On The Road Again

Tomorrow at oh-dark-thirty we fly off to St. Louis. And then, between landing and leaving on Sept. 24th, here's what we'll be up to:

Paducah, Kentucky overnight

Metropolis, Illinois - Fred family reunion, and back to Paducah for overnight.

Galesburg, Illinois - Dinner the next evening with Fred's high school friends.

Coal Valley, Illinois (outside of the Quad Cities: Moline, Davenport, etc.) - overnight at Pat's girlfriend's house.

Monday, same place, girlfriends from Illinois to come and visit, dine.

Tuesday - across Iowa to see my aunt in Omaha.

Wednesday lunch in Lawrence, Kansas, west of Kansas City with a humor writer I befriended online. And then ...

Across Missouri to Quincy, where we'll stay until the 24th. The rest of the Seattle contingent will arrive on Thursday. And then we shall eat Made-Rites and Pork Tenderloins and shall drink weak beer and weaker coffee. We may also do some cemetery visits to update our Cemetery Visit badges.

Since we're taking the laptop along, I'm going to try to do the Charles Kurault thing and send updates from the road. I also printed out about 10 geocaches, and we'll be searching for them as we go. (Don't know what geocaching is? Check out the link to the right.)

See you on the road!

 

 

So Far, So Good

I officially retired from the paper sales business the 1st of September. Twenty years of sales, sales management, and marketing, and I'm done.

I spent this week cleaning out my office and preparing it for my new career of writing and working with The Quincy Group. File drawers were reclaimed and business supplies were given room to breathe. I made new tabs for my hanging files: Business - General, Business - Book Sales, Copywriting, Event-Planning, Marketing and Self-Promotion, etc. and moved them to an empty credenza drawer. The old Writing drawer became the home for two dictionaries, a Thesaurus, and the latest "Writer's Market Deluxe 2007 Edition," which weighs slightly more than a well-fed toddler.

The best thing of all was reclaiming my car. Only someone who has sold long-term can understand this. For an outside sales rep, a car is one's office, and when you deal with a hard good like paper, your car is full of it: swatch books in the trunk, printed samples on coated paper that slide around under the passenger seat, updated price books in case someone needs one, tchotchkes for giving away to worthy customers, that packet of 8.5x11 samples that you were just sure you'd be able to use to get someone with a Docutech to use your papers ... all of it, out it came.

I'd taken much of this sales rep detritus into Unisource before I left, good Catholic Midwestern waste-not/want-not daughter of a Depression Era child that I am; and I dutifully put them back in the spots where they belonged. But what was left after I was done parsing out the usable stuff went into the recycling bin. Except for the really cool paper. I kept that stuff, finding room for it in the office closet and muttering to myself, "You just never know. I'll use this on something." And I know from experience that I will.

My Sales Warrior vehicle is coming up on 150,000 miles. I plan to drive it until it dies or I do, and I'm hoping it goes first unless it can handle about 500,000 more miles. And because I only now have the time, I'm noticing all the dings. They're new, I'm just sure of it. But maybe they're not.

I just never had time to really look at them before ...