Tag Archives: work

where did all the trains go?

Posted on February 25, 2023 | Leave a comment

America really needs to put back all the missing trains. I’ve played Ticket to Ride! I know this entire country used to be nothing but trains, trains and more trains! The entire Gilded Age is based on train-made fortunes. And where were all those trains this week when I needed to get from Chicago to Pittsburgh during a storm and thought my flight was going to be canceled? They were NOT AVAILABLE. In fact, there was one train available and it was sold out from Chicago to Pittsburgh, even though I would absolutely have taken it as an overnight sleeper if I’d had to.

However, this is not actually a blog post about how America is, in general, devoid of trains. It is rather a post about how I had to go to Chicago this week, and then to Pittsburgh, and I had to take two planes, one train and a lot of automobiles to do so. Still, I am actually beginning to prefer trains: they are more sustainable in terms of carbon output, and also make me far less nervous. My anxiety over the impact of late-stage capitalism on the safety of a plane to fly gets worse every year, as I worry that a plane will be improperly maintained due to airline cutbacks on service costs. I also worry that the pilots will be over-exhausted and overworked as their pay is cut and they have to fly more hours to maintain a decent wage. And in the last couple years of this New Gilded Age, as inequality becomes more extreme, I am more anxious as a plane takes off and lands than I have ever been in the past.

And yet, it’s a necessary evil. There is no other real way to travel for business, and we’ve set up our society so that planes have made distance less relevant. The expectation is, once again, that we meet in person when possible, with clients or with colleagues. And so, I am back on the road, and back on planes, worrying quietly in my seat that I won’t be on one of the planes that collides while taking off from an overscheduled airport, or is hit by lightning flying in unsafe conditions. I am more comfortable on the ground, in a train, where it may derail but I’m less likely to actually die if it does.

Still, I survived all the transportation this week, and now I’m back home, able to sleep again. It was actually a worthwhile trip, and I had such a nice time seeing all my colleagues in Chicago and in Pittsburgh. I so rarely get to actually be in an office with people I work with anymore that it feels so special when I’m in a room, not a Zoom, for even one day – and I had three days this week in real space, plus a dinner with my team on Monday. I suppose I can get used to travel again for this reason, in that I just like working in person with people, and these are my chances to do it.

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the junk drawer of the brain

Posted on September 26, 2020 | 1 comment

I’ve had a lot of metaphors for how I’ve felt since the COVID-19 crisis started. The most frequent I use for myself is an image where my mind is clogged with short pieces of thread, a drifting mass of incomplete thoughts that I am constantly trying, and failing, to braid together into coherent strings. This is often at its worst when I have not taken the time or headspace for myself, which I need in order to focus on smoothing all those little pieces of thread out. Once I parse through my thoughts, I can often transform all those incomplete fragments into substance that can be subsequently spun into extended threads of consciousness. It’s a new condition for me, because while I am used to writing to make sense of my thoughts, I am not used to having my thoughts this fragmented.

My brain has become a junk drawer.

This isn’t a new condition, but seems to be worsened by two separate factors, both circumstantial from the pandemic. The first is from my professional sphere, combination of task switching and call overload that is killing my discipline to focus. My job often requires a lot of task switching, but the virtual nature of my team has resulted in a substantial uptick in how many times I am task switching per day. With a dispersed team, we are all IMing each other instead of engaging in person at the office. This results in more interruptions and task switches, as we can no longer rely on the visual clues of a person at work to better time our messages with their breaks from flow. We also IM much more because of the lack of hallway conversations, an inability to chat with each other in natural conversations that would be far more efficient than the all-day random Teams chats we use as a substitute. The result is a constant switch between Microsoft applications. I feel my ability to focus on just writing a PowerPoint is deteriorating as a result.

Eliminating Task Switching to Improve Productivity of Teams
The knowledge worker at the best of times.

The second factor is from my domestic sphere. It is the nature of being the person at home, working, with a child in the house. Let me preface again here, I have a child that requires far less effort than he would have two years ago. He’s able to log himself into Google Classroom and Hangouts and get through his own day. He sets up his own playdates in the afternoon and bikes (or scoots) to play dates and sportball practices all by himself. He logs himself in to his online activities: D&D, comedy, guitar. But even with all this, I am still constantly identity shifting throughout the day between Boss Lady and Mama. I’ll come out to refill my water bottle and find Ben sitting on the couch, camera off, reading instead of participating in class. I’ll find him procrastinating assignments or playing Words with Friends during school hours. I’ll realize that it’s 2pm and while I have been eating protein bars and leftovers at my own desk, he has not eaten lunch yet because he was too distracted reading to eat. And while he tries not to bother me, if I am not in a call, he will come in to ask for permission to watch TV or shift his Fortnite time from the weekend to a weekday.

Fortnite for Nintendo Switch - Nintendo Game Details
“No, child, you may only pursue your highly addicting game on weekends”

All of this is exhausting and is training my brain to expect to go from one task to another instead of remaining in flow. Flow is that state of being on which I wrote a solid blog post a couple years ago, the week before I started my “new” job at OMD. Here is the TED talk that also summarizes this state:

I need the efficiency from a flow state to get through my day as a knowledge worker. Being in flow is also where I really create the work that shows the talent and intellect that powers my career. Like much of my childhood, my career is partially built on a reputation for being “smart”. The pieces of work that showcase my intelligence are built in a state of flow. Without being able to go into that state, where my ideas come together into a narrative and where I’m able to put something together that ties together all the tech and details that go into the back-end of my job with the concepts that make up the front-end of it, that is where I excel.

Transforming knowledge workers into innovation workers to improve corporate productivity - ScienceDirect
Insight, information and knowledge all require focus

Where I am struggling now is that all of this disconnect, all of these short attention activities, do not deliver the value to my work that just being present and paying attention does. It’s multitasking on calls, it’s spending more time flipping through emails, it’s being unable to work consistently without getting distracted doing stuff that is kind of worthwhile but not worthwhile in the context of interrupting my workday. Part of this is just having too many things to do (did Anthem process the claim for Ben’s doctor visit? is OptumRX sending my prescription?) but part of it is that the quick tasks feel easier than the longer tasks, and surfing for weekend getaways or quarantine AirBNBs feels easier at any time than working. Now that my brain is in this horrible place of constant disconnect and short-term procrastination, it’s exceptionally hard to be present in ways that reinforce my value at work, much less get anything worthwhile done…and those are the losses and misses that are ratcheting my anxiety up…and anxiety is exhausting.

I could now go into all the ways I am going to fix this, but I think instead of that, I am going to process this for the weekend and re-set the habits and behaviors. Maybe it’s just putting a “BE PRESENT” post-it on the wall behind my computer. Maybe it’s resuming meditation. Maybe it’s focusing on goals, not tasks. I am pretty sure it is all these things and more, but something has to change to combat the clutter that I feel my head is just constantly stuffed with every day.

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the non-milestone birthday, continued

Posted on August 22, 2019 | 1 comment

I generally try to keep my birthdays somewhat low key these days. While they used to be long-weekend all-singing-and-dancing productions, these days, they are more like me trying to hide from what I think is unmerited attention

After all, shouldn’t my mother be getting the credit for my birthday? I mean, it’s HER birthday tomorrow, and she likes to say I was her early birthday present, but honestly, she did the work to build me and should therefore get the celebration. (Ditto my son. Why am I not the one being celebrated every June?)

I thought I was getting away with a quiet birthday this year, with the celebration focus on my mother. On Saturday we all celebrated Mom’s birthday at the Oak Bay Marina restaurant, aka The Place We Have Gone On Fancy Occasions Since 1982. The big difference now, however, is that the kids meals are composed plates representing miniature versions of the adult meals, and not the dry hamburger I was so excited to get as a kid.

Ben and my niece Tate with their “kids” meals. I did check to be sure that was a kid sized fish and chips Ben is stabbing.

At the end of this delightful meal, we sang happy birthday to Mom, with only my son and nieces chiming in “AND YOU”, meaning me, at the end of each line. The focus remained on my mother and her milestone birthday!

I was also very quiet in my birthday party this year: I invited less than ten friends to just come get a drink at Bearded Lady around the corner. We had a really lovely time too: the conversation flowed well and the cocktails were exceptionally well crafted to match. But in my haste to get out of the office in time for said happy hour, I mentioned to my two group directors (with whom I form a triumvirate) that I was leaving early for my birthday. They asked why I didn’t say anything, and I grinned, and just explained that every year on a new job, I always manage to fly under the radar for my birthday. It was on Monday, but I thought I was safe!

Then today, I was dragged into what I thought was a Client Innovation Day planning meeting, only to be joyfully surprised by MY ENTIRE TEAM singing Happy Birthday…complete with Melissa’s Gluten Free Cupcakes and a birthday card and drawing:

I am sorry to say I was so surprised that I did tell the guys they were the worst for tattling on me, but I said it smiling. I really need to be more gracious when people throw me a surprise party. I did let them know I was teasing and then sent a separate thank you email telling them how grateful I was not only for today, but for every day. I do actually really love this team a lot – it’s a HUGE operation with no end of craziness but it’s really become a work family over the last few months.

So while I am no longer throwing crazy house parties, or taking a whole crew of people to Bats Day, I am still #blessed enough to have people who want to celebrate me even as I try to hide.

EDIT: I would have had this up half an hour ago, but I got distracted looking for Bats Day photos and ended up organizing Google photos instead for ten minutes, and then I clicked over to Facebook and ended up reading THAT aimlessly for twenty minutes. ALL THESE SITES ARE BAD NEWS.

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the complete lack of glamour in business travel

Posted on August 15, 2018 | Leave a comment

I’m in Cincinnati!  Again.  This is what it looked like last time I was here in April.

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I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but I used to think business travel would be glamorous.  This is probably because I grew up in the 80s and 90s when being a Business Woman was glamorous. The truth is, there isn’t much glamorous or sophisticated about actual work, which is what business travel is for.  It’s an extra long day, extended with flights or drives or trains, during which time I can’t work, yet still need to get the work actually done.  I do not get to swan around exotic locations wearing oversize sunglasses and a designer scarf, showing up only to deign meetings with my presence, like I thought I would get to when I was much, much younger.  Most business travel, in reality, requires days of prep beforehand, follow-up actions afterwards, and no end of sifting through all the emails that came in as soon as the wi-fi cut out on my flight.

And yet, aside from missing my men, I don’t mind business travel.  Like advertising and business in general, it isn’t a glamorous activity, but it does enable include the part of my job I like the most: talking.  Not just talking myself, but having everyone talk, brainstorming, discussing, planning, reviewing.  The kind of meetings I travel for, are when we take a step back and look at the forest, instead of being lost in trees.  Being in a room of people all working towards the same goal, even a corporate, commercial goal, is exciting, albeit in a nerdy way, and that is what I travel for.  Despite all those promises made in the 1990s about “virtual meetings”, there is still no substitute for just sitting around a conference table.  It’s likely a descendant of storytelling, sharing ideas and concepts, which is a very human element to keep in business.

Still, I’m trying to figure out where I got the idea that business travel would be exciting.  Perhaps it was because I assumed if I was important enough to travel, I would be an Important Businesswoman in general.  And even without watching mainstream movies my entire childhood, I still managed to pick up, by osmosis, the idea that being in business would be exciting and sophisticated.

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Sigourney Weaver in “Working Girl”: an awful boss BUT a sophisticated terrible boss with an amazing harbour view from her office.  It should be noted that when “Younger” did a Working Girl riff this week, I died.

Where did the women of my generation get this idea?  Is it descended from the archetype Helen Gurley Brown created in 1962, the idea of the sophisticated girl about town?  Given that the woman used mineral oil as a salad dressing to discourage eating, I have my doubts about her mental stability in general.

Image result for helen gurley brown sex and the single girl

Small steps forward, ladies!  SMALL STEPS IN YOUR HEELS.

It may be more likely to stem from the increase of women in white collar jobs in the late 70s and early 80s, the daughters of the first feminist revolution, who grew up with wider horizons than their mothers – including the idea of having their own careers

Line graph shows the percentages of men and women working from 1948 to 2013.

Source: “Women in Top Management“, Sage Business Research.  Actually, it is a really fascinating article in general about the under representation of women in top management

Wherever this idea came from, it is nicely encapsulated in this Hark! A Vagrant comic strip.  This is the perception of the business woman in the 80s: all goals all the time.

What is it about being goal oriented, about being tough, that says “sophisticated” though?  It may be the association of businesswomen as being urban creatures, who would have to have the sophistication required to live in an engaging way in a big city.  It may be the idea of the intelligence required to succeed in an environment in which the odds are stacked against women.  It may even be the perceived lack of typical female insecurities, which is a whole other post.  I am still unsure what it was about this image that appealed to me so much when I was younger, much less how this image permeated pop culture enough to trickle down to me.

Regardless, here I am in Cincinnati, on a business trip, waiting for the end of the reggae fest at Fountain Square across the street so I can go to sleep, poking at a deck I’m presenting tomorrow, missing my men and eating a decidedly unsophisticated take-out salad from Panera Bread.

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Corporate reggae brought to you by Proctor and Gamble!

No one actually said business travel would be glamorous, I just assumed it.  And I suppose we all know what they say about “assume”…

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making work friends

Posted on June 7, 2018 | Leave a comment

This morning, I was skimming Facebook and saw that a group of women from my office had gone out for drinks last night to celebrate a former colleague’s.  My absence from this group is not particularly telling or indicative of anything to do with me or my value as a person, colleague or friend.  It is just a group of current co-workers who have been going out as a group for years, while I sit anti-socially at my desk.

In fact, my anti-social status at the office is so extreme that I am missing the company picnic today because I didn’t cross-reference my work and personal calendars before making plans for the school closure dates.  Therefore, I am hosting Ben’s friends for a day of “please entertain each other” activities instead of re-bonding with my own co-workers.   Part of this is because I’ve been offsite for the past year, and upon returning, instead of attempting to re-bond with colleagues, I decided to hide at my desk and pretend I don’t know anyone anymore.

My failure to prioritize this kind of in-office socializing is probably why I am rarely invited to events outside the office.  On a daily basis,  I make the choice not to get up from my desk and talk to people, which results in not being invited to events outside of the workday.  And for the past few years, I have prioritized my son’s birthday over the company picnic – and then this year, the one year I could have gone, I invited three of his buddies over to hang out instead of sending Ben to chess camp for the day, so I am now committed to staying home with a houseful of ten year olds.

It therefore should not be a surprise that I’m  not invited to office social gatherings, and yet, I’m still sad and disappointed when it happens and I see it posted about retroactively.  It’s just so hard to get over my fear of socializing at the office.  I worried for years that people didn’t like me, and only put up with me because they were obligated to engage with me, a fear everyone has but that I actually had reinforced in me twenty years ago by a co-worker who told me that was how she felt.  Now I not only worry people don’t like me, but also worry that the obligation to engage positively with me is higher since I am management and sometimes, I am someone’s direct or indirect boss.

This is not a surprising phenomenon to many people, I’m sure.  There’s mixed feelings on work friendships.  TV teaches us that it’s the norm to have a workplace social circle, but I  have never had that kind of extended work/social life.  I am friendly with co-workers, and often remain good friends with people after leaving a job, but it isn’t a regular occurrence to have that kind of interaction.  I do not believe this is abnormal, especially for people with children and/or other priorities outside the office, and the New York Times seems to emphasize that work friendships can be weird and inconsistent by running articles on a regular basis talking about issues that crops up in these strange hybrid relationships.

Is there a not-awkward, non-creepy way to make friends as a grown-up?

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</script
 

It would be easy to be safe and just cocoon further into my loner, anti-social status, but that isn't what I want.  I know that my co-workers are people I would like spending time with if I wasn’t so anxious about it.  The problem is that added stress of thinking, “does this person like me or are they just putting up with me” kills most of the joy I would get from the encounter, and makes it difficult for me to reflect positively on the fact that this is a cool, smart, interesting person with their own perspective on the workplace we share and have in common.  It’s difficult to engage in a positive, meaningful conversation during a workday as it is – I’m always worried I’m  keeping someone from something more important – and then my fear of whether or not my presence is received the same way makes it even more difficult for me to engage in a verbal exchange that would add collateral to the friendship.

Therefore, I’ve  been hiding at my desk, nodding at people when I see them, smiling and saying hello, and praying I don’t have to actually engage because THAT IS HARD AND CAUSES FEAR.

Image result for making friends grown up funny

I empathize with this SO HARD.  It’s how I know Daria is really covering for insecurity!

I’m asking myself now, what can I actually do about this?  Do I have to come out and talk to people and put myself out there despite a crippling fear of rejection?  Do I have to make going to company events and happy hours more of a priority?  We’re moving to a new office soon, after all – can I make it a priority to talk to people there?  Can I engage more through the “Women in Leadership” initiative, making sure I show up for those events?  Would it help if i went into the office more days instead of working from home all the time?  What if I reached out more to co-workers, current and former, attempting to get to know them on a 1:1 basis and setting aside time to do so?

The answer to all of these things is yes, and the answer to everything is that I have to just work a little harder at engaging in meaningful social interactions, both in creating the opportunity to do so and in finding conversation to make that isn’t awkward when those opportunities come up.  That isn’t easy for me – I sometimes feel like I’m missing a critical part of the human personality, the part that puts people at ease and makes people feel comfortable with me, the part that makes me likeable.  That, however, is an insecurity for an entire other day.  For today, I need to go problem solve a way to get to that company picnic!

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cave day!

Posted on February 2, 2018 | Leave a comment

I first found out about Cave Day through Daybreaker.  It seems incongruous, a morning rave and a day of focus.  Still, I can see the overlap. There are bound to be people in those early morning sober rave dancers who have their own projects to focus on.  The idea of taking an entire day for mandated focus would therefore have a lot of appeal to anyone trying to translate a vision or an ambition into reality, and I’m pretty sure that anyone committed enough to get up at 6am for a sober rave is committed to some sort of hustle

Cave Day is literally just a day of being in a metaphorical cave.  That “cave” is a state of focus on a work flow.  Whatever one is working on, it doesn’t matter.  What does matter is that you’re in a cave and isolated from the outside stimulus that may distract and derail.  Cave Day is eight hours of work sprinting, of trying to stay “in the flow” of whatever project it is one wants to get done.  I checked out a review online, and it seemed to work: the combination of mantras, focus exercises and peer pressure definitely induced work.  Oh, and despite their email address of bats (at) caveday.org, they are not related whatsoever to Bats Day.

I signed up for this as part of the 2018 work I’m doing, where I’m trying to focus more, period – and especially on my own arts and projects.  I’ve been kicking around an idea for a non-fiction book tied into my Political Science minor in Comparative Federalism, an exposition on my theory of why Canada got Justin Trudeau and his “sunny ways”, and America got Trump and his safe space for white supremacy.  Therefore, I wanted space to work on that book idea, and figure out if it was a viable idea I could roll out into a book proposal – and ultimately, justification to take a sabbatical to write.  However, as great an idea as I thought this was, I was never finding time to write in my daily life, no matter how many times I blocked it off in my day planner.

Therefore, Cave Day not only guaranteed that I would spend at least half a day writing, but it also gave me a deadline to finish some preliminary research and exploration to ensure that was what I wanted to spend the time on.  It isn’t as if I have any shortage of writing projects to work on: I also took a novel writing class last year in the hopes of getting my own tribute to the steampunk genre out of my brain and onto paper, for my own entertainment.  If my non-fiction project wasn’t viable, maybe I’d just get re-started on my fiction project.  Or I could just crank out a month’s worth of blog entries.  Whatever.  Cave Day was going to make sure I wrote.

(I should add, one of my goals this quarter was to submit a blog piece to my employer’s Official Company Blog as part of Building my Personal Brand as a Senior Account Director and Media SME.  I could have sat down and banged out 5 blog entries, a mix of personal and professional and it would have still been a satisfying day)

I wasn’t sure what to expect at Cave Day, to be honest.  I assumed everyone there would be much younger than me, the sort of people who have “side hustles”.  I was partially correct on that: the founders and organizers, Jake and Molly, were definitely squarely in the millenial generation, as were many of the attendees.  There were a few people in my Xennial category though, including the guys at my table.  It was also a slightly male skewed event, with an estimated 65/35 male to female split, as if men feel a pressure to do more.  The 25 of us in the room were, however, diverse enough that I didn’t feel out of place.

In fact, I actually made new  friends.  After an hour sprint of researching  why Canadians have such a vested interest in the common good, I looked up to see a group of grad students writing on a whiteboard headed “Why Are Canadians So Happy?”  It was, for a moment, disorienting, like my imagination come to life.  I bounced into the room, in true Canadian Tigger-like fashion, and discovered it was a marketing project, developing a new campaign.  I cheerfully then volunteered my opinions on Canadian culture:

  • Bears in swimming pools are a thing in heat waves. So are cougars in suburbs, the predator, not the human female.
  • Don’t mention gangs, too soon after the last spate of violence in Vancouver and Toronto
  • Yes, Tim Hortons is HUGE in the East, but in the West, we’re all Starbucks
  • Nanaimo Bars are the only real Canadian food I can think of
  • We are very proud of our diversity and tolerance and of being SLIGHTLY LESS RACIST than America
  • Yes, we all agree, Justin Trudeau IS good looking.
  • We all secretly love the Queen.
  • The North is special to us.  We are, after all the True North, strong & free
  • We don’t vacation IN Canada.  We go to the USA
  • These views are limited to English Canada.  Don’t ask me about French Canada.  Pretty sure they HATE the Queen
  • Margaret Atwood is ALL OVER TV right now and we suspect Netflix’s $500M investment is just going to all be adaptations of her work

After expounding on the culture of my homeland though, I did actually get right back to work.  The day was structured in work sprints, 50 to 60 minutes apiece, three in the morning and four in the afternoon. In the morning, we also started with a one-line intro and commitment to our projects, which we re-emphasized at the end of the day by stating how much we felt we’d accomplished on that project.  We wrote down our plans for our day and each sprint in advance so we would have a clear end goal in sight.  And after each sprint, we stopped, stretched, took a five minute break, and re-set ourselves to work again.

Overall, I liked Caveday.  I loved the space in the Breather offices in midtown. I appreciated the little bit of drama when we entered and were able to symbolically burn whatever it was was wanted to leave outside the cave by imagining it implanted in a ittle piece of flash paper that was burned on arrival.  I appreciated having my phone taken away from me.  Even the scents of the candles (citrus) and the sound piped in (water) were selected to improve focus and flow.  I wrote over two thousand words, completed a much procrastinated review for a direct report, cleared out a bunch of Scout email and caught up on some of my belated Todoist items.  It was a well spent nine hours, in which I accomplished much more than I would have on my own.

Despite liking Caveday, I don’t know if I would go again.  Nine hours is a lot to commit – I sensed I was the only parent in the room.  It’s also time spent traveling into Manhattan, for a 10.5hr day on a Sunday.  That is  huge bite out of my time.  If I can replicate that kind of focus closer to home, then I’d rather stay in Brooklyn – even if it’s just doing work sprints at the library or a coffee shop, somewhere outside the home where I can’t be disturbed but also where I don’t have to go far from home or take an inflexible amount of time out of my day.   Caveday is a great value though: $50 to sit down and accomplish something priceless, with lunch, snacks and coffee thrown in.  If it was in Brooklyn, or if it was more flexible, I’d do it monthly.

So that was my experience in the Cave.  One last thing I did take away was a custom coaster, printed on one side with “I am IN the Cave” for when I’m in a state of focus/flow, and “I am OUT of the Cave” for when I’m not.  It reminded me of my Camp Nerd Fitness wristband, where the red side represented a desire not to socialize, and to be left in an introverted state.  Together, my CNF bracelet and my Cave Day coaster side make an impenetrable wall for focus and concentration and staying in my own brain for a bit.  Totally leveraging both the next time I need the mental space.

 

 

 

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Leaving home as the price of growth

Posted on December 23, 2014 | Leave a comment

Four months ago, I changed agencies. I left Mindshare, and moved twenty blocks north to a different company, Merkle. Circumstances were changing at Mindshare, in a way no-one on my team, or at the agency, could control, and I wasn’t sure there was going to be a place for me when the dust settled. I chose to instead go on to a new adventure, at a new agency, one with a heavier focus on data, on ad tech, an agency who focuses on the kind of direct response marketing I have been doing for my entire professional career.

I hadn’t had any significant contact with my Mindshare team since leaving in August, beyond a few short messages in email or LinkedIn, until Friday. That was when the team held a reunion. We were a fairly tight-knit account team, all 100% assigned to work on the same client, all with a strong team spirit as a result. So when a dozen of us met up at a bar downtown, it was hugs and squeals and happiness all around. Many of my old teammates have been reassigned to new accounts at our old agency; some, like me, took it as an impetus to leave Mindshare and move on for new experiences at other agencies.

I hadn’t realized, until that reunion, how much I missed my old team. I have been so focused on this new job for the past four months, on learning my team, the client, the work, that I hadn’t thought much about the job I’d left behind. But being there, with my people, for almost five hours on a Friday, brought me more joy than I had expected. I missed them so much, for so many reasons, and there they were: the people who made coming to work a joy and a pleasure for almost three years.

Saturday, I woke up, and immediately thought, “I want to go home”. Because I do. I want to be able to go back to my old job. The problem is that my old job, and my team, do not exist anymore. The band has broken up, everyone has moved on. This is why I moved on, too, to an agency where my particular skillset would be of more use, and where I believed I would be able to learn so much more than I could have had I stayed. It isn’t that I rationally want to go back to doing the work I did a year ago, but rather, that I had such an emotional attachment to that job that I am thinking of it as a sort of “home” that I had to leave.

I’ve been thinking about this for the last couple days, the idea of “leaving home”. And I realized I left so I could continue to grow professionally. I left because I wanted to learn more and do more. I left because I wanted to learn to lead in a different context, and because I wanted to learn to work on different accounts. I left for a dozen perfectly good professional reasons, all of which have been proven as I’ve stretched to fit the new role I’ve taken over.

The reason this resonates so much with me is because it isn’t the first time I’ve left home: I left British Columbia a decade ago and have been writing about how much I miss it ever since. I also knew, at the time, that I needed to leave if I ever wanted to move forward with a real, legitimate career path in the agency world. I knew I needed to move to Los Angeles so I could continue to grow as a person. (It just happened that I also needed to leave so I could find my husband less than two years later, but that’s besides the point). I had to leave Vancouver so I could grow up.

A decade later, I am a grown-up, but I’m still growing as a person. I’m still learning things, both big and small. And this week, what I’ve learned is that throughout life, one creates new new places called “home”. And leaving the place you call “home” is sometimes the price you pay to be able to grow.

So I’ve had the opportunity to grow in the last four months, and for that, I’m grateful. And I can hope that someday, I have another team like the one I had at Mindshare. And in the meantime, I can keep leveraging the opportunity for personal and professional growth, and make myself better at what I do.

EDIT: Hilariously enough, WordPress found a few “related posts” below from nine years ago when I left Tribal/DDB to move over to IMS. Also the decision I had to make at the time to move forward, back when I was a senior associate moving on up to manager. Even though it has literally required therapy to recover from IMS, that job made my career.

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wednesday recap: freelancing, cooking, seasonal sponge painting, and interviews!

Posted on September 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

I spent yesterday right where I am now: on the couch in our living room, with my newly upgraded laptop (I upgraded the hard drive last week ). I have actual work to do again. Of course, it is not of the paying variety of work, because everything is in “pitch mode”, or “rampup mode”, or some sort of mode that will take a lot of work to earn a paycheck. But I still like having work to do, and being a consultant definitely gives me more creativity than I had before. I have a completely free range of motion I didn’t have at my last agency, and I can propose anything I want without being limited by red tape.

I also managed to get dinner on the table right when Paul and Ben walked in the door. Ben comes home and yells “Mama!” and gives me a big hug, every day. Then he tells me, “I’m hungry. My tummy’s empty”. Last night, I had the timing down perfectly, and I was able to hand him dinner immediately. When I cook, I plan for a meal for myself and Paul, and then deconstruct it and modify for Ben. Last night, Paul and I were having braised chicken with fennel, mushrooms and tomatoes, over whole grain bow tie pasta. For Ben, I modified the sauce by pureeing the vegetables with some spinach and extra bottled marinara, added ground turkey, and handed him his pasta right when he got in. The kid plowed through two bowls of the mixture. It was perfect – he was just hungry enough to eat, but not so hungry that he was too grumpy to eat. THAT is why he needs dinner exactly on time, because my kid, like his dada, has too little reserve fat on him to be able to skip meals.

After dinner, Paul and I were trying to entertain Ben with some sort of craft. I hit on the bright idea of sponge painting. For those of you who were never in elementary school, this is when you use squares of sponges and paint to dab colors on paper. The sponge makes a print, and you can mix colors for shading and effects. I dumped some of Ben’s paints onto a paper plate palette, cut up a sponge, and immediately showed him how to dab-dab-dab paint into a tree shape. Then we learned about what colors you get when you mix other colors. And then Ben smeared the paint everywhere to make a giant smudge. Oh well. We started over, did more trees, added a pumpkin, and called it a Fall Scene.

ME: “Look, Ben! [dabbing red and yellow on a tree] The leaves are changing colors! What season is it when leaves change colors?”

BEN: [blank look]

ME: Oh. Right. SoCal baby. Not so much with the changing leaves.

Paul and I, having grown up with seasons, are used to doing Seasonal Crafts in elementary school. We did the colored leaves in fall, cotton ball snow in winter, tissue paper blossoms in spring. But Ben has NO FREAKING IDEA what’s supposed to happen in seasons because we don’t have them here. He knows it gets hot in summer, and rains a bit more in winter, and that’s it. I know he thinks snow is a local phenomenon, not a seasonal thing, because he’s seen snow in May in California. The seasonal craft concept is just a concept to him, because seasons are something that only happen in books and on TV. To be fair, even when I was growing up, seasons weren’t like they were in books, because we had so many evergreen trees, and it rarely snowed in Victoria. But in Ben’s world, “winter” is something that only happens when we visit Pennsylania or Canada. When we move someplace that isn’t L.A., he will have a LOT of adjusting to do for actual weather.

But overall, Ben and I came up with a really nice fall scene:

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And now, the good news: I have INTERVIEWS! One is with a full service agency in Pittsburgh, and the other is with a social media agency in NYC. Both are great opportunities that I’m super psyched about, focusing on social media, with a lot of room for growth and strategic thought. And both were flexible enough to arrange for me to have interviews with key personnel visiting the West Coast, instead of requiring me to fly to the East Coast for a day. The only problem is that their key people want interviews on the same day, next Thursday. No problem…except that one interview is in San Francisco. I’m asking to reschedule the L.A. interview to Friday, but I just love this. I love that I’m back at the in-person interview stage again, and that everything is moving forward once more towards gainful employment.

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manhattan madness

Posted on June 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

I’m in NYC again today, comfortably ensconced in the Sheraton Midtown. I’m here for all of two days again, flying out tomorrow. I miss Mr Ben already, and I still woke up at 5:30, local time, without the sound of him trying to walk in his crib (it thumps against the wall between the bedrooms).

Last night, I was so exhausted that I couldn’t do much more than procure dinner and go to bed. The Theater District is notoriously overcrowded and overpriced, due to the high concentration of tourists. Yelp recommended the halal cart on 53rd and 6th. Yes, that is the first street vendor I’ve ever known to have their own website while still running a cart. I took my chicken, rice and lettuce to go, picked up some Tasti-d-Lite for dessert, and returned to my hotel room.

In the process though, I was thinking about why New York City feels, weirdly, familiar to me. It shouldn’t. I’m from as far away from here as you can get in terms of North American cities (and right now, Victoria does seem half a world away). The reason this city feels to me like someplace I visited in childhood, is because of all those children’s books that are set in the city, whose titles I totally can’t remember the names of. But they’re out there, dozens of them, books about children living in apartments in Manhattan, about children living in houses in Brooklyn, about Central Park, all these books that describe the city. And because of that, when I get to New York, it’s that lifetime of cultural references, starting with those books, that makes it feel more familiar than it should.

Also, sometimes, when I’m walking through Midtown, it reminds me of downtown Vancouver: the same density, the glass buildings, the thousands of people. The difference is, of course, that Vancouver backs onto the mountains and the rest of British Columbia. Manhattan flows out in all directions to suburbs across the rivers, millions of people, and no end in sight. Like Los Angeles, but with more parks and green space instead of all the roads and cement, which is KIND OF RIDICULOUS.

I think I have enough time to scoot up for a quick walk to Central Park and back down – it’s seven of the short blocks from here (streets?) I’d better get on that.

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in san francisco

Posted on April 22, 2009 | Leave a comment

I’m hanging out in the Westin St Francis lobby right now, killing a few more minutes before I go down to SFO to catch my plane back to LAX. Being all resourceful & eco-friendly, I’m actually planning to take BART from the Powell St station down to the airport. It’s there, it’s just as fast as a cab in rush hour traffic, and I know how to get around on it.

The St Francis is the sort of hotel I’d never normally stay in. It’s gorgeous and historic and high class, but it’s also expensive. And if I, personally, am spending that kind of money with a Starwood brand, I’m a W type of girl. I like the boutique-y, newer hotels, where there are spa-type bath products and trendy decor and downtempo playing in the lobby. But this was the LAST ROOM IN SAN FRANCISCO, apparently, due to the multiple tradeshows happening this week. And the travel coordinator at work still picked it up at a reasonable price, so, here I am, gazing at all the gilded trim and marble floors and crystal chandeliers in the lobby.

AD:Tech has been a couple days of a lot of walking. I have been working the floor – or just plain working – all day today. I walked around to look for and talk to new technology providers and vendors, and then I took a couple hours to sit at the back of the Moscone Center West and catch up on email and deliverables. I’ve had meetings and meals with vendors constantly since I got here yesterday morning, and by now, I’m almost talked out. Last night, we went for dinner with a vendor, and then hit a couple of parties at hotels. A small group of us stopped by a small party thrown by another vendor at the Palace Hotel, had a couple open-bar drinks, and then went down to the W to listen to the fairly decent DJ there and see the hotel lobby fill up with trendy tradeshow goers. I got back to the hotel around 11pm, and, since I hadn’t slept at all Monday night, I barely managed to take out my contacts before passing out from exhaustion.

And it was tough being inside working all day when it was freaking GORGEOUS in San Francisco today! I walked outside this morning into a perfect, soft, 70F day, and wanted to just go walk around in the park or by the Bay or something. I settled for a quick walk through Union Square on my way to Moscone Center this morning instead. Yesterday, it was 85F outside IN THE CITY. It was L.A. hot! It was ridiculous! I shudder to think how hot it would have been in L.A…or, for that matter, in East Bay. Now, it’s back to normal: slightly cloudy, cold wind off the Pacific. April in the City.

It’s probably time for me to head back to L.A., back to my chunk of a baby, and my husband, and work tomorrow. I miss my men – especially my tiny one. I actually like travelling, except for the whole being away from my baby thing. I will get home, and Mr. Ben will be fast asleep, and I will have to wait to see him in the morning for his usual feeding & cuddle time in bed. But I’m still so glad to be going back to my tiny family. Time to head for BART.

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