The Meeting

Today was day one of my work's annual "gather in all the directors and have a meeting/training time." It was the challenging, growth, out of our comfort zone day (tomorrow is 8 hours of meetings, and the main challenge will be staying awake and not dying from boredom).

Today was not as bad as I thought it might be. In fact, it had nothing on other training sessions, including last year's amazing race (a full day of things I'm not good at). All we had to do was sell water. Each team of 4 had 18 bottles of water to sell: 9 cheap brand and 9 premium brand. First we had to make a 1-minute commercial for each brand. They were filmed at the local TV station (and no, they won't be aired; in fact, they need to be destroyed to avoid ever being seen outside our company because we showed the brand names in the ads). Then we had to sell the water.

Selling was easy. One of the guys in the group called a friend at a comic book shop (the friend gives out water at some group gathering thing) and got him to buy the lot. In fact, it was a bit disappointing and slightly annoying because he did this without consulting the rest of us, so we had no input or chance to talk about different selling ideas; further, the guy went with the suggested retail price and rounded up; I was ready to sell for much more. Ah, well; it was easy and we made the second largest amount of money.

The commercials were fun. I did the cheap water commercial for our group. We decided to aim at families, so I was the tired, stressed, thirsty mom with a purse full of stuff that I had to pull out to get to the water. The guy in our group sold the premium brand water; he played the part of a Norwegian dragon slayer.

Back at head office we watched all the commercials (and laughed a lot) and then voted on which one we thought was the best for each brand. To brag a little (hey, it's my blog), I not only received the majority of the votes for the cheap brand commercials (and the vote of the boss, his wife, and the director at the studio), but I also had the most votes overall. Our premium brand commercial also scored the most votes in its category, so we won the competition (did I mention that it was a competition? And there was a cash prize?).

Not a bad day at all!