My own bed never felt so good.

For the last week, I've been one very tightly wound person. I had a series of ride-alongs with one of my national reps on Tuesday and Wednesday. For those of you who are not familiar, a ride-along is when an outside salesperson is basically being observed for a couple of days by one of their own product reps. The rep the reports to your direct boss about your approach to selling their product, your productivity, and any suggestions they may have to better your method. In short, it's two days of hell. I had never had a ride-along before so I was extremely high strung those two days. All in all, did it go well? Um, I survived. Let's just leave it at that.

In addition to the ride-alongs this week, this weekend was my professional association chapter-wide conference. Since I am now a paid employee of the association, I was responsible for tons of different tasks for the conference. Basically, I co-chaired the whole thing...down to standing on the sidelines during the Gala and handing the President notes on what she was supposed to announce/award next. How did it go? Um, I survived.

Let me just throw out there that I had been on the phone at least twice a day every day for the last two weeks with the other organizers of the conference. And the two days of ride-alongs? I had to shut down all work on the conference for two days. That in itself was enough to give me a face full of breakouts and a fever blister.

One thing that I noticed is that people don't RSVP anymore. They just show up and feel entitled to a seat at whatever event is coming up next. At CEUs held in giant classrooms, not problem, but at $65/head Galas, big problem. I think the caterer hated us. And when we tried to close registration for the Gala, even more chaos ensued. I'm not going to get into all the gory details, but let's say that boyfriends and husbands were kicked out, and instead of eating at the Gala, I ate McDonald's in my car ten minutes before start time.

It's all done. I'm home safe and sound (even though we got a speeding ticket on the way home from Arkansas).