My Holiday Poem

I once worked for a company for about thirteen years, and each year, I wrote a Christmas poem, and it kind of became a little tradition.  Here's the latest in the series of holiday poems...I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you have a wonderful holiday.

It’s the week before Christmas

And all over town;

It makes people nuts

This festive smack-down. 

The malls are just crazy,

Our nerves are all frayed;

One stop at the mall

And I wish it’s home that I stayed.

At the office, it’s wild

Trying to tie up loose ends;

Clear the junk off my desk

Before Christmas descends.

This year was so great

I started exciting, fresh work;

A new role, a new firm

And the boss: Not a jerk.

A leader with vision

Is all that I asked for;

Ole Santa came through

I got that, and much more.

I love my new job,

The people, the place;

But I travel so much

I need a brand new suitcase.

 

I’ve flown so many miles

Air Canada now treats me swell;

But it took forty-nine flights

Of being treated like hell.

On your 50^th flight

The sun starts to shine;

Now you’re someone so special

They give you free wine.

 

Lots of time in Quebec

La belle province, c’est vrai;

I feel like I visited,

And decided to stay.

I miss my three pretty girls,

And gorgeous Laura, it’s true;

When I travel away

To do what I do.

So now we use texting

And occasionally Skype;

But don’t ask Laura to cam

She’s just not the type.

My family is patient,

They’ve embraced this big change;

We can handle the distance

Except when I’m out of cell range.

And that’s my wish, Santa,

If you have no objection;

Build me more cell phone towers

So I get better reception.

Cuz it’s a part of my life

That blinking  little red light;

Seeing me with no Torch

Is an unpleasant sight.

 

Santa, you know how I feel 

‘Bout my friends over at RIM;

Give a couple of good quarters

To my buds, Mike and Jim.

So on this note I’ll end

It’s Christmas, once more;

7 days left for shopping

You’d better hit that last store.

Share time with those close

Over coffee or beer;

Enjoy good times together

With lots of love and good cheer.

From our home to yours', have a great holiday.

Sean, Laura, Haley, Ainsley & Madeline

Soul-Sucking Jobs for $1000, Alex

I’ve been lucky.  I have never been unemployed for too long, and for that I’m very grateful.  There were many years where I had part-time side jobs just to help make ends meet.  I loved some of those part-time jobs, and others were just grim.  A couple lasted years and others lasted for days.  In one case, I couldn’t even make it through the entire shift.

When I was in university, I was racking up credit card debt like a madman.  When you arrived at university in the eighties, you got handed a form with all the credit cards listed, and all you had to do was put a tick in a box beside each of the ones you wanted, sign your name, and wait.  Within 6-8 weeks, your mailbox was full of new plastic.  I had a Petro Canada card and an Esso card, but no car.  I had cards from the Bay, Sears and Eaton’s.  I had a MasterCard, two Visas, and an American Express card.  I needed an extra wallet to carry around all my plastic.

I was living the high life, but as with all good things, it came to a crashing end.  Those creditors wanted to be paid.  When I had maxed out all the cards, and had already been using my MasterCard to pay my Visa, and vice versa, and I could no longer eat at the Eaton’s restaurant because my card was declined, it was time to get another job.  Enter BiWay.  For those who don’t know, BiWay was like the dollar store, before there was such a thing.  Except the stuff wasn’t a dollar.

My first shift was on inventory day.  If you ever were in a BiWay, you will recall that there were tons of big bins, all filled with little things, like individual Bic pens, and lighters.  We had to count every one of those individual things.  OMG.  I was forced to count a barrel of Bic pens, separating the red from the blue from the black about four times before I got a number that my manager thought was acceptable.

Approximately 4000 individual Bic pens fit in a huge oil drum sized bin at the BiWay

The most bizarre thing about the BiWay was that it had one of the most formal structures I’ve ever worked in.  I had to call my supervisor, and my manager, both of whom were younger than me (remember, I was only in my early twenties at the time), Mr. and Miss.  Who does that?  I’ve worked in law firms and multi-national organizations where senior partners and CEOs didn’t want to be addressed so formally.  I didn’t last long at the BiWay.

At BiWay, the bosses expected to be called Mister.

After my stint in discount retail, and in the midst of a recession, I had a day job at a law firm that I really liked, but that wasn’t paying the bills.  I was engaged and saving for my new life as a married dude, so I decided to go ahead and get a part time job to supplement the savings, or to pay off some bills or something.  I had already done my time in fast food, and decided that my new job should not involve asking the age-old question, ‘Do you want fries with that?’

I also was not that into the idea of telemarketing, but I was looking for something that would fit into my work schedule, so when I saw an ad for a job doing fund raising for the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, I figured it couldn’t be that bad.   I called up, and they hired me without an interview.  That should have been my first red flag.

The National Arts Centre.  Could they survive without me?  Yes.

My job was to call a pre-screened list of people that had previously supported the NAC, and from whom it should have been easy to squeeze some fund raising dollars.  It turns out that we were not simply asking for donations, but rather asking for specific levels of ‘patronship’.  Being a patron means you’ve donated much more than a sponsor or a regular donor.  The cost of becoming an arts patron was between 1500.00 and 5000.00.  In a recession.    Good freakin’ luck.

They handed me the list, pointed at the phone, gave me a script and wished me good luck.  I settled in, and dialed.  After one call, it became evident that shaking down arts lovers for cash in the midst of a recession was not for me.  I spent the next two hours fake dialing and talking to a dial tone.  I clearly did not get any donations, and after what felt like a year, my 15 minute break arrived.  I stepped outside, and ran like hell.  They never even called to see what happened.  I’m sure it must have been a fairly regular occurrence for them.   On the positive side, the National Arts Centre remains a vibrant thriving enterprise, even without my help.

The telemarketing job from hell

In 2011, if you watch A&E on Wednesday nights, Dave, Jarrod, Brandi, Barry and Darrell make self storage look pretty cool.  However, in 1995, it was not cool.   Not one bit cool.   In another desperate bid to generate some cash, I took a part-time job as the Sunday guy at a self storage facility.  I don’t know how I thought I could possibly handle sitting in a remote office, at the side of a highway, seeing absolutely nobody for an entire day.  But I did sit there Sunday after Sunday, occasionally renting out a storage locker, but never meeting a co-worker and rarely talking to a customer.  I could feel my soul getting sucked out.

I read a lot of books.  I dreamed a lot of daydreams.  I watched the clock tick by, minute by minute, every tock felt like another nail in my heart.  There was no internet, no ipods, not a TV, it was horrible.  One day, I discovered that the phone system had an intercom.  I’m not sure why Canadiana Self Storage needed an intercom, as the office was a one room shack at the side of a highway, but an intercom we had.  I passed the rest of my days at the self storage empire singing karaoke to myself through the intercom.  After a few more karaoke Sundays, I had to quit.

A regular Sunday afternoon in the Storage office

There were times when I tried on my entrepreneur’s hat.   I figured that working for myself would allow me to make some extra money, on my own terms, and on my own schedule.  Still in the nineties, I decided that, while living in a small Alberta town, I could make lots of loot by, you guessed it, cleaning other people’s houses.  My lovely wife was working as a desk-top-publisher, so I told her my idea, and before you knew it, I had business cards, and A Man and His Mop was born.

My first client was a guy who hadn’t cleaned his house since forever.  It was the most disgusting thing I ever saw.  The moment I walked into his house was the moment I decided that A Man and His Mop was over.  I agreed to clean the sty, so I cleaned it.  I couldn’t get the whole house finished in one day, so I was supposed to finish it the next.  I got up the next day and couldn’t face the thought of going back, so I didn’t.  I didn’t get paid, and I spent the next year sneaking around the small town, trying to avoid this guy.   I can’t imagine cleaning people’s houses for a living, but I have a boat-load of respect for people who do.

I don’t even want to tell you about my next entrepreneurial experience, Pooper Scooping.  I don’t know why I thought cleaning up after dogs would be better than cleaning up after people, because it isn’t.  I got one gig, actually got the cash, and shut down the business.  It never occurred to me that once I cleaned up the dog crap, that I would have to take it somewhere to get rid of it.  Toting around bags of dog crap in the back of my car was nasty gross.

I know that none of these are even close to being the worst jobs in the world.  But, I've learned that I can’t work alone, and I have to believe in what I’m doing.  To top it all off, I have what my brother-in-law calls ‘computer hands’, so not so surprisingly, cleaning houses,  heavy or dirty work, or picking up dog crap turned out to not be for me.

And The Winner Is...

It’s probably no surprise that The Office is one of my favourite TV shows.   Michael Scott, the manager, hosts an annual awards night called the Dundies. where each employee wins an award in a category hand picked for them including the ‘Don’t Go In There After Me’ award, the ‘Tight Ass’ award, and the ‘Whitest Sneakers’ award.  In my working career, I’ve had the great privilege of working with lots of bosses and since awards season is right around the corner, I think it’s time they got some award-show style recognition.

Michael Scott...the kind of manager we should all aspire to become

The first category, the ‘Kind but Creepy’ award, goes to an old boss from my days in the fast food biz…I was managing a couple of his locations during the school year, and I was planning to go home for the summer.  He wanted me to stay, and I told him that I couldn’t afford to stay there and pay rent for the summer.  In the ‘Kind’ department, he told me that since he was hardly ever in town, (his home was in Thunder Bay), that I could have his apartment for the summer, rent free, and that we’d just have to be roomies when he came to town for a day or two each month.

Like Oscar and Felix, we were a couple of odd roomies

That sounded like an excellent deal, and it worked out well, until the day I got home from work and found him in the bathroom, door open, sitting on the toiled taking care of the day’s business.  That was awkward enough, but when you add the fact that he was sitting there eating a big plate of dinner, that’s the ‘Creepy’ part.  Kind?  Yes.  Creepy?  Freakin' right.   Still, toilet-dining aside, he was a good and generous boss.

It's always a shock to see your boss eating dinner on the crapper

In the ‘Napolean Knew Best’ category, the winner is one of my bosses from my days in the car rental business.  Like the diminutive Bonaparte, he was also a height-challenged French man.  What he lacked in tallness he more than made up for in attitude and temper.

When I wrecked one of the rental cars in an unfortunate roll-over accident on a night filled with freezing rain, other accidents, and floating timbits, instead of inquiring as to my well-being, he asked why I couldn’t have been one of the thousands of other drivers who managed to get their vehicles home safe that night.  If he saw you reading the newspaper at work, he blasted, "…you’d better be looking for a job…" as he trotted past you.  If you showed any compassion to him when he was feeling under the weather by asking, "Are you feeling alright?" he informed you that, "I give headaches, I don’t get them."

The only thing he was missing was his horse.  And his guillotine.  I'm not sure if the same could be said for Napolean, but this man could make me laugh.  

I once had a Regional Director, and often, our travel schedules synced up, so we shared cabs and flights and fairly regularly, a cocktail or meal at the airport.  She is the winner of the ‘Holy Crap, Really?’ award.  For a while, every time we were together, she would turn the conversation around to issues of the team, and engagement.  Who’s happy?  Who’s not?  What’s really going on?  And being fairly junior, and clearly not that bright, I didn’t exactly figure out, at least at the beginning, that she was digging for dirt, so I blathered on and on, talking about my manager, and what was working and what wasn’t.  (Stupid, right?  I know, I know).

My boss asked, I answered.  Bad Sean.  Bad.

On one surreal day, she sent me an email and told me that she wanted to meet.  Somehow I got it into my head that I was getting a raise.  I walked in, and she was formal and frosty.  She sat me down and told me how disappointed she was with my lack of professionalism.  She told me that team players don’t blab, and that she was writing me up for engaging in gossip.  To say I was stunned would have been the understatement of the century, but there was no arguing, or justifying with this manager.  She, for some reason, which I never learned, decided that she had gotten enough information out of me, and it was time to shut off the information faucet by slapping a letter in my file.

I was sick to my gossipy stomach, as this was my first official, ‘this will be a black mark on your permanent record’ kind of smackdown I had ever received.  The irony is, that aside from this bizarre event, I owe the last 20 years of my career to one or two opportunities made possible by this director. 

The first "letter in my file"...stayed there til my next boss took pity on me and shredded it.

The Sarah Palin Lifetime Achievement Award goes to a boss I really liked, and who gave me more opportunities than I can count, but who spent a great deal of time focused on her image.  The main difference between her and Sarah was that when my boss knew she was in over her head, she expected somebody to throw her a life preserver.   She also commanded an impressive knowledge of modern ‘business-speak’ buzzwords, more than enough of these ‘bumper stickers’ to fill any gaps in the conversation, often without betraying the fact that she didn’t know the answer.

Definition of acluistic :

(ā-clü'ĭst-ĭc) (adj.) Describing or pertaining to anything clueless; without a clue.

One of her most over-used (and frequently mocked) go-to buzz-phrases was…”Really guys, on this issue, I’m Switzerland.”  You used to hear it occasionally when a leader wouldn’t have an opinion on a particular issue…neutral, like Switzerland during the Second World War.    However, my boss used it every time she didn’t understand an issue, so it became a running joke.  If she wasn’t at a meeting, people would ask, "Who’s representing the good people of Switzerland today?"  If someone had a hard-line opinion, they would say, “Really guys, I’m North Korea on this issue” (or whichever country du jour was known for taking aggressive stances).  I really liked working for her, but sometimes she was just a little too acluistic.

What else do you think when somebody proclaims, "I am Switzerland"?

The Indiana Jones Temple of Doom award goes to a manager who spent her entire life looking over her shoulder.  She just knew something was out there, lurking, waiting to get her, and she was on a quest to find it, before it found her.  “Sean…” she said on many occasions, “…the most important job of a leader is to root out the Boogey Men.  You need to find them and deal with them.”   She was mostly talking about our own people who, from inside the business, would do us harm.   Hmmm.  I missed that one on every single day of manager school.

  

Indy:  Famous slayer of bad guys and boogey men

I really do understand that keeping your eyes open and anticipating the things flying at you that need to be dealt with is something every good leader needs to do.  In this case, there were actual real marketing, product development, revenue, and operations issues that didn’t attract nearly as much attention as the scary monsters in the closet.  Instead, she focused on boogey men.  I dunno about that one, but I did learn a lot of other valuable lessons while reporting to her.

Better watch out for monsters

The winner of the I’ll Take Geography for $1000, Alex award goes to one of my favourite bosses of all time.  We were once sitting in a bar overlooking the St. John’s harbour, in Newfoundland.   I had just been chastised by a customer for making some bold comments about my knowledge of Newfoundland geography that turned out to be really, really wrong.  My boss, who was giving me a hard time for the geographic blunder in the meeting said, (completely seriously, albeit ironically), "It’s great to just sit here, and stare out into Peggy’s Cove…it’s beautiful."  As it turns out, Peggy’s Cove is in Nova Scotia.

Beautiful Peggy's Cove, NS

Beautiful, but not Peggy's Cove

The winner of the I’m the Boss, So I’ll Say What I Want award is a former CEO I greatly admire.  First, because of his skill as a leader and grower of businesses, but second, because the guy could say whatever he wanted and get away with it every time.  I’m a chubby dude, and I remember being I was quite proud of myself because I’d lost about 25 pounds…I was standing by the elevator when the CEO stopped in his tracks, and looked at me.  I thought he was going to compliment my weight loss, but instead said, “Slater… man, you’re getting harder and harder to miss.”  Take away the folksy Scottish accent and his disarming smile, and the bastard just told me I was getting fatter.  Cheers.

"I don't mean to be rude, but have you gained some weight, Sean?"

Being a manager is tough, and I don’t mean any disrespect to any of my former bosses…in fact, I owe each of them a lot. Every one of them gave me the opportunity to learn and grow.  Even Napolean.

Tired @ Work: Wake Me Up When It's Over

I used to think the only thing scarier than falling asleep while you were driving was waking up while you were driving.   I now believe that the only thing scarier than falling asleep in a meeting is waking up in a meeting.  We are a tired society.  It’s well established that with all the things we have on the go, that the first and most usual thing we let go is sleep.  I am the long-reigning king of showing up at work with little or no sleep.  I’m not proud of it, it’s just the way it has always been for me.

Back in my university days, I could go for three or four days with no sleep…I’d go to school, then go to work, then go home and write a last-minute essay overnight, then go back to school, and repeat for another couple of days.  That alone may speak to my less than stellar results.  When I was younger, I was a bit like the Energizer Bunny…I could just keep going, and as long as there was something to do, I could go.  The crash came when there was nothing to do, like while spending time at home during reading week. 

Unfortunately, I carried some of these excellent sleep habits with me to the world of work.  Part of it is that I have a procrastinator’s soul.  Why do it now when there are three more weeks before I need to have it done?  I don’t get serious about things until the due date is nearly upon me, and when I’m not serious, I can’t effectively marshal the required attention…I’m mainly talking about presentations and reports etc.  If I learn about it today, and it’s due tomorrow, let’s go. When I learn about it today and it’s due in a month…check back with me in about three and a half weeks.  Then, I pull an all-nighter or two, and get it done.  If I need to be creative, I’m usually at my peak at about 2:30am.  If I need to be productive, I’ve got the focus of a hawk at about 4:30 am.  If I need to pound through monotonous paperwork, catch me at about eleven o’clock, once the kids have gone to bed and the house has settled.  I usually write this blog at about two in the morning.

I've never tried Red Bull.  I'm almost afraid to see what it would do to me.

It’s occurred to me recently that I’m getting too old to keep up that kind of schedule.  I crossed that magical chronological milestone on the calendar (40), and it all went to hell…I just can’t pull multiple all-nighters in a row and expect to be able to function anymore.  I’ve become a napper.  I’ve been known to blow a complete Saturday afternoon or evening in slumber-ville.  If you ask Laura, I’ve always been one to fall asleep on the couch or in a chair watching TV, but it almost feels chronic now.  I sit down, watch TV, and wake up at 3:37 am, with an infomercial for the Slap Chop or AshleyMadison.com (that’s an interesting one to wake up to…check them out on the Google) blaring forth from the TV, my glasses askew, sometimes with a drink in my hand, or my laptop on my chest, and I drag myself off to bed.

This is not an endorsement, but I do remember waking up once with an Ashley Madison infomercial playing and I thought it was Saturday Night Live.  

But it also has an impact at work.  I remember once waking up in a meeting.  My boss was staring directly at me in disgust.  I think my only saving grace was that the meeting was a conference call, and the people on the other end who were running the meeting had no idea I was asleep.  I got a bit of a stern talking to over that one.

If the Vice President can sleep in a meeting with his boss, why can't I?

I once worked the night shift at a hotel, and it was so quiet at night that I learned to sleep standing up, like a horse.  They wouldn’t let you sit down, and you needed to be at the desk, so somehow, I learned to lean appropriately and close my eyes for a few minutes.  Only once did I wake up as I was falling forward toward the desk, nearly cracking my skull open on the edge of the counter.

I usually don’t sleep very well the first night I’m in a hotel, so when I travel for business, which is a lot, I can usually count on a sleepless night, and a really tired next day.  In about 2002, I was regularly traveling to Winnipeg, every second week, for about a year.  Like clockwork, I would arrive at the hotel and not be able to sleep, and then show up tired at the office.  I’ve met a lot of people who share this ‘first night phenomenon’.  I now travel almost every week, so I have at least one of those sleepless nights per week.  A couple of weeks ago, I was in three different hotels in one week, and had three of those sleepless nights.  I was a disaster.

During one of those trips to Winnipeg, I arrived at work, and called my three managers into a meeting.  I remember sitting across my desk from Margaret, Kathy, and Stacey.  We were having our typical meeting and at some point, I put my head back.  My office was so small that there was enough room for my desk and chair, and a couple of guest chairs, but when I sat at the desk, the back of my chair was up against the wall, so when I put my head back, it leaned against the wall, which made for a pretty comfortable sleeping position. 

And sleep I did.  I’m not sure how long they let me sleep, but it scared the shit out of me when Margaret (a petite little thing) decided to get up on my desk on her hands and knees and get as close to my face as she could before she clapped her hands as loudly as possible.  It’s a bloody good thing I was wedged in between the desk and the wall, or I’m sure I would have jumped up, likely flipping the desk or the chair, and quite possibly injuring Margaret.   It turns out that I have a strong heart for a chubby dude, and it’s a good thing, or it could all have ended right then and there.

Margaret is no Kathy Griffin, and I am no Piers Morgan, but to date, she's the only woman to have ever crawled across my desk.

I am not the only person to sleep at work.  I remember once going to a sales presentation in another city with two of my colleagues and the local sales guy who had an existing relationship with the prospect.  We arrived in the room and it was like a sauna…the ceiling was very low, the customer had about 20 of their people in the room, and we were 4, all in a room designed for about 12.  We packed in, and it was HOT.  I stood up to talk, and because the ceiling was so low, I almost put my head right into a pot light.  Standing there, with my head in the light, I felt like a burger under a heat lamp just waiting to get sold.

As I started to talk, the sweat started to pour down my face.  I could feel it first beading up on my brow, then I could actually see it running down my nose.  I was standing beside one of my colleagues and I could see my drop of sweat splat onto her copy of the presentation…to say I was embarrassed was a gross understatement.  To her credit, she didn’t react.  (At least until after the meeting).

Yep.  Watching your own sweat drop onto someone else's paper is pretty gross.

While all of this was happening, the local sales guy decided it was time for a nap.  I looked over at him and he was sound asleep.  Not snoring, just sleeping, like a baby.  I’m pretty sure that because of how he was sitting, the customers couldn’t see that he was asleep.  That is until he woke up with such a start that 20 heads immediately snapped to the right to see what the kerfuffle was all about.  Between the sweaty presentation and the sleepy sales rep, we didn’t win the business.  I wonder why.

So the next time we're in a meeting together, and I'm taking a nap, don't take it personally, but in the immortal words of the great 80's band, Wham, please "Wake me up before you go go..."  I hate waking up in a meeting room all alone.

If you want to hear the classic Wake Me Up Before You Go Go, click here!