs a real live person IMHO.
My opinion? They are customers and potential customers, sure, so you do your level best to work with them and fulfill their needs - even go take a French course and/or hire someone bilingual. But if they insist on not even knowing functional conversational English, they're being insular and obstinate and want to be patronized, and I would be very hesitant in doing the patronizing...
I don't like being knowingly put in the position of being pwned. It's never a fun place to be. Make them meet you halfway.
The vast majority of the Quebecois were born and raised in Canada, an English Speaking Country. Yet their parents were on a "Quebecois Uber Alles!" kick and either didn't teach them English or instilled a hatred of Those Other People and encouraged them to hide the knowledge and not use it.
Hey, Quebec! France is 8,000 miles over that-a-way. ---->
(But I'll bet you already knew that, and it's why you are in North America. Suck it up and join the rest of the club, we speak English as our first language, and that's what the government operates on.)
It's a very convenient dodge - if you want money from some people, the easy response is "No Se Habla Ingles!" and they walk away. And without proof to the contrary, or knowledge of their native language, you have to let them. Offer to hand *them* money though, and all of a sudden they display perfectly functional English language skills. Gee, who'd have thunk it?
Write the contract in English and get it translated for their convenience - but they sign the English copy.
Besides, the "romance languages" are wonderful for making romance, but totally lousy for conducting business. Only in French or German can it take a whole paragraph or an atrocious 100-letter compound word construct (Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!) to describe something simple like "computer" or "cellphone" or "PDA" - which is why you often see them reverse-adopting the English term or acronym with a French or German suffix tacked on.
That reminds me..I..blush..for the first time, actually looked at your website. Nicely done btw.
I just remembered Ive quite a number of pneumatic drilling heads. From small to large. Some air driven, most electric motor driven. Self feeding, self retracting etc etc
Is there any market for them? Them came off of operating machinery that was taken apart
Gunner
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer." -- Benjamin Franklin, /The Encouragement of Idleness/, 1766
Don't patronize the French speakers or any others in the transaction of international business. Clarity of thought and technical description is pivotal in business language. That is why English is the world's official business language. But, OTOH, as Bruce suggested, German can be used to a limited extent. German words are pictographic expressions constructed from English; such as brassiere translates to "holdsemfromfloppin" and etc.
Bob Swinney
My opinion? They are customers and potential customers, sure, so you do your level best to work with them and fulfill their needs - even go take a French course and/or hire someone bilingual. But if they insist on not even knowing functional conversational English, they're being insular and obstinate and want to be patronized, and I would be very hesitant in doing the patronizing...
I don't like being knowingly put in the position of being pwned. It's never a fun place to be. Make them meet you halfway.
The vast majority of the Quebecois were born and raised in Canada, an English Speaking Country. Yet their parents were on a "Quebecois Uber Alles!" kick and either didn't teach them English or instilled a hatred of Those Other People and encouraged them to hide the knowledge and not use it.
Hey, Quebec! France is 8,000 miles over that-a-way. ---->
(But I'll bet you already knew that, and it's why you are in North America. Suck it up and join the rest of the club, we speak English as our first language, and that's what the government operates on.)
It's a very convenient dodge - if you want money from some people, the easy response is "No Se Habla Ingles!" and they walk away. And without proof to the contrary, or knowledge of their native language, you have to let them. Offer to hand *them* money though, and all of a sudden they display perfectly functional English language skills. Gee, who'd have thunk it?
Write the contract in English and get it translated for their convenience - but they sign the English copy.
Besides, the "romance languages" are wonderful for making romance, but totally lousy for conducting business. Only in French or German can it take a whole paragraph or an atrocious 100-letter compound word construct (Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!) to describe something simple like "computer" or "cellphone" or "PDA" - which is why you often see them reverse-adopting the English term or acronym with a French or German suffix tacked on.
these attitudes are EXACTLY why we are losing market share world wide - customer service means exactly that - if the customer wants to speak French, so be it - or Thai, or urdu, or tamil, or whatever it is - the provider's job includes making the customer relationship special as well as offering the product or service desired.
and I assure you French is perfectly fine for business and technical work - did you ever hear of Lavoisier?
You act as though we should ignore them, no we should not. They get the same effort to satisfy their needs as anyone else, if not a bit more. But they need to make the effort to work with us, too.
It's the same problem we have in several areas of Los Angeles - there are a substantial number and variety of second and third generation immigrant families (both Latin American and Asian and Mideastern, it's not isolated to one community) who remain insular and base their lives around their home countries and languages, and isolate their activities to small communities. Will not be bothered learning English themselves, will not teach their children English, will not speak it in their home or allow it to be spoken in response, won't speak it where they shop or worship.
About the only exposure the children get is at school, and frankly that isn't enough.
There are immigrant and naturalized parents raising US Citizens with sub-par or barely functional or even non-existent English skills, by choice. And if they stay in their little insular community exclusively, they can get away with it.
The "Melting Pot" model has been co-opted into the "Ethnic Ghetto" model. They either just don't get it, or consciously choose not to.
The Melting Pot is how we built a strong country and a vibrant economy for 200-plus years, because people are investing and building for their future here, and are always considering the effects of their decisions and actions on their children's and grandchildren's future.
The Ethnic Ghetto workers are not into building a nicer USA, because many still consider their home country their true home. They are here only to stash away and/or wire home every dime they can make, so they can cash out and go back to their home country and live like a king on what would be a pauper's retirement here. And they set their children and grandchildren up to follow in their footsteps.
I am well aware of non-english speaking persons in Los Angeles - including korean, vietnamese, indian (three dialects), and of course various south american indian languages. However, whether you, I, or anyone else likes it, if you want to sell a product or a service, you do better making your customer feel wanted. I see this happen up close, and if you don't want these people to be YOUR customer, then someone else will take them on and make them THEIR customer - and often that someone else is in a different country and it hurts our nation as a whole.
Solve the social problems separately from business problems or we will fail at both.
There are few business problems with them, actually. They learn American Business quite well. Its the other that they have deep issues with.
Gunner
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer." -- Benjamin Franklin, /The Encouragement of Idleness/, 1766
in case you saw one of the others we have out there...
I'd be interested in knowing what makes and models they are. We use some for special projects when our units are simply not the best choice for a given application... But generally, there is no real valuable piece of used automatic drill machienry out there unless you have a specific customer lined up for it.
That being said, I'm looking for a used Jiffy-Tap unit. If you have one of those, I might be interested in grabbing it from you.
The others you may have could possibly be useful for us too, but I'll determine that once I know what they are. Mostly, competitor's units are sold for very low prices on eBay, etc. because the RPM rate and stroke length have to be just right for the end user's application. If you have a match for what they want to do, you can get 50% of new at times... Otherwise, I've seen $5,000 machines sell for $20 plus shipping.
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