The world is a strange and wondrous place.
After more than 40 years on this planet, I can still find myself in places like this, waiting at a traffic light behind a truck like this with so many questions:
What exactly does a plating company do?
What the hell is passivate? Anodize? Chromate of aluminum?
Are plating companies so rare that one presumably based in Massachusetts (given the license plate) has reason to be in central Connecticut? On a Saturday? And if so, where is it going?
What is behind the door of this truck? Piles of passivate? A machine used to plate something with passivate? Something else entirely?
More importantly, how was this business born? I can’t imagine anyone dreaming of owning or running a plating company when they were growing up, so how does a business like this start? Did someone see a market opportunity and seize it? Did the company’s owner work in the plating industry and decide that he or she could do it better? Did someone take over the family business, and if so, what spurred their parent or grandparent to launch this company decades ago?
There are answers, of course. Some I could not find, but a few are available thanks to the internet.
I still can’t explain plating very well, nor do I entirely understand what passivate is. And I still don’t know what that truck contained.
But according to the website:
“Following 18 years of plating experience – plus electroplating schooling – John Wietecha started his company in 1978. From its first 3500′ leased space, and with the help of Dennis Chaffee who joined the firm months later to soon become a principal, Valley Plating grew to become a major regional plater with over 750 customers in the Connecticut Valley.”
So I guessed right. John Wietecha worked in plating for almost two decades before deciding to launch a business with the help of Dennis Chaffee.
This, of course, lead me to a host of new questions:
Why did John Wietecha work in plating for 18 years? Did he stumble into the field after high school? Learn to plate in the military? Dream of plating as a little boy?
Does his work in the plating business make him happy? Did he forgo some other dream in favor of a career with more stability and profit?
And did Dennis Chaffee also love the plating industry? Or was he perhaps sitting on a pile of cash, looking to invest? Did he push aside some childhood dream in favor of assisting John Wietecha in building this business?
The world is a strange and wondrous place. After more than four decades on this planet, I find myself wondering about things like this constantly, often frustrated with the inability to answer every question that comes to my mind.
