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Deepening Customer Relationships
I've spent the past three days at Red Alert stress levels due to a major sales conference I single-handedly put together at work for my entire division. Three days of racing around trying to keep everything running smoothly, putting out the inevitable little brush fires that erupt during these things, and generally driving myself crazy so that 50 other people can relax. For the previous week I averaged about 5 hours of not very restful sleep per night, in part due to last week's heatwave, but also because of a series of recurring variations on the familiar "Test Anxiety" dream; the one where you find yourself sitting in a cramped elementary school desk in your underwear about to take a test for which you not only haven't studied, but in a class you don't even remember signing up for. I literally had two or three of them a night, all centered around some catastrophe related to the sales meeting that I was unable to rectify, and in at least instance, the events I dreamt about actually came true!
As far as everyone else was concerned of course, the whole thing went swimmingly, except for perhaps that half hour on Wednesday morning when my company's Human Resources Director stood around sweating because the presentation materials I had brought over to the hotel the night before had gone AWOL. The eventually turned up (10 minutes prior to the start of the meeting -- not quite as dramatic as Bruce Willis or Pierce Brosnan defusing the bomb 2 seconds before the LED timer drops to "0", but close enough for my line of work), but I had known since the previous evening that they had disappeared, and so of course that was another of the many factors that led to sleeplessness, anxiety, upper back pain and a general feeling of "why am I doing this?"
Still, there were a few perks. The best part of the entire episode (aside from taking a break in the middle to go play tourist with my father -- more on that later), was probably sitting on the foredeck of the Argosy cruiser, alone, sipping a Glenlivet/rocks and just enjoying not having to check up on any details, not having to see to anyone's needs and not having to basically do ANYTHING for a whole 15 minutes. It wasn't nearly enough to compensate for the other 72+ hours of stress, but I do know how to enjoy whatever limited amount of downtime I can muster.
And now, it's over and things can get back to normal. And I did gain a valuable insight from the experience: If this is what being a full-time cruise director is like, they have my sympathies.
Posted byCOMTE
on 3:08 PM
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