GM FYI Blog

Trish Hidock
Manager, Customer Records, GM Service and Parts Operations

On the first day of this blog, cf posted a comment recommending we profile her former supervisor Trish Hidock (rhymes with drydock). So we talked to Trish and wrote up her story.

It’s 1986, you’re 23 years old, and you’re about to get your M.B.A. from Wilkes College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. A student tells you a certain company is looking for qualified women to enter the sales field. Okay, you want a challenge. You send off your resume – and you get hired. You will be selling GM parts to dealers in New Jersey and Staten Island, N.Y. You will be driving all the time. The only snag is that you’ve never driven a car or even had a driver’s license. So one week before you start your new job at GM Service Parts Operations (SPO), you get your license and you cross your fingers while you cross the extremely narrow Goethals Bridge into Staten Island.

And that’s how Trish began her 20-year journey at GM. She says that from the start, fellow district managers and dealers took her under their wing and taught her the business. Trish worked for nine years in the field (and moved six times). Her job took her to New Jersey, the Catskills in upstate New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. In 1995, she moved to Howell, Mich., to work in Central Office for GM SPO – specifically the Product Program and Development Group. She first designed training programs for district managers, and then moved through a series of product specialist jobs (Goodwrench Exhaust, Goodwrench Transmissions and, ACDelco Transmissions). She eventually became manager in Goodwrench Service Plus and the GM Parts Incentive Program, then manager in Diversity Marketing before she moved into her current position as manager of customer records. She oversees everything to do with the GM SPO customer records files, including maintenance and updates. With some 65,000 customers, that’s a lot of data management.

As a young girl growing up in Mountaintop, Pa., (the quintessential American small town, where everyone knows everyone) Trish always wanted to ride horses. But with a stay-at-home mom, a dad in the union at RCA and four siblings, there wasn’t money for such luxuries. And for most people that would have been that, a dream left behind in childhood. For Trish, however, it wasn’t forgotten, just delayed. When she turned 30, Trish’s husband gave her a gift of five riding lessons. And presto, Trish went from observer to participant. She’s worked on her riding over the years and now has her own horse, Kane. Trish adopted Kane two years ago – he had been neglected for two years and was in terrible shape when she got him. Kane is happy and healthy now. The two of them will enter some hunter jumping shows this summer. Trish’s husband, Bill, recently took lessons, so now they ride together.

Trish and Bill (who is a naturalist at Indian Springs MetroPark in Michigan) have other adventurous hobbies. They backpack and hike in all kinds of places, (to the top of Mount St. Helens, for example) and scuba dive. They’ve been to Fiji, Costa Rica, Galapagos Islands, and Bora Bora. Trish laughs when people call her adventurous. She says she’s “scared of a lot of things,” although she tries them anyway.

Trish says her favorite part of her job is “the involvement with people,” from dealers to customers. With Trish Hidock, her sincerity and enjoyment of people and life is evident.

To see more of Trish’s favorite hobbies and travel, please visit our Flickr photo album.