First Day in the Q Center

I was glad to have gone to bed early the night before, because I was up early in order to be dressed and ready for a 7:45 AM ride to the office. (To think, I'm never even AWAKE at 7:45 AM in London, much less having eaten breakfast and be on my way to the office!)

After a quick stop in the Woodlands office, we made our way up to the Q Center, where we were scheduled to have our day of meetings. We had chats with Don (big kahuna) and Kurt (slightly less big kahuna), who chattered on endlessly about "vision". I barely followed any of it.

Luckily it was finally time for lunch, where we went downstairs in the Q Center to eat, where it was an all-you-can-eat buffet. I undoubtedly ate way too much, but it was all so delicious it was hard to help myself!

There were more deathly boring meetings in the afternoon, but the advantage to early starts in Chicago is that you get to end the day early, so I caught a ride back to the hotel with Dana at 4 PM. I did some more work (oh yes, here in Chicago, I actually have stuff to do), although to be honest a big part of it was updating my CV to send to a hiring manager about a new role.

Oh right, about that: On Friday, at work, my First Boss contacted me out of the blue, e-mailing me a job description and saying, "I'd heard you were pretty bored at your current job, and thought this might be of interest to you." Reading over it, I have to say that it did sound kind of cool. Lots of analytics stuff (my speciality), but dealing with sales (something completely new for me). So I talked to my First Boss on the phone a bit about it, and she encouraged me to at least drop a line to the hiring manager. Who encouraged me to at least send her my CV.

I spent most of my time while I was home in New York debating with my parents the merits of leaving my existing job for a new opportunity like this, because while I'm terrified about whether I'll be up to the challenge, there's a part of me that thinks if I don't take on the challenge, my brain will completely atrophy and it will get harder the long I stay in this brain-rot job. So although it felt a bit disingenuous, the work that I did when I got back to the hotel room was to revise and polish my CV to send off to the hiring manager for this new job.

I had just survived a full day of meetings without shooting myself, which at points was definitely a danger. As my thoughts wandered however, I realised that a lot of my problem is that I'm a researcher, but I'm not interested in what I'm researching. So it begs the question.... How do you figure out what you're interested in researching once you've tapped out your previous topic? In-person meetings like this one are supposed to totally re-energize and revitalize you, but I am finding that the idea of escaping this team and escaping this work is incredibly appealing. Hence, once I was happy with my CV, I sent it off.

Then also did a bit more work for the guy I met in the cab (he finally got in touch!) How funny that one was...

After I finished my extra work, given that I wanted to do my hair up tomorrow, I went for a wander around town looking for hairspray, and although the pharmacy I'd originally been searching for turned out to be out of business, I did find the local grocery store, which was handy. Although on the whole, this is a terribly small town, and there really isn't much to do here!

Finally at 6 PM (yikes! That's early!) I made my way to a Thai place where we were all scheduled to have dinner. I found myself stuck next to the woman I affectionately refer to as "Crazy Lady" because, well....she drives me crazy. I did my best to make polite conversation throughout the course of dinner, but I was really struggling. What on earth do you talk about with a whole bunch of people who live these suburban lives that are totally unrelateable to your own? At least despite the fact that my boss is Mormon and doesn't drink, the rest of us had a bunch of wine, which definitely helped me to survive the dinner.

After we'd finished our meal (where there was a funny moment where I bit right into a VERY hot red pepper...everyone laughed at my surprised reaction!), Crazy Lady and the Woman From India decided to bail and go home to go to bed, while the rest of us went back to my boss' house for ice cream. It was actually pretty delicious (if only slightly awkward to be in their craft-crazy house), and we finally got to head back home around 9 PM. (These crazy early Chicago hours are totally bizarre!)