bl(ip)og

I had to to give 24 regional managers BlackBerrys (+ training) while they were in town last week for a quarterly meeting.

Although our office is fairly huge, there’s really no place for that many folks to roll in and set up shop, so their meetings are always held over at the Founder’s Inn ‘hotel that god built’ (on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s campus). Nothing like having to work in a venue where you expect to burst into flames at any minute…

Normally it’s impossible to train region managers — they have the attention span of chihuahuas on crack. However, much like the Borg, our IT department has adapated, figuring out that this group is generally the most vunerable in the late afternoon (they crash around them from their early afternoon sugar high), so I was very glad to see that my training class was scheduled at 5PM — right before their dinner!

Although public speaking scares the piss out of me (mostly because I have little experience with it), the class went off well. Of course, had I known that it’d involve speaking from a raised stage, projecting my hand (demoing the BlackBerry) on a 30′x20′ screen, or that my CIO and VP of IT would be dropping by unannounced, I probably would have passed on doing it. I’m glad I didn’t, though. It was a great experience!