Go West, Young Man

Six trips in 8 weeks. Six journeys across the continent, 3 time zones, hotels, rental cars, taxi cabs, and California… so much California. I used to think it would be cool to live there, now I’m convinced that its a place you should only visit.

Last night I got up on a brightly lit stage and presented to about 200 people some of my employer’s upcoming products. Some really good ones. The lights were too bright to see my audience, but that was probably a good thing. I brought notes (in case I froze up) but I didn’t use them. I forgot they were even there the moment I started talking. I spoke a little too fast — something I often do when I’m nervous — and I glossed over a few of the finer points I meant to communicate, but over all the talk went well. I think I’ve subconsciously adopted some of Steve Jobs’ presentation style from all the keynotes of his that I’ve watched online over the years. If I can even learn to re-implement his Reality Distortion Field, I’ll have to move over to sales.

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I still can’t believe I’m doing this job. By “doing” I really mean just hanging on for the ride — I haven’t actually entered any of my results into the system. Its all I can do to keep from getting more than 2 weeks behind on my expense reports — which is really the only process I’ve actually learned at the company. The rest will probably wait until Christmas break… then I’ll have some sort of metric to determine whether or not I’m succeeding at this gig.

I have one more week of travel left. Sunday I’ll leave for the Seattle area for the entire week. There’s a posh Executive Briefing I’ll be at, a number of team meetings, and a swanky Christmas dinner party for our group. Nicole will be using a free flight I got by accepting a bump on one of my trips to fly out and join me on the Wednesday for two days. We’ll be doing a lot of our Christmas shopping at the company store, so if anyone wants any software for Christmas, drop us a line!

I miss my family a lot when I travel. Ben misses his daddy a lot too. Every time I return home, he yells “Daddy! You came back!” — as if he’s surprised about it. Hopefully he’ll figure out that I’m always coming back. Fortunately the travel won’t always be like this. Things should slow down significantly next year. They’ll have to, because I’m pretty sure I used half my annual travel budget in the past 2 months!

San Francisco

When I travel somewhere I new, I make an effort to see at least one local site or attraction. Sometimes that means hoofing it for a mile or two. In San Francisco, it meant taking their sketchy, ornery, broke-down transit system. So, that was awesome. But I did make it to the Golden Gate bridge, and back (eventually) and it really was awesome…

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