Just the zebras for today, but I'm going to be plugging in a couple of entries for last weekend in their correct dates. Look for May 25 and 26, coming soon! Featuring all-new narrative on our trip to the Bronx Zoo and Sasha's First Birthday bash!
In the meantime, let's get to the zebras. On Thursday, I went to a sort of sales inspiration seminar for my employer. The speaker was Tom Brown, a terrific guy who has written Zebras Don't Wear Pinstripes. Now, shattering my sales quota for this year isn't something that I'd had in mind, but it was interesting, nonetheless; my boss gave me his book, and over the next few weeks I'm going to look at it to see how I can apply these ideas to promoting Smart Llama. Let's all hope he regrets setting me on this path!
Actually, my boss has been behaving in some interesting ways lately, and I'm trying to figure out what it could all mean. I've been doing a lot of demos and conferences with him, and it looks like he's trying to get me to understand the business' Big Picture; but I'm not really getting the kind of technical projects I can sink my teeth into. Meanwhile, one of my other coworkers is getting swamped with a lot of projects, many of which I could handle just as easily as he, if not easier. Odd, all very odd. But then, I've never quite understood the dynamic at my company.
Anyway, back to the seminar. Beyond the subtle and inscrutable implications for my job in having been to such an event in the first place, there were amusing events! Anecdotes for me to recount!
There were naturally a few team-building activities. That's how this kind of seminar always plays out. The first one was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich speed contest. I was assigned to be a sandwich builder, and I was partnered with a construction supervisor. A useless one, at that. The challenge: make a legitimate PB&J as fast as you can. My knives blazed! My condiments glopped! I matched the record for sandwich-building speed at Mr. Brown's seminars: A mighty 15 seconds! As my fabulous prize, I got 100 fake pesos. Plus I got to keep the sandwich. Woohoo!
My partner for the PB&J contest was an interesting specimen of a human being. Sales staff at its worst. For some intangible reason, he rubbed me the wrong way. Not knowing much more about him than what I gathered from a really quite shallow interaction over the course of 6 hours, I still got a strong opinion on him: He's the kind of guy that cheats on his wife. He tells racist jokes on the golf course. He skips his kids' ballet recitals and soccer games because he's got a deal to close, and he screens his mom's phone calls. I don't know what about him provoked this negative reaction, because it's not typical of me, and there are sales people I've admired and liked, I swear it!
The second seminar challenge involved a puzzle: two bent nails hooked together. Without speaking, you and your partner both had to unhook and rehook the nails. This is the sort of puzzle I can do in my sleep, so I did the unhooking and rehooking right quickly, and then I positioned the nails such that my partner couldn't help but get them apart again, took 'em back, positioned them so that he couldn't help but hook 'em back together again. And we won golf towels. Woohoo!
After that, I decided it would be impolitic to continue winning their little challenges. But that's what they get for putting technical staff in with a bunch of sheep^D^D^D^D^D salesmen. And me the only girl, to boot. So not a level playing field, the suckers.
My kitchen is: filled with balloons and streamers. I guess I should take the birthday decorations down sometime.
Posted by andrea at May 30, 2003 09:12 PMIt sounds suspiciously to me like you are being groomed for either a. a promotion to management or b. an affair with your boss. I'd put my money on the first one, though.
I'm more interested in your partner. Did he realize that you rigged the nails for him? Did he care if he knew? Has he gone back to work and bragged about his win "with only a stupid techie" for a partner?
Posted by: cathyy on May 31, 2003 09:24 AMYou know, I'd think that Peter was setting me up for some sort of management kind of thing, except that my company only HAS seven people. I am one of FOUR people at my company who do billable work! What's to manage, exactly? My boss prides himself on not having the added overhead of a sales team, since he feels he doesn't really need one.
As for my partner, don't know, couldn't care less. He works for a company that is planning to become our competitor. And anyway, he seemed quite impressed with me. I don't think he knew I was tech staff.
Posted by: Andrea on June 1, 2003 10:33 AM