An Arizona Cheesehead's Thoughts

We took a little site seeing trip while in Germany last week. My colleague wanted to show me the  Cologne Cathedral or, as we almost locals like to call it, the Dom. According to Wikipedia (which wouldn't lie), it's the most visited landmark in Germany. The Dom is a Roman Catholic cathedral and it took 800 years to build. Construction started in 1248 and ended in 1880. Well, there was a break in there from 1473 to the 1840s. It's a very impressive structure. At one point, it was the tallest building in the world at 516 feet. The Washington Monument took that title from it in 1884. So tall I couldn't get it all in the picture. (I could have if I had walked further away but my ankles told me not to try it.) Look at all the carving work! One of the entrance doors. The main entrance with a bunch of Saints (I'm assuming) watching it. These were close to life size from the perspective I saw them. You can't be called the "Hight Cathed...

I never want to leave home again after the week I just had. Oy. Let's recap, shall we? And, by recap, I mean that even though I'm trying to keep it short there was... Just. So. Much. Monday I arrived in Germany at 7:20 in the morning and spent the day in the sales office. My only sleep was maybe an hour in the car on the way from Hamburg to Muenster. I had a Parrot Head conference call scheduled for what was midnight my time. I debated trying to sleep first but decided to tough it out. I'm the Moderator of the calls. I dialed in a few minutes before midnight and it said my PIN wasn't valid to start the call. I tried again, thinking my sleep deprived brain just mistyped. No success. I then sent a text to the person who sets up the calls. She gave me some other PINs to try. By this time, people were emailing - "Are we still doing this? I'm on the call and it hasn't started." We finally found a successful PIN and started the call late. I hate that...

My friend and work colleague, Steve, moved away for a few years but is now back and working with us again. I'm happy because he's a great human, a pleasure to work with but, most importantly, he's a social butterfly like me. (Well, I guess the great human part is more important, but not for this story.) The difference between us in the latter category is that he's much better at following through with events. A few months ago, we set up an event called Random Happy Hour. The idea was to invite a bunch of different people within the organization, hang out in a relaxed setting and get to know each other better. We called it "Random" but it wasn't entirely. We invited our "usual" suspects, people we wanted to get to know better, people we wanted to introduce to each other and people with well developed internal networks. We then told everyone to invite whomever else they wanted to. The first Random Happy Hour was fairly small but went well. We h...