After 20 years working in dealerships, I was hired by Mercedes-Benz USA, and entered the corporate world as a MB Technical Specialist. My job was to diagnose and repair the cars that nobody else could. No pressure there, right? However, it played perfectly to my innate love of challenges. The bigger the better! As one of the few MB technical troubleshooters in the United States, I had the opportunity to travel and work on issues which initially had baffled even some of the most experienced technicians. But we worked together to solve those issues, and in the end it was always a great learning experience for us both.
“I consider myself very lucky to say I truly enjoyed every job I did.
I think few people can say that, and it was truly a blessing for me.”
I enjoyed that job because I had a very real sense of pride in the work I was doing. I found the complex technical issues I faced not only challenging, but fun to tackle, and most of all, to solve!
After a few years in what I considered a very challenging but exciting role, I moved into a staff engineer position. In this capacity I worked directly with the Daimler-Benz engineers at our international headquarters in Germany. We worked on a variety of issues, which I found to be fascinating. I even had the opportunity to go on summer and winter test drives, which truly was a lot of fun.
After a long and fulfilling career, I decided to give back and pass my knowledge and experience on to incoming technicians. I accepted a position as head of Technical Training and Operations for Mercedes-Benz USA, where I found things had come full circle. I was working to train technicians whose shoes I was in decades earlier, and I found it to be truly rewarding.
Since retiring from Mercedes-Benz in 2015 after more than 40 years, I have been traveling the country, and built my dream retirement home. I am continuing my work to develop the next generation of technicians through my involvement with TechForce Foundation. I feel truly blessed by the trajectory my life took, a path I was able to walk because I’m a tech.
Comments