An Arizona Cheesehead's Thoughts

We had a “Welcome to the team” lunch for our newest colleague and I was in charge of the icebreakers per usual. One of the questions I asked was, “What’s your dream job?” The caveat is you can’t pick your current job. That’s just a suckup move anyway. Two people answered they wanted to work with horses (ugh), one said police officer, two said chefs of some sort, another said electrical engineer and one said the answer I had prepared. Writer. Which is laughable in a way because the only writing I’ve done is for our newsletter and (small) pearls of wisdom emails from the President (that’s me) of Parrot Heads in Paradise. I started thinking about what was stopping me from doing any real writing. I couldn’t come up with any good reasons. Oh, I had reasons, of course, but not good ones. Can you legitimately say you want to be a writer when you don’t actually write? I might have well have said I wanted to be an Olympic athlete. Both seem just as likely when you’re making zero effort. I also...

Every year, our CEO picks a theme for the company and presents it at our annual staff meeting. This year's theme is "Change" and it's overwhelmingly accurate. The company sold off some of our core business and has plans to sell another division, too. What does that mean? Well, a large chunk of our salespeople and a few operations peeps moved to the company that bought our business. Their last day with us was May 11. Because the support requirements of the overall business will be much smaller, another contingent of operations personnel left on May 25. A few people are staying a little longer for clean up before they, too, depart. I'm in that last group. My absolutely last day will be June 29. I would suggest "surreal" may be another theme as I've been here for over 19 years and it's so strange to think I won't be driving through the gates every day and settling in at my tchotchke filled desk. (I've already taken home two bags of stu...

So, I did a 5K race event. Totally makes me an athlete now, right? Our company sponsored participation in the Rock 'n' Roll  race events last weekend by paying the full entry fees for employees and partially for their friends and family. In all, we had 191 participants. Much to the shock of many, I chose to be one those 191 and signed up for the 5K. Me with some actual athletes. (Photo courtesy of SmartPractice) When I told people about it, their natural response was to ask, "Are you going to run it?" My reply was consistent, "I'm not even sure I know how to run anymore." I literally can't remember the last time I ran so walking was my plan. While I did walk a 5K in November in the Walk To End Alzheimer's, I knew this was going to take more effort than that leisurely stroll so I did some prep work. I didn't want to let anything be an excuse for not successfully completing the task. First up was getting some decent shoes as I was...

We have a small gym at our office. I often walk through on my way from the parking lot to meetings in that building. It looks nice. We also have a big room dedicated to things like Zumba and Yoga and, well, I don't know what else because there's literally no reason for me to go there. Although, I do actually know one other thing they do in the big room and that's hold Spin Classes. I know because my friend Michelle leads some of them and has been trying to get me to take one with her. When her direct efforts weren't paying off, she got my friend Steve to start suggesting it.  Have to give it to them, they tried with lots of enticements. "It's fun!" "It's dark so no one can see if you need to take a rest." "It won't be bad, I swear!" "You can do it with us and your other friends; it will just be a little party." "It's in the afternoon so you can go home right afterwards so no one will see you....

Three of my colleagues and I have continued our monthly rotation of board games playing during our lunch so I thought it was time for an update on what we've played. With a few exceptions for vacations, we've all played every week. It's been good bonding time and generated some great memories. I think my favorite takeaway over the past few months is my colleague's extreme bitterness on his multi-month second place finish streak. I would have been ecstatic. He was frustrated beyond belief and finally broke it with a first place last week. Evolution Grrr. This game. You build your own species and try to collect the most food for the win. I was pretty good at building my defenses and stuck to the herbivores but one of my colleagues was the king of switching back and forth from carnivores and killed me. Literally, a few times. I never won. I did call my colleagues jerks. A lot. Carcassonne Carcassonne is a tile laying game with meeple placement. Where you put ...

I get a lot of direct marketing pieces from people trying to sell their software, hardware, network equipment, security programs, etc. It comes with the territory of working in I.T. and getting on just one mailing list. I have to give credit to one guy for something catchy, though. He sent me two seed kits along with a request to meet and followed up with an email the day after I got the package. Too bad for him he was selling HR Management software because I have no interest/responsibility for that. However, I will make anything into a competition if I can so I challenged one of my colleagues to a see growing contest. Neither of us are good plant people so it was an even matchup. We agreed to start on a Monday and by the time I got to my seeds after my many meetings, hers had been growing for hours. I told her I would cry foul if her seeds sprouted ahead of mine. After one week - a clear winner emerged. The starting kit. Initial "planting" which involved...

We had our corporate golf tournament, SmartScramble, a few Fridays ago and there's an annual competition among the departments to create gift baskets for the event's silent auction. The department with the basket garnering the highest bid wins something. Pizza party, I think. I don't know because we hadn't done anything until this year. It takes a ringleader and this hasn't been my jam so one of my colleagues stepped up and solicited a team to donate items. Of course, we had to pick a theme for the basket, too. How do you narrow down the entire nerd/geek world into one themed basket? Well, you send a gazillion emails back and forth, talk about it at several meetings and present arguments over cube walls until someone makes an executive decision. My colleague finally did just that. Thank the gods. Marvel, it was! That's a lot of cool stuff! We all hit up Amazon and selected items. After even more discussion, and mocking our colleague for suggesting DC...

Our company started a department challenge this year. The challenges are wellness based and they bought a really ugly trophy to be passed around to the winners. The idea is to add something to represent your department to the trophy if you win it. Yes, it's supposed to be ugly. The first month, the challenge was to send a daily #healthyselfie. I went with the easy ones of me drinking water, unpacking my organic fruits and veggies, weighing in for our "Maintain, Don't Gain" competition and one controversial entry - drinking a glass of red wine. Red wine is healthy, people! While the wine picture got accepted, the acceptance came with a long missive on the dangers of consuming too much alcohol. Whatevs, way to be killjoys. Despite trying to motivate our team, we didn't get enough pictures to win in January and February was not much better. That month's challenge was "Stretch". You were supposed to stretch every day then record it on ou...

Remember before video games there were these games that you could play anywhere, even outside and without electricity? Yeah, practically prehistoric, I know.  I have many fond memories of long battles trying to conquer the world in Risk, becoming the Monopoly tycoon, coming out of Life with the most dough (because that determines success in actual life, no?), trying to capture the flag in Stratego and, of course, gleefully sinking Battleships. Those were the days, indeed. Kids these days don't know what they're missing. And, they should stay off of my lawn. A few of my colleagues still play board games with their friends and families and one of them suggested a weekly session of play at work. We call it Board Game Tuesday and everyone brings their lunch to eat while we take over a conference room and try to become the ultimate winner. It was decided to play each game for a month so that the newbies could pick up some tricks of the trade and advance their skills...

We had a presentation to our Senior Managers and Directors on Personality Types. We all took a test ahead of time and it rated us via the DiSC  profiles. That's one where you fall into one of four quadrants with the axes of Active vs Passive and People vs Task oriented. There are other ratings similar to it and we had done one a few years back. My results were consistent between both tests. To help illustrate the types, the presenter showed movie clips. This clip was to provide an example of a "D" (sometimes called a Driver or Dominant). They can come across as a "give me what I want and give it to me yesterday" type. I thought it was a perfect illustration. And, I'm glad I'm not a D. BTW, J. Jonah Jameson always makes me laugh. The "C" is also called Conscientious or Analytical. Just the facts, man. We hadn't declared what we were but I got outed pretty quickly when she started talking about the I (Influencer, Expressive) a...

A couple of weeks ago, some colleagues and I headed up to Northern Arizona for an optional offsite activity. Our CFO has a cabin (honestly, big house) up there and he has made it a practice to invite his direct reports up every year. This year, he expanded the invitation list to all of the Senior Managers and Directors of the company. (No, his cabin isn't that big. We were spread out over several places for our lodgings.) We headed up to the pines on a Wednesday afternoon. The first night was dinner then hanging out. Thursday morning was golf for those who wanted to play while the rest of us sat on the porch and worked. It was gorgeous! This is when I love technology - a wifi connection and I can work anywhere. We headed to the main lodge for lunch after the golfers returned then delved into our first "work" activity of the trip. It was a "dusting off of our 360s". Back in 2010 and then 2011, our upper management group participated in Zenger|Folkman 3...

Our wall of tiles is complete! I wrote about the creative process  a while back where we all had an opportunity to make the tiles. A lot of work by Kim, our resident artist (and VP), later and the wall is done. Careful placement with spacers for the grout. We hired some people to affix the tiles to the wall and do the grout work. They were at it for quite a while. Supply of tiles to be affixed to the wall.  So, yeah, we thought we had made enough tiles... Kim had to make some more as the space was bigger than what we already had for our supply. She did all the stain and kiln work and most of the final design determinations. Kim overseeing the placement work. There was careful consideration to placement to make sure the pattern of colors and tile designs flowed well. Grout work. After a few of the rows had grout put around them we found that the grout stain was also staining the tiles. So, they had to tape off each tile before putting in the grout. And, we h...