So I’m back home.
I did a panel discussion thing at the conference for internet professionals I was at. My topic of expertise was how to get traffic to niche websites. Really a lot of people, including the organizer (who I did it for), came up later and told me how great I did. Quite a few people were like, “wasn’t that your first panel?” More like my millionth. I kind of like public speaking. I was nervous beforehand because I wanted to do a good job. The only public speaking which makes me ill is reading my own fiction aloud and I’m working on that little problem. One of the people I was on the panel with has always been really nice to me in the past. We’ve never done business, but he has always been really friendly and he was kind of frosty afterwards. I hope he just had stuff on his mind. Forrest’s conjecture was that the guy likes little girls and not businesswomen.
On the what-impression-do-I-make front, there was another guy who attended the seminar who came up to me at the Players Ball later in the weekend and was gushing about how great I was. So far so good. Then he starts going on about how he assumed I would be all “grunge” and not have a clue from what I looked like, but, once he heard me start speaking, he was like wow this girl would do great in the corporate world. Then he went on at great length about how I would do really well in the corporate world if I wanted to.
I told him that the coporate world moves kind of slowly for me. That, online, if I work hard, I can move up faster than I could in the corporate world. This is true. But, really, the problem is that I could never figure out how to get on board at a reasonable level to start off in the coporate world. So I would do these lower-end artsy positions and my supervisors would flip out when they realized I was more educated and more knowledgeable than they were. I worked at one publishing company where the production manager used to ransack my desk every morning before I came in, steal my allergy medication, and then put things I was allergic to in my workspace. She was eventually caught, but the owner laughed when I suggested that he should give me her job if she felt that threatened by me. She did, after all, start doing this after he started having me sit in on meetings with printing company reps because I was better at print buying and specs than she was.
I remember one time when I was starving in Atlanta and I called a friend who worked at Oracle for advice and she said she had gotten a lot of mutual acquaintances work, but she didn’t believe I truly had the corporate dream, even though I had seemed more likely to succeed than any of the rest while we were in school together. Much earlier than that, a management consultant friend of mine offered to get me a job that was “sort of like a secretary but more educated” and I told him to keep his sexual fantasies to himself. He and I were halfway sort of dating and I thought it would be weird. I now understand that the job was jr. consultant and I should have taken it. But no one gave me a map. No one gave me an escape plan.
When my impact is great enough that giant corporations want what I do, they hire someone else to knock it off. To knock it off, but not very well.
I always thought I would go to work in flashy powersuits some day. Now I generally work in a T-shirt I got for a free and a bra I spent too much on.
I’m not doing bad, but I sure as hell am not doing as well as I thought I would be at this stage. I always thought that that youth and skill will be beaten by age and treachery thing was a joke. I thought if I worked really really really really hard, it would all work out just fine.
Ever see SLC Punk? That movie was the first time since ET that I cried in a movie theatre and the only time I actually really sobbed. That was supposed to be my life. My father went to Harvard Law. Heck, my mom did Harvard graduate work before women even really did such things.
SLC Punk was supposed to be how my story went, but Heroin Bob keeps dying and I can’t get out.
