Last Fall my work team won a trip to Santa Barbara. Through bad timing we weren't able to schedule it until this coming up weekend. A couple other teams won as well and I was looking forward to letting loose with fellow salespeople and their managers. Imagine my surpise when one of those managers told me on Sunday (Oscar party) that upper management would be travelling along with us. It shouldn't be less interesting, but now we all have to act more "workerly" than we might otherwise have done.
So at this same Oscar Party I saw the President of the company standing kind of all by himself. Since I have only worked there a short year, he doesn't know me from Adam. I figured it was time to introduce myself (oh the power of two glasses of wine) and went up and did so. We started in on the small talk and through this I learned that he was headed for CA the next morning. So I pipe up, "Oh, and at the end of the week are you heading down South to Santa Barbara to be with all of us for the trip?"
He looked at me like I had three heads. "I don't know what you are talking about," he said.
"But So-and-so said that upper...." and I trailed off realizing that I probably just stepped into it. I was close to basically putting my foot down and saying, "But I heard you were going, so WHY aren't you going?" Dur.
So of course I had to recap my embarrassing story to a co-worker who just laughed at me and said, "As much as we don't want upper management to go, they don't want upper-upper management to go either."
Posted by kerewin at March 7, 2006 09:43 AMCongrats on your trip. Networking is always good. I think. I suck at it but I've ordered some books from Amazon about how to talk to scary people.
Posted by: ozma at March 7, 2006 08:46 PMRemind me at 4am on Friday about how good it is, because I will likely need the motivation to get my ass out of bed. Also, I think the lack of caffeine is really going to hurt right about then.
Posted by: kerewin at March 8, 2006 07:25 AM