Mike Schramm

It's National Manufacturing Week at McCormick Place, and in between a demo of an industrial compactor and a booth that bills itself as "America's Leading Bearing Supplier," a man stands in front of a laptop and sings. Lyrics appear on the PowerPoint screen before him. "Working in Maintenance is an honorable field," they go. "Today we use computers and sophisticated tools/ but there's nobody entering our technical schools."

The man's name is Joel Leonard, known in the manufacturing industry as the "Maintenance Evangelist," and he's singing "The Maintenance Crisis Song," a song he wrote as a way of promoting the maintenance profession among today's youth. "We need some high-tech, very smart kids," he says off the mic, right before elaborating on all the networked monitors and neat technology would-be maintenance technicians will get to use. But before he's able to convince those kids to join up, he says he has to "get rid of that negative perception. People think people in maintenance are just a bunch of Bubbas and Skeeters." To that end, he's brought along a glass gravestone put together by a promotional firm with an engraved message proclaiming the deaths of both Bubba and Skeeter. "We're killing off Bubba and Skeeter," Leonard grins widely. He calls it a crisis in maintenance, and it's become his quest, his passion, to resolve it.

He's been "in this business for a long time," and people visiting him on the floor know he's interesting, even if they can't be convinced to join the show: "We're not singing," a woman says as she walks up to meet him. Another patron stops by to witness the tiny concert, and also recognizes Leonard as quite the personality: "I've heard about him, and now I've met him." Today's event was supposed to be an informal contest poking fun at American Idol, but nobody except Leonard is all that interested in competing. And, unfortunately, the kids Leonard was hoping to reach with his maintenance message ("I want kids to have less hoop dreams and more pipe dreams," he proclaims through the laptop speakers) are notably absent.

No matter. Leonard is in rare form, singing another song he wrote called "I Need a Maintenance Woman," that eschews J. Lo and Britney Spears types for a female who can tighten a wing nut and monitor a water pump. Both songs are available for download at his training business' website (mpactlearning.com), and Leonard promises that he isn't done yet. Two more songs are in the works, along with updates of the two he's singing today. "We've got funk, blues and rock. I'm working on a hip-hop version."

(2005-03-15)

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