Where have I been?

For those of you lucky enough to be subscribed to this site’s feed; I use the term lucky loosely there, will notice that the intervals between posts have been moderately slow. You might also notice that my Flickr feed has been rather bare of late as well. There has been an excellent reason for this; work, work, and a bit more work! For those of you that don’t know, I’m actually a fairly simple creature with an even simpler job, well, it was to start with. I work for a local polythene and paper wholesaler, primarily as a sales co-ordinator (good luck trying to work out what that really entails). Anyway, my job was good, go to work, sit by the phone and drum up orders from a stream of existing customers and organise the odd artwork for printed carrier bags. They also put me in charge of the warehouse and logistics, which was good; it broke the monotony of the phone rings. However, for those of you in business, especially in the UK, will know that the marketplace is tough. Business is scarce, with people wanting to hold on to their money rather than investing in the future. So when our only sales rep came to retirement, the company knew they wanted a person out in the field putting across the face of Oscar Products. To try to come up with the answers we took on a business coach, or John the bus driver as I call him. Anyway, John claimed we were heading in the right direction but seconded the thought of a person pushing the customer relations. After spending some time with each of us in the office, he claimed to have seen something in me, I never knew existed; a communicator and relation builder. To be honest, I’ve never seen myself as anything more than a closet geek with an unhealthy obsession with gadgetry and the inter-web. Not deterred, John put forward the idea of me being the face of Oscar Products and donning a suit and getting out there and talk the talk to the customers. A couple of weeks later, I had the title of "Business Relations Manager" on my business cards and spent half my time driving around the place meeting and greeting customers. The job itself is very different to anything I have ever done, I’ve never done anything like this before, but it has been one hell of a wake-up call to the big wide world. So, where is all this leading? Simple really, my head is somewhere between customer locations and not really with it. I think the culture shock has really taken it out of me and the evenings are now normally spent sitting there in a complete daze not sure which way is up. This has obviously put a knock on effect on everything else, the site has suffered from lack of motivation, my camera is collecting dust as I have no energy to get out and about and my general outlook has turned very sheltered. There have been plenty of occasions where I have good intentions of getting back into the grove, but each time my mind wanders back to work. I think that is the joys of being so heavily involved in a small company, you are forever trying to make the most of each situation and ensuring the companies' survival. It has been about 3 weeks in the job and whilst there is still no real light and the end of the tunnel, I am beginning to come to terms with the idea. As my life settles back into some form of normality I’m sure I will get back into the swing of things, and hopefully, I’ll find my groove again. Thanks for listening, it was good to get that of my chest; long overdue.