Lunch Hour

Stole away from work for an hour, and am home in the cool and quiet. I need to get back out there and into circulation but am finding it impossible to move. There is bad news today. The other sales manager at my property, T, is giving his notice today, and in the world of hotel sales managers, that means he'll be "walked" -- or told to clean out his desk and be done at the end of the day. Giving notice turns you immediately into persona non grata -- you might steal clients if we give you the basic two weeks! -- hence the washing of hands, the near instantaneous abandonment, the tossing of the sales manager into the cold and lonely world.

The ramifications for me are pretty obvious. I'll be taking over whatever deals, clients, or groups he has out there, and in addition will be responsible for responding to everything that comes into the office. I will, of course, still be responsible for my own deals, clients, and groups. There will be just me, the Director of Sales and the Catering Manager. This will go on indefinitely, or until they hire another sales manager.

This is a worrisome proposition, the waiting for a new guy/gal to get hired. It took them fully two and a half months to hire T, during which time I was not only new but also alone at my hotel. Let's just say this can't happen again.

Aside from the workload, there is the morale factor. The Director of Sales has created a singularly dysfunctional department and this puts me right back in the position of being the sole prop for her lunacy. At least when T was here, we could bitch about things together, and could strategize ways to mitigate the bullshit, or to detour her idiotic roadblocks. Without an ally, we'll be back to square one: inexperienced me having to rely on her ad hoc regulations and muddy thinking to somehow fill the hotel.

But lastly is the sense that he's just the first guy to jump from the plane successfully. I'd be lying if I weren't looking around, too; he was just ready to make the leap first. But my leads to date aren't panning out like his are, and I have to keep making money first and foremost. Hence the frustration and the hastily grabbed lunch hour. I'm honestly jealous and freaked all the at the same time. Either way we can say that the next month or so is going to be a lot more hammer-and-tongs than expected.

Some Salient Facts

I don't have much to say, but typically that means that there's too much to say. If you know me, you know that silence isn't my natural condition. I'm my Mother's child; like her, my brain is like one long playground slide. Ideas start at the top and don't stop till they've flipped out my mouth, sometimes at a speed that defies actual articulation. With luck, I'm glib and a bit of a charmer; without it, I'm a mush-mouth idiot.

I'm three and a half months on from my last post, and you'd think a mangy blog like this would've crawled into the corner and starved to death. Blogger doesn't pull the plug, though, like I thought they might, and lo and behold, Bark:Bite is still here. And lo and behold, I'm back at the keyboard thinking -- knowing -- I should be typing something.

So what you should know before we go on is that three and a half months of things have happened and we won't be able to go on until you understand that:

• I'm still employed at the same hotel but only moderately successful at my job. I'm currently chalking this up to the utter failure of my employer to offer any reason whatsoever that I am any more than interchangeable with any other moron out in the world. I'm also currently ignoring the suspicion that this is both a dead end career and I'm meant for something entirely different.
• Who knows what that is.
• I finished the OKC half marathon in under two hours. 1:57 to be exact. I was so nervous I forgot to take off my warmup jacket and track pants. I beat the time I'd set out to run, so consider it a great success. Enough of a success that I decided like a fool to sign up to run the Chicago Marathon in October.
• And promptly injured myself, though it took me a good month for the symptoms to catch up with me enough to keep me off my feet entirely. And it's taken me another three weeks to pinpoint the problem (part of the left Achilles tendon structure) and to start working it out. Meanwhile, time marches on, and my training schedule gets farther and farther behind.
• What that means is, I have to heal my sorry ass and start running seriously again.
  
• Barack Obama is now the Democratic nominee-elect, and if we're lucky the next goddamn President of the United States of America. Ron Paul, it should be noted, is nowhere on any ticket. I still think he was a true gentleman, though, to encourage me to vote my conscience way back in March.
• Tulsa is demoralizing in myriad large and small ways. Almost every day there's something new and dispiriting to absorb -- whether it's the weather, the backward geography, the provincial and small minded people, the ironfisted fundamentalism that seems to underly almost everything that's done here; the redneckism, the head-in-the-sandism, the little-c-conservatism. It's a neverending suburb, is our Tulsa, but tragically is only the third best Vanilla in the store. Even other places do suburbs better.

I suppose that's enough to start with, but there's always more than one reason why things are the way they are, and the way things are today will need some explanation still. Be warned: this list will grow.



Also: hello again.