Canada Corn - Day 2

Even with a rocky sleep I was up around five and raring to go. Well, my brain was fired up. My body was looking for a few more hours of sleep. I didn’t lollygag but got right to it. I was done getting ready and eating breakfast around six so I put in a load of laundry. I fired up my computer early and cleaned up my inbox. I’m trying to keep it to under twenty active items cooking away. With full day calls the last two weeks that require full engagement it’s been hard to keep all the little items that pop up at bay. It’s making me realize the constant flow of questions, concerns, requests, that flow in weekly for me in this role. I can still remember riding a tractor for five hours straight and have a half dozen total emails. I got a few phone calls as we got closer to the start time of the call from folks on the call. Just a few questions for me before we got into a larger audience. I ran down and changed loads a few minutes ahead of the start so that I was well ready for the call when it started at eight and we picked up exactly where we left off. There was no delay in establishing a routine today, it was right into a quick rhthym and we were off. It helped the speed per product when we came across products that weren’t available and we could just jump right past it. That’s important because with what was left to cover we calculated the time per product we’d need to maintain as around five minutes per in order to be done under nine hours. As it happened, we didn’t take nearly that long. Ahead of lunch a couple higher ups jumped on and myself and a colleague mixed in a couple innocuous comments to the group about the direction we were seeing overall. When we broke for lunch he called me right away and we giggled like school girls about what we felt was a clever ploy. At his recommendation I decided upon some pad thai for lunch. It was going to be a much quicker preparation and consumption than the day previous. Around three in the afternoon was when we finished our conversation and parted ways. That gave me a couple hours back and I needed them to tackle some things before a bonus call that was slated to run from five until seven. Towards the last minute I decided showing my file wasn’t going to be good enough and that I should pull together some slides. This naturally is when a couple customers called with questions and addtional requests. I was down to the last twenty minutes when the Big T called to chat, unfortunately I couldn’t give him the focus and had to jump off. We were presenting our corn needs for the Canadian marketplace to some of our breeders and some leadership within the North American product management group. The call actually took the entire two hours and was rife with good discussion and lots of good questions from their end. I felt that it was a great use of my time, unfortunate that it was into the evening but tis the season as they say. A colleague called to review some of that call and it was during that conversation that I made a can of chicken and sausage gumbo soup from Campbell’s Chunky. It was fantastic. After doing the dishes I went and refreshed my laundry for a few minutes in the dryer and hauled it up, folded it and stowed it before bed. It was nice to get that domestic chore done while putting in a full day. I need to do more of that to keep up with my homeownership duties. I’ve fallen well behind on my cleaning and it’s a good thing I’m not allowed to have guests. There wasn’t much left of the evening left after that but I deigned to spend it all away from screens and got to bed at a much better hour.