Chicago Blog

Hello from Snowy Chicago!

As I blog tonight I’m sitting in my very own hotel room on a business trip with my company. It’s our annual sales conference and the men who planned it decided Chicago on Valentine’s Day weekend would be perfect. Note that it was men who were planning it. I love men and the wonderful compliment they are to women….but sometimes they need that “woman’s touch” in order to make good decisions. These men clearly didn’t consult a woman in their planning or they would have realized A) Chicago is the worst possible airport to fly in and out of; 2) You could not go to a colder place on the PLANET other than Antarctica than Chicago in February; and D) When you plan something on Valentine’s Day…nobody wins.

Really it hasn’t been too bad. I’ve only been outside the hotel once, and that was to get in and out of the shuttle that drove from the airport to the hotel. Other than that all of our meetings and meals have been in the hotel.

The meetings have actually been really interesting. One nice thing about having a job you generally like and find interesting (other than the times it breaks your heart….or you want to throw something at someone if you have to make another phone call) is that the meetings revolve around interesting things. It makes me excited to be better at what I do and has given me some good nuggets that I can take back to the office and implement on my desk. I guess that’s the point of it all, pump them up and send them back out. As someone said today, “How many of you set out to be a recruiter? (no hands went up) There’s no college degree for this, and if you had told me 17 years ago when I started that I would be making 100 cold calls every day and getting turned down 95% of the time just to be part of a process that is largely out of my control- I would have told you no way.” It’s true. I think all of us benefited from the encouragement. I will blog more on what I’ve thought through during my time here and what I am taking away from it in the coming months.

The one big bummer is that I was going to try and meet up with an old friend from college while I was here, and his sister was induced into labor yesterday afternoon so he couldn’t make the drive up to come visit me. Really? The one time I come out to the Midwest in my entire life…and she gets induced into labor the one day I have free? Really? I have to admit I was a sad panda…but I put on a strong face.

So all that to say, it’s been great being here. I have some great stories to tell! And I’m thankful for the training and I will certainly go home and hopefully put it into practice. But I will probably not be moving to Chicago anytime soon, seeing as it is 11 degrees here right now. No offense to any Chicago lovers out there.