by john | Jan 12, 2010 | Real Life
Warning – the below post includes no pics of hot college cheerleaders, nor does it include any hot pics of men in cheerleader skirts.
Full Disclosure – the above sentence is purely for the SEO spiders in a shameless attempt to increase webcrawler traffic.
But I’m really not going to wear a cheerleader skirt. Even though that seems to be most of my job. I’m a sales manager, which can mean many things to many things. And sometimes different things on different days to the same people. Most of the time, I concentrate on the sales part of the title, as I’m one of the leading sales people in my office. That’s actually the easy part. After 14 years in the same industry, with the same company, in the same location, I know my market. I understand who the players are and how order go to market. I understand what projects to go after and which ones to take a pass on. And I win more than I lose, which at the end of the day is a pretty good marker for success.
The manager part is way harder. Like many industries, ours does not hire managers, we promote them from within. Just like principals that are promoted out of the classroom, this can be a hit or miss proposition. Many great sales people can’t manage worth a damn, and for the first few years I was in this position, I was one of them. On the upside, I was only managing two people besides myself, so my ineptitude was pretty harmless. Fortunately for me, as our group expanded to where I was managing more people, my company realized that we probably needed some training. I balked at some of the training, but what it did teach me was that I needed to learn how to do this thing. So I read some books, and I read some blogs, and I started to work at it.
And what I’ve come to realize is that there are bunches of different types of managers. There’s the minutiae manager, who never misses a meeting or a follow-up call, who has all their reports in on time and doesn’t have any trouble with paperwork. It may come as some surprise, but that ain’t me. There’s the rah-rah manager, who inspires their people to ever greater heights by their boundless enthusiasm and love for the job. That’s not really me, either. I try to be more of the analytical and fun manager, but I end up more the grumpy cheerleader.
I’m snarky by nature, but I have an ability to see complex things in fairly simple terms. This allows me to slice through a lot of BS and tell people what’s really going on. I have to fight my natural bitchiness to keep the message positive, but I am at least able to boil things down into one or two sentences that are easily understood by everyone. This talent for synthesis is something one rep of mine remarks on frequently, and I tend to use it a lot when I’m trying to inspire my folks. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Some folks just aren’t ever going to get it, no matter what, and eventually with them you’re going to cut bait. But most folks just need to understand the process (or maybe have the process tweaked for their talents) in order for them to succeed. So I spend a lot of time being the grumpy cheerleader. How do you manage people?
by john | Jan 11, 2010 | Real Life, Travel
and Jebus it’s cold! By now the temp is finally above freezing, and the pipes in our office have finally thawed, after being frozen solid all weekend. It’s funny that I spent my weekend 300 miles north of here, and it was warmer in NC than down here in Georgia. Weather’s funny that way, I guess.
This weekend saw the latest episode of 30-something Sales Goofs try to Drink Like College Kids, which is never an attractive show, and leads to random people in the wrong gender restroom and a very baffled hotel front desk the next day. It was a work event, and after we all worked all day we went to the restaurant in the hotel for dinner. Without reservations. In Winston-Salem, NC. In January. To say the restaurant staff was a little overwhelmed would be an exercise in understatement. To say that the smoke emanating from the kitchen was more reminiscent of a July 4th barbeque than anything resembling fine dining would be fairly accurate. To deliver six complimentary bottles of wine as an apology for six completely screwed up steaks is a pretty good trade, especially when none of the screwed-up steaks was mine. To close down the bar at 10PM, however, was completely unfortunate.
So since we knew the bar was going to close early, we ordered a bunch of rounds of shots right before last call. So that was painful enough, but we weren’t tired enough to do the reasonable thing and go to bed for our 10AM exhibition the next day. So I, in my incredibly poor judgement, went to the hotel lobby and bought some beer. Or more to the point, bought a dozen beers. And sent more people in after me to clean out the fridge. Not a big deal, since there were still a bunch of us, and only about two beers apiece at that point. On top of all the shots. Which came on top of the wine we drank at dinner. Which of course was preceded by a few cocktails before dinner. But I think if we’d only emptied the fridge the one time, we woulda been okay.
How’s that for foreshadowing? If we’d only emptied the fridge the one time…? Right there I tell you that we did indeed return to the fridge for more beer, and did indeed empty the fridge again, and this time since our number had dwindled, the one of our number that went for the beer was smart enough to leave it outside the door to the lobby so it would stay cold. Frankly it was probably chilling faster outside than it was in the fridge, given the relative temperatures of both last weekend. So none of us had our keychain bottle openers with us, and there was only one cigarette lighter to use as an opener, so the practice of opening beers on the brick steps was put into play. That of course led to a text message the next morning saying “I cut my tongue on a beer bottle last night?” To which I responded with a “yes,” and no further explanation.
So we drank all that beer, and then the restock beer, and then it was 4:30 AM, and we were truly not looking forward to being at the show by 10AM the next morning. But the rule is, you have to answer the bell. You can do whatever stupid shit you want at night, as long as you can answer the bell the next morning. And when I reached checkout the next morning right about on time, I looked over at one of my obviously worse-for-wear compatriots from the night before, and said “Welcome to the team.”
by john | Jan 8, 2010 | Real Life
That’s not an untrue method of describing much of what gets posted here, although perhaps the use of “verbal” would be inaccurate. I tend to just sit at my keyboard and spew, without too much thought of the consequences, which frankly has been a pattern of my life – not thinking too much about the consequences.
But today I was taken somewhat to task for some things that I’ve revealed here on the blog about things in my life and some of the lives of people around me. I suppose I had forgotten that more people have access to what is written here than just my blogger friends, because I tend to post a Twitter update whenever I update here. And that updates my Facebook, which some 800+ people have access to. So there might be information out there that could come around and hurt or embarrass some folks that I don’t want to hurt in any way. So I responded with the fact that you can’t really unring a bell, and if people have read things here that may embarrass other people, I can’t do anything about that now.
Then I started to think about what I should have done differently. Should I reveal less about myself here? Should I talk less about what’s going on in my life? Should I try to think about how what I say is going to affect anyone that might read anything I ever write before I write it? And if I do that, will I fall into a heinous case of analysis paralysis and never get anything written?
Finally, I think I’ve decided to apply the very few hard and fast rules in my life to my writing here. I’ve lived by this set of rules for a long time, and it’s done me well.
1) Don’t do anything you really don’t want to do. I don’t mean like getting up in the morning and going to work, I mean like things that you really think are wrong or bad or terribly unpleasant.
2) Don’t do anything to intentionally hurt anyone else. It may be impossible to avoid hurting people in life, but as long as you don’t intentionally harm anyone, you can apologize and move along. They don’t have to accept your apology, but you’ll have done your part.
Following those two typically leads to the third pretty easily.
3) Regret nothing. Everything you go through in life gives you something, good or bad. Take it, revel in it, and work with it. Maybe it’s something that sucks, but you can use it. I can honestly count on one hand the things I truly regret in my life, and I’m very happy about that. I think too many people go through their life saddled with too much regret, and that’s left them baggage that gets in the way of living. Here are the regrets that I can think of (this isn’t to say that these are the only things in my life that I shouldn’t have done, but these are the things that I actually feel bad about).
I regret never going to see my grandmother in the old folks’ home before she died. Even though she suffered from dementia and probably wouldn’t have known it was me, just knowing that someone cared a little bit would have brightened her day, and since I drove past the home where she was every time I visited my parents after she was put there, I have no excuse for never stopping. It wouldn’t have meant much to her, but I wouldn’t have that guilt.
I regret the way in which I broke up with my high school sweetheart. I was seeing a couple of other girls when Suzy and I met. Obviously I don’t regret THAT I broke up with her, because I love being married to my wife and can’t imagine spending this many years (not to mention the ones in front of us) with anyone else. But I broke up with her via a long-distance telephone call because I had misunderstood a telephone message from her that she was coming home for a visit that weekend. Had I heard her correctly, I could have broken up with her in person, and that would have been the kinder thing to do. We were a huge part of each other’s lives for five years, and I owed her a face-to-face ending.
I regret not going on the study abroad program in China that I applied to my sophomore year of college. It was one of the very few big opportunities I’ve ever let slip away, and I may never again have the chance to immerse myself in another culture to that degree. I think I’ve taken pretty good advantage of most of the opportunities I’ve been given, and made a few extra for myself besides, but that one I’d like to have another shot at.
Those are honestly the biggies. Of course there are people I wish I’d been nicer to, like my oldest niece when we were kids, but frankly, we’re pretty good friends now, so it worked out okay and I don’t really care that we despised each other for our entire childhood. It gives us something to crack jokes about at family gatherings now. There are a few other things I wish I’d tried, and sometimes I wish I’d toughed out grad school, or tried to stay in school and get a Master’s in English, but those are things I can still do if they become important. I wish I’d met my mother-in-law, because I think my wife is pretty amazing and I’d like to have had the chance to know the woman that she came from, but the fact of the matter is that I never would have met my wife if her mom hadn’t died and left her some cash to go back to college with, so our marriage really is the silver lining out of that huge cloud.
So I’m not going to self-censor any more than I already do. And anyone who doesn’t like what I write doesn’t have to read it. And anyone who thinks I’m oversharing doesn’t have to read it. Because it’s got my name at the top of the page, and this is my corner of the world to spew with as I please. You’re welcome to share my life. I wouldn’t have invited you otherwise. But I get to decide what’s too much and what’s not enough and what’s just right. And that’s just the deal. Now I gotta go try to get a little bit of writing in before I clean up a Powerpoint presentation for tomorrow.
by john | Jan 7, 2010 | Real Life
I promise to discuss my penis and its activites less today, but rather to move upstream, as it were. Today’s topic – the bladder.
I travel a lot. Not as much as some of my jet-setting poker writing friends, but enough nonetheless that my Marriott Rewards Platinum status is secure for all of 2010 (and was halfway through 2009). And one thing I’ve noticed in my travels, is that I have a fairly well-trained bladder for travel. I can be in an airplane or car for hours on end and never have to pee, which makes it convenient. This also means that whenever I get where I’m going, I usually have to pee like a racehorse. I don’t mind that too much, because the release of a gigantic piss after holding it for hours at a time is nigh-orgasmic, and any time I can insert a little more nigh-orgasmic into my day, I’m all for it. Frankly, any time I can insert the phrase nigh-anything into a sentence, I’m all for it. It sometimes makes me want patches on my elbows and a pipe, but I can live with that.
But sometimes, especially when I’m heading home or to the office, my superpowered bladder begins to fail when I’m just close enough to not want to stop, but far enough away (read: more than 3′) from a toilet to make relieving myself impossible or at least impractical. It’s almost like my bladder has a mind of its own, and when it senses that I’m close to my final destination of the evening, it just slides into relaxation mode, and is ready to let it all hang out. Literally. Right f’n now. This has led to more than one instance of stopping at a gas station or fast food restaurant one exit away from my hotel to take a leak, and more instances than I can count of doing the peepee dance while holding a suitcase, backpack and three days worth of dress shirts while waiting on an elevator.
This is even less attractive in real life than it is in your imagination, trust me. Probably no post tomorrow, as I have a work thing in Winston-Salem that will take all day. Then Saturday I’m going to a poetry workshop at the Main Street Rag offices, then Suzy and I are going to see Avatar in 3-D Imax Saturday night. That’s one movie that really makes me wish I still did hallucinogens to get the full experience, but the Imax 3-D might be the closest thing.
by john | Jan 5, 2010 | Real Life
Dictionary.com defines usury as – the lending or practice of lending money at an exorbitant interest. In practice, the street definition has been mangled a little to apply to any assholish lending practices, and my conversation this morning certainly qualifies on that regard, if not under the “exorbitant interest” qualifier. What follows is a cautionary tale of a man who mortgaged his adulthood for an education and is still paying for the privilege fifteen years later.
When I was in high school, I wanted to be a teacher. As soon as you’re done laughing at the concept I’ll continue. I wanted to be a high school English teacher in the Dead Poets Society vein, not realizing that most people who attempt to teach using those methods would end up quickly unemployed. As the child of working-class parents, I was informed at a very young age that if I wanted to attend college, it would be on my nickel. So I worked hard and got scholarships that would cover all my tuition to Winthrop, one of the schools I had short-listed. That list became one name long when they sent that scholarship offer.
The only problem was, tuition was but one portion of the expenses that had to be covered to get my happy ass educated. So I applied for Pell grants and this new thing called the South Carolina Teacher’s Loan. Now this loan was a great idea on the part of the state of SC, because if you became a teacher in SC at the end of your college education, the loan would be forgiven at the rate of 20% per year. So teach in SC for five years, and you don’t owe any money. Great, right?
Except I decided at the end of my junior year that I had no interest in becoming a teacher. So I finished up college like a lot of people, with a pile of student loans that I couldn’t afford to pay. So I didn’t pay them. And I didn’t pay them. And I continued to not pay them for a decade or so. A couple of years ago, I started paying on the student loans, and they stopped calling me with nasty threats, and all was good in the ‘hood. Until last week. I went online to check the total remaining balance, kind of a beginning of the year what’s up with my debt check-in, only to find that the amount listed as my monthly payment had increased by $120 per month.
I was a little befuddled, so I called the SC Student Loan Corporation and spoke to Tara, a very helpful young lady who had no idea what was going on. So she promised to look into things and call me back. Then she noticed that I was on what they call a graduated repayment plan, which might explain why the payment was increasing. I figured, “ok, not a huge deal, I can afford the extra $120/month, and if it’ll get this thing paid off quicker, all the better.” But Tara promised to talk to her supervisor and call me back.
Which she did, this morning. And she responded, as I expected, that her supervisor at the SC Student Loan Corp. said there was no way they could forgive any of the interest or renegotiate anything with me, and that my payment was scheduled for another increase on January 20th, 2010. I expressed some dismay at this, since the increase of $120/month was dated January 10th. So I said that Tara should probably have her supervisor call me, because a loan that increased by 25% in the monthly payment one month shouldn’t reasonably increase ANOTHER 25% ten days later. So I expressed to Tara that I couldn’t afford to make that payment, and someone should call me.
Now I’m not going to say that I’m without fault here. Had I paid the loans on time, I’d be done five years ago. Had I had the money to pay the loans, I’d have paid them. But this latest development is a little ridiculous, and now I just have to sit and wait for the fine folks at the SC Student Loan Corporation to get back to me and convince me that they’re not screwing me over, and that I shouldn’t just tell them to go into the kitchen and fix themselves a nice hit steaming cup of go fuck yourself. Which I won’t do, because I can’t.
Because here’s the cautionary tale about student loans – they never go away. They are guaranteed by the gubmint, and the gubmint gone get they money somehow. If I had paid for my room and board on credit cards I could have declared bankruptcy and pissed off with an education and never paid for it, or just settled with the creditor for less interest. But since it’s a student loan, I’m hosed. So now I wait for the nice supervisor to call me and try to figure out some equitable solution to this that doesn’t involve me taking a loan out against my 401k to pay off the student loan and then pay myself back into my 401k over the next four years. So pay attention to the terms of your student loan, because unlike other debts you’ll incur in life, they don’t have to work with you, or be reasonable, or do anything the way normal creditors do.
by john | Jan 4, 2010 | Real Life
So I don’t do resolutions. It’s not really a conscious thing anymore, I just don’t do them. Part of it is not wanting to set myself up for failure, part of it is not having a whole lot of focus in my life in general, and part of it just laziness. Of course there are things that I will try to do over the course of the year, and here are a few of them.
1) Lose weight. Like most Americans, I’m overweight. I could be comfortable around 225 lbs., which would be fine if I didn’t weight 275 lbs. currently. So I want to lose at least 40-50 pounds this year. I’ve done it before, as recently as 2007, so I know what it takes, I just have to get off my fat ass and make it a priority. I’m an obsessive type, so if I can work it into one of the obsessions, I’ll be able to get the weight off. Keeping it off may be a goal for another year, though. Making long-term lifestyle changes aren’t easy, especially when the lifestyle you’re in is one born of laziness.
2) Write more. I want to create at least one poem each week in 2010. That would be 52 pieces at the end of the year, and that’s a decent body of work for a year. And if I continue to revise and rewrite as I generate new stuff, I’ll have plenty of work to submit. Which leads to my next goal, which is to submit more. The only path to success as a writer seems to be to write a bunch, submit a bunch, and get rejected a bunch. If I don’t put in the time to submit, I don’t even take the shot at publication. So in addition to creating one poem each week, I’d like to do one submission for publication each month, and if possible, enter one contest each month. The contests are a little more iffy, because there might not be that many contests I think I’m a good fit for, but we’ll give it a shot. I did two submissions last week, one for an anthology locally and one for a national website. I should hear back from those in the next couple of months.
3) Spend better time with Suzy. She’s got some health issues that we’re addressing this year, and I want to make sure I schedule our time together better. It’s important to me that we eat together whenever possible, and now that the new year has started and I’m not on my “all about me” kick that I spent the holidays on (yeah, even more than usual), I want to make sure that when I’m home in the evenings that we spend some time together. With the time I spend in Atlanta and the travel I do for the rest of my job, I want to make sure that the time I spend at home is focused on us being together. Not that we won’t necessarily have our own time in the evenings, just when she doesn’t have anything going on, I don’t want to play video games or poker and ignore her.
4) Get my poker game back on track. I have a couple of ideas as to what is off-kilter in my game, and I think I know how to fix them. I didn’t log a win this weekend at BadBlood’s, but I think with a few notable exceptions I played pretty well. And on one of the notable exceptions I got lucky and won anyway. I need to take apart a few pieces of my game, and I’ll be working on that in the coming weeks and months. If I can get on a good streak online I may even make a withdrawal from Full Tilt and play a WSOP event this summer, but don’t hold your breath there. I say that every year, and every year I either lose focus and blow my online roll, or I decide that it’s not a good investment of my time and money and pull the plug before I register.
5) Work on my photography. I have a decent camera, and I’ve taken some nice shots this year, now I need to focus more on learning how to use all the settings on the camera and get the most out of it. I think I have a good eye, and my experience with lighting design helps in composition, but I’ve got a long way to go before I have anything marketable.
So those are some things I’m going to focus on this year, as well as coming up with a way to disseminate my poetry without it fouling the “unpublished” status and wrecking my chances of having it accepted somewhere. Because I do want to share the stuff I’m writing with you guys, but I don’t want to screw myself out of publication opportunities, either. So once I figure that out, I’ll let you know.
