It is 5:40 AM on Wednesday morning in the first month of 2016. The wind was blowing strongly through the night which woke me up a few times. I always enjoy a good storm at night but I didn’t hear drops of rain, just a lot of wind blowing through the trees.
This year continues its hectic pace. I normally do not write about work but will in this post as I want to remember what work was like in the beginning of the year. Only a short while ago we had a full team but then two were let go and nobody was immediately hired. In December we had two more colleagues leave which brought our team of six down to two people. What this means for me is I now have triple the work and it does not help that my own portfolio is extremely busy with a number of important renewals happening right now. I take pride in a spotless portfolio with no loose ends. In keeping everything running smoothly I do not have much stress. My response time is almost immediate and everyone is happy. Now that I’m covering two other territories I cannot be as fast as I’d like and this week I’m actually on the road every single day which backs up requests from my own customers even further.
I’m sure there are other jobs where this is the norm but it is not the case in my current role. I’m not getting paid triple and I hope they make some new hires quickly which will make things actually even busier for me in the short term as they’ll have to be trained and out of the two of us, I’m the only one in my specific division which normally contains four. This predicament is the fault of management who has waited too long looking for the perfect candidate. It is my opinion that the upper level VP does not hire out of fear of hiring the wrong person which could put their own job in jeopardy. Thus, she just waits it out looking to move ahead while leaving this important decision for someone else.
Furthermore, my sector as a whole did not do very well this year and our stock price plummeted as we didn’t live up to Wall Street’s expectations. I myself only hit 99% and this is in the top five out of 65 people. I would imagine there will be some shakeups here in the next few months in upper management which is the norm for sales in corporate America.
It is now 5:53 AM and I’m glad I got this post in. I’m not looking forward to opening up my inbox here in a few minutes which is going to keep me extremely busy until I have to hit the road again. I’m taking a highly senior person who I haven’t met before to lunch. Two of my favorite contacts at this company are now gone, one being let go and the other leaving by choice. This leaves the top level guy who seems pretty amiable and relaxed. We’re going to lunch and I expect things will go well but when contacts leave you have to rebuild the relationship and sometimes the upper levels make a change in order to save money. It is usually not a wise decision as it is a matter of fact we’re much better than the competition. By making a change they will inflict a lot of harm on their travelers but be able to show that they are saving a few thousand dollars and sometimes this extremely small savings is all they care to show in order to move up in their own careers.
In other news I learned my very first school lesson as a parent. My oldest is attending a new class and they have show and tell. My wife wanted to send him with just a magnifying glass but I thought the bugs in the bug catcher would be more interesting since that is what the magnifying glass is used to inspect. We packed the bug catcher and magnifying glass in my sons backpack but when I picked him up he was pretty sad. It seems he didn’t get to share his bugs because show-and-tell items need to go in the show and tell box. He wasn’t able to explain to the teacher that his item was in his backpack and the teacher didn’t take the time to try and understand this.
This raises a very important philosophical point that has confounded parents through the ages. If teacher does not inform parent there is a show-and-tell box how does the parent know show-and-tell box exists? So, I felt pretty bad that I wasn’t able to help my son out on this but will know to question the teacher thoroughly about what is supposed to go where when starting a new class.
It is now 6:01 AM and the inbox beckons. I’m looking forward to powering through these next few days then enjoying the three day weekend which is some reprieve from the sadness of the holidays being over and the stress being much higher than usual at this time of year.
