Canada Corn - Day 1

Despite a strong sleep, I found myself in a crunch for time. I wanted to pull my comments together in a different way that I had planned for and found myself rushing through a shower to be at the helm for half seven to do so. The meeting was scheduled to start at 8am. It is the annual Canada corn meeting that I used to run. We go across the nation and everyone who grew the experiment gives their impressions on the new products. It is a long and ardous process. We talked about different corn hybrids for hours. There was a brief hiccup where the software we use for the visualization crapped out for a few minutes but overall the new guy who took the reins from me handled himself well. He settled into a rhthym after the first little bit. We had spent some time the previous evening walking through what he needed and what he had. I showed him how I’d used the tools in the past and shared what we were trying to get out of the meeting. I gave him waaaay more assistance than I ever got when I took over. There are reasons why but I have always been of the mind that I don’t want to leave someone in the lurch. Our company is historically awful at onboarding people and it generally takes three years of them being in the job before they are comfortable that they are doing it properly. That is across all functions of the company. It’s an embarrassing fact of the industry and I’m not willing to let it be acceptable so I have spent hours and hours over the last eighteen months helping him get into it faster and easier than I did. The corn talk went on until after one, we had some time zone issues and that made lunch later and much shorter than usual. We were given thirty minutes to eat, take a break, answer the phone, emails, etc. I chose to make tots. They take twenty two minutes to cook. I’m not sure why I thought this was a smart plan. I was able to make a large batch and had them out and drizzled with sriracha ranch dipping sauce before we resumed. I crushed them in spurts while the corn talk continued. It went until shortly after five. That’s when our note taking phenom had to leave the meeting so we decided to stop as well, rather than forge ahead without her. She offered to type up a recording if we made one but we all decided that it had been a long enough day talking corn and decided to continue on the second planned day of the meeting. I didn’t stop working though. I continued to review my soybean puzzle and make sure that I had the right choices made. I made a couple more swaps of products and reported this to those needing to know. Eventually I shut things down at 8:30pm and had myself a Stouffer’s bistro and some chips. The food was a major mistake. I felt like I had a brick in my guts as I started to prepare for bed. Oprah was right, you shouldn’t eat that close to bed time. I predictably had issues falling asleep and I’m sure the night was filled with tossing and turning I wasn’t awake for. Should have slammed two pints of water and become a fountain in the night instead maybe. Seems like I was damned if I did, and damned if I didn’t.