The Trials and Tribulations of the not-so-New Bear Icon

I'm having a blast here in New York City. There's still so much to see, and I think I'm getting to the point where I'll need to take things off the list to see. This is why Chris didn't want to come, he knows I get obsessed about running all over town seeing everything I can. My legs are getting a great workout, though. My legs are sore every night from walking.

I have only to go to Brooklyn today to have visited all five boroughs.

My sister, Laura joined me yesterday, and we saw the Mets game, and walked over to the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows park. The Unisphere is the huge steel globe that was the center piece for the 1964 world's fair. I know many people would know if from the movie Men in Black, but I know it's the cover of the B-52's greatest hits album.

We saw Xanadu on Broadway last night. Man it was great. I laughed the entire time, and they even acknowledge in the show that their target audience is gay men in their 40's. It was a perfect send up of everything that didn't make sense in the movie, and still uses the movie music you are familiar with. I thought it was fun that two of the muses are guys, but yet still "sisters". They are the two best dancers, too. There was a cute cubbie usher who gave us our glowsticks for the finale.

After having a great Italian meal, we tied to see if we could make a late trip to the Top of the Rock, the observation deck on 30 Rock. We were a little late, but we were wondering why there was a crowd of screaming girls out at midnight in Rockefeller center. We asked an NBC hand who was helping set up for the Friday morning concert for the Today show and he said the girls were waiting for Miley Cyrus (aka Hanna Montana). He said some of them were camped out from the night before. He also said they were closing more streets than they had for any other artist. We were happy to get out of the area.

I find that I can't quite walk as fast as most of the locals, but I can outpace the tourists, and they annoy me! If you want to gawk at the sights, move over and let us get through! I find I'm already getting to be a local!

➜First, a couple of sidelines. The coverage of the life of Lady Bird Johnson is interesting. I'm really surprised by her and what she did in an era when first ladies really weren't supposed to do anything. Now they are all supposed to have their pet causes. Lady bird doesn't seem like one to cause too much of a fuss, or be much of a feminist or anything, but she was a pretty early environmentalist in her own way.

She was a very prominent Texas, and quite the southern lady. I must put seeing the Lady Bird wildflower center on my list of thing to do.

➜BW3 isn't as interesting when the trivia game is down. Also, the new cub waiter should be our waiter. He delivered our food, but another gal actually served us.

As we were there, some of the televisions were tuned into the Major League Soccer game. The game wasn't very interesting, and this was certainly highlighted by ESPN's coverage. Every few minutes there was an announcement or a commercial telling you the "David Beckham is coming to America on July 21!!!" You couldn't get away from it. it was like the Second Coming had been announced.

So yeah, the local MLS team in Dallas has a big billboard also promoting this, saying that Beckham is coming to Dallas (for the LA Galaxy's one game against Dallas) oh, and tickets are STILL available. This billboard has been up since March.

Let's face it, here he's a lot less famous than his wife. She got more attention for the announcement of a reunion tour of the Spice Girls. In the middle of tonight's Houston vs. Chicago game, the announcers were so bored they did a phone interview with the LA coach about the arrival of such a superstar. I was really wanting the coach to say, "Oh, he's just another player," but it's more likely the league officials were forcing him to make this a "big deal."

If Pelé didn't make soccer a big success, I don't think Mr. Posh Spice will, either.

➜OK, and now about today's performance.

Well, it wasn't horrible.

There were lots of ways I could have done better, and I probably overreached in a couple of places, trying to do more, and provide more than necessary, but I wanted to show I could develop my own materials and go beyond what was given. I ran into some time constraint problems, some of it caused by the "participants" arriving late.

One of the biggest problems was our training region, with the programs and test accounts was down, so everything had to be on paper, and I could only demonstrate so far in the live production region. It made it hard to complete the mission.

If there's any way to overwhelm with handouts, I think I did it.

My class was made up of four managers and one corporate trainer. while dealing with this group is tough, having the trainer there was even more difficult as I know from talking with her that she has formal training, and I'm pretty much self-taught, and may be a little more rough around the edges.

I wanted to encourage participation amongst the students, and I wasn't quite sure if the managers would go for it, but how wrong I was. They actually talked to much, and showed a lot more knowledge than a new associate would, so often I would have to try to recover trying to keep them on topic. I'm not sure I reigned them in enough, and I had to drop some of the extras I had planned.

Heck, when I'm nervous I just keep talking, so I was trying to keep myself on message, and here's this group finding ways to make an item good when it was presented as a bad order item. One of them also went on about how his group would process something differently and I had to keep telling him that an entry-level processor isn't trained to do that. It was annoying, and should have been left out of the discussion. I guess I was lucky to get to the actual live demonstration after discussing the reasons why you would reject and item, and having people conflicting on those reasons.

It's training - the only time these things get to be black and white!

I was a little worried about using the "reward" for a good answer, handing out chocolate. I didn't want it to seem like a bribe, but I'd do it in a class anyway, so I did it today. It seemed to excite them. What's training without candy, anyway?

So I should know if I move on to the next round in a week or so, this after the three weeks between round one and today's mess. They started with twelve, had six do the demo, and will narrow it down to two. I'm thinking I didn't knock it out of the park today. Perhaps with some better time management skills i could have done so, but I didn't bomb, either.

I threw in a little joke at the end, a trainer's evaluation sheet who's only choices were that I was great and got the job or I was the best and got the job. It was more the fact that I would think of the detail of an evaluation sheet over what it said, but heck, if I can't promote myself, who can?

I think I did well not to break character, not falling into the trap of saying "oh, you manager's know this already." I even told them, although we won't be able to process items in here, be sure to have your mentor on the floor help you with your first item. Except for having to bring them back on track, I tried not to acknowledge them and anything but new associates.

I had them create name cards for me, a typical training trick to allow the instructor to call people by name. When Chuck wrote Lloyd on his, I only addressed him as Lloyd. They found it funny, but I wasn't joking.

We'll see where they want to go. Apparently they are about to have a training class next month, so they really need a trainer. I hope I showed them that I can hit the ground running, even providing improvements to what's out there, but with these guys I don't know. I'd cross my fingers, but that never works in my favor.