Salesperson of the Year

My company’s annual sales meeting was held in Lake Geneva this year, quite coincidentally in the exact same hotel that hosted the Lake Geneva Triathlon, beginning Monday after the triathlon. So after Saturday’s successful event, Steph and I hung out with brother Trent and wife Amy at her parents' house in nearby East Troy on the lovely Lake Beulah.

For my money, the pontoon boat beats the cotton gin as best invention ever. We pontooned (verb?) all over Lake Beulah on Saturday and Sunday, enjoyed the best Bloody Mary I’ve ever tasted (no lie) from a lakeside bar (sorry, can’t remember the name), and Trent and I practiced maneuvering and capsizing his canoe. Children Hobbes and Athena as always enjoyed the time of their lives swimming and playing Frisbee fetch and were quite exhausted afterwards. Swamp Thing (Hobbes’s new name) slept for two straight days.

I showed up for the sales meeting on Sunday evening and stayed until Wednesday. During the meeting I happened to win my division’s Salesperson of the Year award because my yearly sales numbers were good and because I set an all-time company record for sales price to a new customer (“value pricing” at 40x usual retail price; it was a little tricky but I pulled it off). Although there are only two other eligible salespeople in my division and they’ve both won the award previously, it was still a nice honor. The other funny part is that I don’t really consider my job to be sales, but what can you do?

We were only marginally inebriated on Monday and Tuesday nights because our national sales meetings are notoriously low key. That’s because three years ago several people got too drunk on the golf course and started hitting golf balls at coworkers as a joke. Oops. Now they tend to frown on dangerous idiotic drunken behavior at the meeting. What a shame.