Ranting and Raving

About six months ago, I received a mid year promotion, as I had met (and exceeded) several of my yearly goals. GO ME!! 😉

The promotion was considered a ‘milestone’ promotion, as I had moved into another level of the hierarchy. Basically, the company breaks down levels as follows*: peon, senior peon, monkey, senior monkey, manager, senior manager, and then fancier titles where you do more talking and less grunt work. I was promoted from senior peon to monkey. That being the case, I apparently had to go to some training course. Had I not received a direct email from the HR department asking why I hadn’t signed up yet, I would have never gone. The emails about it were the generic ‘company looking’ emails and I was ignoring them….whoops! 😉

There was a bit of a scramble to get a flight and make sure I was registered, but it all worked out and I headed for Chicago early Monday morning.

I’m not going to go into detail about the training, because that would be boring. All in all, it was well designed and well executed training, not the standard talking heads reading DIRECTLY from their PowerPoint presentations. The presenters were well versed, the panels were actually interesting (with good questions being asked by the audience) and the training was very hands on. I actually enjoyed it and was able to take away a lot of good ideas from it.

I stayed at the James Hotel in downtown Chicago. The place has a really awesome, early sixties retro look to it. When I walked into my room, I totally felt like I was in a episode of Mad Men! You can check out photos here. Also included are some pictures of the Chicago River Walk which was nearby. And for dinner while I was there, the training group went to Zed 451, a churrascaria. The interesting part about it was that it wasn’t just a straight beef/pork/chicken setup, they actually included several delicious seafood options as well. Oh, and it was open bar…which was NICE! Nothing beats asking a waiter for a glass of Macallan 12 yr on the rocks and hearing him say ‘right away sir!’. 😉

Although a hectic and brief trip, it did turn out well. Except for the fact that I seemed to have caught a cold from the traveling. Early Flight+Airport+Airplane+No Sleep = reduced immune system and higher chance of a cold. I’m doing okay though, so don’t y’all worry yer perty litta heads off bout me, ya here!

*these OBVIOUSLY are not the real names….you would hope!