A Day of Training in NYC

NYC Quickie Travelog #4
Midtown Manhattan - Mon, 24 Mar 2025, 5:30pm

Today was a day of training in New York. Seeing as that's the whole point of me traveling across the country and back for a few days I figured I should actually write about it.

"Training day" can conjure notions of information overload or, almost worse, death-by-powerpoint. Maybe even both. I've certainly been subjected to either or both in the past. But this training day was very productive. Part of it was that the trainers were careful not to overwhelm us. And possibly part of is that this training is as much about feedback to the trainers as it is training us.

That gets back to what I noted ahead of this trip: it's training for a tiger team. The company wants us to be the first ramped up on the new product and new approach, and it also wants us to provide feedback to improve the training before it's broadcast to the other 80-90% of the sales team. Thus if the day had been information overload or death by powerpoint, we would have been vocal about that. Instead we got the opportunity to be collaborative about how best to tune the material for wider consumption.

It's interesting to note how this training also is a counterpart to a training day I had 14 months ago. It was about the same product. The company thought it was ready to ramp up sales on it 14 months ago. The result of the training day in Jan 2024 was that we made them aware of the fact the product was Not Ready for Prime Time— an outcome they absolutely were not expecting. Moreover, after they wisely pulled back for a few months to fix things, they later realized they needed to pull back for over a year to get the product truly ready for market. Now we're there. The product's way better. And our goal is to have everyone ramped up on by the end of May.

Up Late, Up Early. Twice.

NYC Quickie Travelog #5
Midtown Manhattan - Tue, 25 Mar 2025, 7:30am

It's been two nights of being up late and two mornings of being up early. Ugh.

The first was because of timezone changes. I flew to New York on Sunday. Going east, the 3 hour time change makes it hard to get to bed at night. I stayed up until 12:30am on my computer before turning out the lights but then tossed and turned in bed until almost 2. I even took a light sleeping pill that didn't seem to help.

The start of the workweek (not counting spending most of my day Sunday traveling for work) came early. My alarm rang at 6:30am. I snoozed it once and, thankfully, it turned out I didn't need to rush. My working spot for the day was just a short walk away, closer than I had estimated last week. I had time to check things on my personal computer in the morning, stop at a bagel shop on the way to work, and still get to the office before most others arrived for the workshop.

Monday was another night of being up late, though I can't blame timezone change for it. I was out with colleagues too late. The company had a reception at a rooftop bar after Monday's training/feedback. It was scheduled for just 30 minutes— the reception, that is— but lasted much longer. A few people peeled off after 30 minutes to get a proper dinner somewhere else; something about them needing "a porterhouse steak and a $200 bottle of wine". Or maybe that was how those of us left slumming it on the rooftop bar saw it. 🤣

I was with a small group that stayed until the bar closed down sometime after 11, then stumbled into another bar on the walk back to the hotel. The group stumbled into the bar. Actually, two stragglers in the group stumbled into the bar. I was already half a block ahead waiting for them to catch up when I noticed them stepping into an Irish pub. I seriously considered leaving their drunk asses there but decided instead to stick with the group... and for the same reasons I'd stuck with they already to that point. They're my team. 🙄

I finally got back to my room— no additional stumbling into bars on the rest of the walk home— a bit after midnight. I undressed and went straight to bed.

My 6:45am alarm today came early, though not quite as early as yesterday. I had spare time then so I relaxed it by 15 minutes today.

I'm feeling only slightly off from last night. Mostly that's because I did not go overboard with drinking last night. I hit the proverbial bottle hard at first, then slowed my pace of drinking— deliberately— after that. Some of my colleagues pounded down 3-4 more drinks while I nursed one. And they don't have the body mass I do. I bet they're going to be hurting when I see them at work in another hour.

Half Day in Manhattan, Time to Fly

NYC Quickie Travelog #6
EWR Airport - Tue, 25 Mar 2025, 2:30pm

We wrapped up our training/feedback workshop today with a half day that ended at lunch. Most of my colleagues stuck around the office for boxed lunches that were brough in. I jetted for the airport so I could hop on a client call at 1:30 from a quiet spot in the terminal and then board a 3:30pm flight home. It seemed like most of my colleagues had much later flights and thus plenty of time to kill.

While riding in a car through the Holland Tunnel into New Jersey and then over one of the skyways over the Meadowlands I had a bunch of Sopranos moments. As in, I kept trying to figure out if this tunnel embankment, or that "Welcome to NJ" sign, or this bridge was part of the TV show's opening sequence. It would've been perfect if we'd driven through downtown Newark and passed Satriali's Pork!

Well, I'm at the airport now, I'm finished with that customer call, and I've had some lunch, too. I've got to say, EWR is a nice airport now post-renovation. Much like the surprising new beauty of LGA I saw the other night, EWR now has wide, airy concourses and nice restaurant choices. Back in the late 00s when I was traveling through this airport a lot it was a dump from the 1970s.