Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Ironically the day after a(nother) 6:30am meeting was canceled on short notice, after I'd already gotten up early for the day, today the opposite happened. A meeting scheduled for 9am was moved 2 hours earlier, to 7am, and I was only told at 7:45.

This was Day 2 of my all-day intensive training I traveled to Orange County for. My boss sent me a Slack message at 7:45am. "Hey, not sure if you saw the message, but [C level exec] said we're starting today at 7am."

Oookay. "Give me about 10 minutes to get down there," I wrote back.

I was already showered and dressed for the day— I had an 8am online meeting I was preparing for— so all I had to do was quickly pack my suitcase to leave my room for the day. And that was quick because I laid things out in order last night.

BTW, it turns out there was no message I could've seen before 7:45am. The CxO announced the change orally at dinner last night. The dinner I skipped because I was sick. There was no email update or slack message to the group. Just my boss reaching out to me individually 45 minutes late to ask me if I "saw" it.

Sheesh.

I'm in Newport Beach, California for a few days of intensive sales training. The training hasn't even started yet— it's on Wednesday and Thursday— but the partying has. ...I know, I wrote yesterday that this trip is not a boondoggle. But last night we went out to a fancy-ish restaurant on the coast, Javier's. The valet parking was full of high end luxury and sports cars. The restaurant was full of people in their see-and-be-seen attire; a style I only see in certain places where wealth and vanity collide like in Southern California.

I was hoping for a not-late night last night. I even seriously considered blowing off the group dinner. But I decided to go because the group seemed small enough. There were just 12 of us. Well, dinner was languidly paced at the packed, fancy restaurant. We had drinks. Then simple appetizers. Then bigger appetizers. Then full dinner plates. I estimate my end would've been $175 all-in if I were paying my own bill. And we didn't get back to the hotel until almost 11pm. So much for my idea of a not-late night. I had been hoping we might be done with dinner early enough for me to take a dip in the hot tub before 10!

Getting back to my room at 11pm was bad enough— considering I was up, sick half the night the night before— but then, because it's a business trip and I'm in an unfamiliar bed, or possibly because I'd eaten too much food too late, I couldn't get to sleep right away. I tossed and turned until about 12:30. And this morning I was up at 5:30 for a 6:30am meeting before the all-day training sessions. Ugh.

Yesterday I blogged "Feels Like the Old Days" describing how spending several hours on Tuesday meeting f2f with a client then hanging out with my sales colleague for drinks and dinner felt like 'old times' again. On Wednesday I had another face-to-face meeting with a client, a different client, for which I met two colleagues who'd traveled in from out of town. But while that meeting had some similarities with Tuesday's in that people traveled to meet together, it was not the same.

What was missing? What was missing was the camaraderie.

Wednesday's meeting was transactional. My colleagues flew in for the meeting and flew out afterwards. We did chat outside the building both before and after the meeting, but those were a) short chats and b) focused almost entirely on the situation with the client. There was very little that was off the straight-and-narrow of the business immediately at hand.

And that's the difference. That's the difference between what working in enterprise sales was like in the "old days"— which, keep in mind, were as recent as 10-15 years ago— and today.

In the old days we spent time together as a team. We had unstructured hours together that we filled with everything from chat about work, to families, to life in general. We really got to know each other as people.

That's a big thing we've lost in the shift to working remotely. Today we just assemble a team to do a task, do the task, then go back to our separate jobs and lives. There's no camaraderie. And that camaraderie was the key.

At my sales training seminar the past few days I had a number of conversations with colleagues about AI. These convos spanned topics from "What are we doing [in our product] to align with industry demand for AI powered features?" to "How can we use AI in our jobs in sales to sell more effectively?"to "Is our job [in sales] even going to exist in 5 years?" There's so much I could write about AI even within these topics, let alone the broader discussions about AI. For this, my first journal entry about AI, I'll start with the latter question— which, to state it in more dire terms, is,  Is AI coming for my job?

I use this alarmist language to make a point: This is what people are worry about more and more. And this is the type of lanaguage that's becoming increasingly common as people express their thoughts/concerns.

I don't think the future is as bad as all that. I think we're at a point in the technology hype curve where there's a lot of uncertainty. And I want to be careful to say that I really can't predict the future of AI, even 5 years out.

Why 5 years? Consider how far AI has come in 5 years. 5 years ago AI was more science fiction than science fact.

Three years ago AI was full of hype but still short of reality. While many people in software development, my field, were buzzing about how AI would give us "10x" improvements and pouring money into it, a few of us were pointing out that there was currently no there there and such investment was like the proverbial lemmings chasing each other over the cliff.

Two years ago in software development we started to see the actual value of AI appear. AI could write code— but generally simple code, and it needed more testing and definitely review by a skilled person. The new wisdom became, "AI makes programmers 30% more efficient." That's a far cry from the 1000% gain people were still frothing about 12 months earlier!

Today, in software, we're seeing that 30% level of gain take hold more broadly. Some people react to that figure by asking "Does that mean layoffs of 30% among software developers?" I think that viewpoint fails to appreciate what's happened across the history of technological progress.

Yes, new technology has always reduced the number of old jobs that were doing things the old way. In the industrial revolution factory automation reduced the number of jobs for everything from sawing wood to stitching clothes to digging for coal. A simplistic view of it is, "Machines replaced people." But while machines replaced jobs where people were doing rote, manual work, the economy was not a zero-sum game. Overall the economy grew because of efficiency, and new, higher value jobs were created elsewhere.

The same lesson applies with the AI transformation. AI will replace people who are doing lower level, more rote jobs. But economic gains will mean more higher level jobs can be created elsewhere. For those who are looking at it as zero-sum, though, and wondering, "Will AI take my job?" the answer is really, "People who know how to use AI to be more productive will replace those who don't."

It's been a mellow workday in Phoenix today. I was about to write "easy workday" but then I reconsidered. It has not been easy, per se. I was up early this morning to travel, and then I met with a major client, a company whose name is on a credit card well over 100,000,000 people own, for almost three hours this afternoon. Some people would find that challenging or draining, but I find it invigorating. Well, not the getting up early for a flight part. But overall the day has been mellow. Here are more details.

My flight to Phoenix was uneventful. "Boring flight," I remarked to the captain as I left the airplane. "Thank you, Captain!"

On the ground at PHX I cooled my heels for a bit at the airport waiting for my colleague, Mike. Mike was on a later flight arriving from SoCal. I used my alone time to get a proper breakfast—pepperoni pizza— in a seat where I could stretch my arms and legs as much as I wanted. Then I met Mike. We chatted for a bit and responded to time-sensitive emails as we shared a table at Starbucks. (Mike's a coffee fiend.) Then we hailed a car to the customer's office.

Our meeting with the customer ran long, almost three hours total. That includes us driving to lunch together and continuing our discussions over lunch. It was a very positive meeting. The folks we met were mostly technical practitioners plus two of technical managers. I mention this because often discussions with an audience like this become strictly technical— talking bits and bytes, when's the next release coming, what's the status of bug #555123, etc. It's a common pitfall a lot of people in our sales organization fall into. But I'm really good at up-leveling technical conversations to business conversations, and Mike, as an account executive, is really good at speaking "tech" enough to be credible. We both work together to shape the convo back out of the weeds with questions like, "What's the impact of that on the business?" and "How does that align to the objectives you're measured against?"

As a result we elicited a really good understanding of what this customer's main priorities for the coming year are, what some of their friction points on implementing new technology from us are, and how we can work together to overcome those obstacles. Mike remarked as we rode to the hotel after our late lunch, "I think we learned more of value about this customer just today than almost any other sales team in the past 4 years has.'

We arrived at our hotel around 3:30pm. Why a hotel and not fly home tonight? We're staying through the next few days for a sales training seminar. We're at a resort over in Scottsdale. Now, when I say "resort" you might start imagining some kind of boondoggle. No, it's not like that. It's a quiet but modestly upscale hotel with a few pools. And no, not the kind with a lazy river or water slides.

The weather's nice today— it's only in the 80s as a high here in Phoenix (and 100° by Friday!) — but I may or may not go out for a dip in those pools. So far I've been content relaxing in my room. I may head out for a very light supper later and see if I can find a few colleagues at the bar— let me rephrase that: see which colleagues I can find at the bar— for a round or two of drinks before going to bed at a reasonable hour this evening.

Across season 4 of Better Call Saul Jimmy is scrambling to find work while he's suspended from practicing law. He's offered a job selling copiers after he makes an amazing interview-rescue sales pitch in ep. 4.02— but he turns it down! Instead he takes a job at a local mobile phone store, CC Mobile.

Fans may have different opinions about why he turned down one to take the other. Sure, Jimmy stated a reason when he turned down the copier sales job, but I believe the answer is laziness. The copier job was field sales. Field sales is hard. You've got to prospect for leads, make lots of cold calls, travel in the field to visit prospects and close deals, and on top of all that the pay is likely mostly commission based— meaning, if you don't put in 150% effort, you don't get paid much. Yeah, retail can suck dealing with customers, but honestly— having personally worked both— retail is easier. You have fixed hours, and when your shift is over you're done

Drumming Up Business at the Mobile Phone Store

Jimmy gets more than he bargained for in choosing the easier job, though. The store he's assigned to is dead. He goes days without seeing a customer. Probably some of his pay is sales based, so he's likely making less than he expected. And he's bored. Jimmy loves to cut corners... but he cuts corners to succeed at tough jobs, not to opt out of working— or out of making money.

In ep. 4.04 Jimmy gets an idea to drum up business at the store with a novel sales pitch.



He's worked with a local thief to steal an item from the Neff Copiers office— yes, he couldn't help but notice something he could steal while he was interviewing there! When Jimmy says, basically, "I'll call you again next time," the thief responds that he'll need to go through an intermediary because he's destroyed his mobile phone. "New job, new phone," the thief explains. Jimmy ponders this and comes up with the idea of pitching disposable mobile phones to people concerned about government monitoring.

In more recent years this "Is the man listening?" pitch might find a cottage-industry business with conspiracy theorists. In this story, in 2003/2004, it's still kind of a dud. Jimmy does get one interested customer, though. It's a construction contractor who intimates that he's not reporting all his income to the tax authorities. "Slippin' Jimmy" plays up how much the IRS investigates people and what the consequences are, and cons the man on the idea of throwing out his phone every month. The man leaves with a stack of prepaid phones.

Selling Phones on the Street

This gives Jimmy an even better idea for how to move phones faster.



Instead of waiting for government conspiracy theorists and tax dodgers to wander into his store, Jimmy goes out on the street to sell phones to drug dealers, gang members, and other probable criminals hanging out on the streets late at night. He even refines his pitch to peddle these phones as contraband for criminal associates serving time in prison. The phones are prepaid, and they're the smallest phones, he boasts— easiest to hide in... uh, anywhere. 😨 They sell like hotcakes.

Because what Jimmy's doing is dodgy he does it outside of his job at the mobile phone store. He makes up his own business cards for it:



Jimmy uses the Saul Goodman moniker for this business. It's only the second time he's used that name; the first being his short-lived TV ad reselling business. Presumably he's changing his name again because he wants to keep this separate from his career as a lawyer. If nothing else, doing business with a bunch of criminals would violate his probation, which would wreck his getting his law license back. Plus, it's broadly implied that Jimmy is buying the phones himself from the store and selling them on the street at a markup, so he needs to keep his name off that so as not to jeopardize his job with the phone store where he buys the phones cheap.

Jimmy Gets Into Trouble Selling Phones (Because Of Course)

Alas, "Jeopardy" is kind of Jimmy's middle name. He gets into trouble hawking these phones. First, he gets mugged by a trio of low level street thugs who look a lot like the bullies from The Simpsons. He hires a few bigger thugs to get revenge on the bullies. So far so good. But then one thug he keeps on retainer for protection, Huell Babineaux— whom we know from Breaking Bad becomes Jimmy's long term security guy— assaults a plain-clothes police officer who's asking Jimmy to stop selling drop phones to criminals. Huell gets arrested.

There's risk to Jimmy in Huell's arrest. Huell warns Jimmy he'll skip out on bail if there's a chance he'll be sentenced to prison— which is highly likely because he's assaulted a police officer and has a prior conviction for theft. Jimmy worries that Huell skipping town would bounce back on him, wrecking his probation and chance at rebuilding his law career. Plus, it's not said in the show, but if Huell goes to trial instead of settling through a plea bargain, his testimony could wreck Jimmy's chances, too.

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.

Wednesday this week was a busy day, work-wise. I was out and about on the Peninsula visiting a few customers. I met at one customer's offices just before 10am for a couple of meetings, took them out to lunch nearby, then drove up to Redwood City to meet another customer for a couple of meetings, then took them out to dinner. It turned out that both meals were at Greek restaurants!

Lunch in Santa Clara was at Opa!, a new-ish branch of a restaurant that's been around in Silicon Valley for a while. I don't remember if I've eaten at one of the their sister restaurants before. If I have, it's been years. Thus this counts for my Try New Restaurants New Year's resolution from 2023. 😂

Opa! feels like a high-concept chain restaurant. The decor is upscale and modern yet looks a bit too... pat... to be unique. It's not really a chain, though. There are only 3 of them. The menu is decently broad, spanning all the standards you'd expect to see at a mid-scale Greek restaurant, plus a few crossover dishes like the "Greek Philly Cheesesteak" that one of my colleagues ordered. It was huge, BTW, and he said it was great.

I ordered the Greek meatloaf, one of the house specialties. It was pretty good. I mean, how great can meatloaf be? It was moist, came covered— but not drenched— with a mild tomato sauce, and sat atop a serving of slightly too-creamy mashed potatoes and a few pieces of wilted spinach. The only reason I wouldn't order it again is because I'd like to try at least 3 or 4 other things on the menu before doubling back.

Also tasty looking was the grilled flank steak with feta cheese. That was my #2 choice, and one of my colleagues ordered it. He had no complaints about it, but my concern looking at his plate was that it was just a piece of meat with a small sprinkling of cheese. I guess if you're doing a carnivore diet that's perfect, but if you're looking for a square meal it's missing a few sides.

Speaking of sides, I also ordered a few appetizers to share. Saganaki was served alight, which thrilled all 5 of my colleagues, none of whom had ever seen it before. Opa! We also shared a plate of dolmas. They were disappointing. They were very fresh, but inside the freshly rolled grape leaves they were just rice.

Price-wise Opa! was on the spendy side of what Hawk and I usually do for meals out together. The tab for our group of six was about $240 all-in, so $40/head with tax and tip and non-alcoholic drinks. The qualify and presentation of the food seemed fair for the price, though, so I could see us going there together every once in a while.

Dinner in Palo Alto was at Evvia. Yes, it was Greek twice in one day. That happened because I picked the lunch spot while a colleague of mine picked dinner and apparently didn't notice the overlap. Or maybe he just really wanted Greek and was jealous because he couldn't attend lunch. 🤣

Evvia has been a well regarded restaurant in tony Palo Alto for a long time. I'm not a go-to-fancy-restaurants sort of person— except when the company's paying 🤣— so I'd never bothered to try it. But I was also curious to try it on OPM.

Evvia's dining room has a classy feel without being pretentious. We were seated outdoors on the covered patio where things felt a bit more casual. Heat lamps blazed away making it actually too hot despite cool evening air in the 50s.

The food at Evvia was all very good though not distinctive. Nothing made me say "Wow!" And the saganaki was not served alight. Disappointing. Maybe it's a fire code thing with the tented patio?

Surprisingly Evvia was not that spendy. I mean, it was more expensive than Opa!. And if you go deep in the extensive wine list you can add hundreds to your tab. But the braised lamb shank entrée I ordered was just $40. I didn't see the final bill (a sales VP paid) but I figure the average cost for a meal and shared appetizer and non-alcoholic drink would come to about $70pp all-in. Order heavy like the VP did, though, with lots of appetizers and two nice bottles of wine, and... well, I think the bill for 5 people topped a grand. 😳

I could see going back to Evvia with Hawk. It'd be in our splurge range though not a crazy splurge. As not-crazy-expensive as it is I wished I'd tried it on my own years ago.

I got a cold-call email at work today from a person who tried to make herself seem like a friend or contact so that I'd be more likely to respond. If you work in a corporate job you probably know the kind of thing. There's the classic fake "Following up on our last conversation" intro (there was no previous convo) or "More info you asked for about XYZ" (never heard of XYZ). This one tried to play to the college listed in my LinkedIn profile to come across as having something in common. It was like, "Oh, wow, you went to Cornell, too, I bet you're really looking forward to the Cherry Blossom Festival!"

This bombed as a gambit to establish rapport because I'd never heard of a cherry blossom festival at Cornell. It certainly wasn't a thing during the 4 years I was a student there, and I'm virtually certain it wasn't a thing for at least 10 years prior (it still would've been talked about as campus folklore) or 10 years since (I would've read about it in alumni newsletters they were regularly sending me). It's a fail of an attempt to seem familiar.

Now, if the same person had reached out with, "Cornell! Wow, it's almost time for Dragon Day, and I'll bet you have memories!" I might actually have responded. Even to a complete stranger I might have replied with something like, "I sure do!" and mentioned the time I participated in a Dragon Day parade as an act of civil disobedience after craven university administrators tried to declare it illegal. Or the time my friends stole a dragon— a baby dragon—and drunk, angry dragon-parents swarmed the house I was living in, demanding it back. Good times! But alas, no, this stranger's attempt at camaraderie was to cite a nonexistent cherry blossom festival.

Friday we wrapped up our 4 days of SKO and TKO. There was way less shine on the event by day 4 than the first two days. Partly that was the lower budget and shorter planning cycle for TKO vs. SKO. Partly it was also that people were dropping out.

Some of the dropping out was people physically not being there. One of my colleagues decided there was too much chance their flight Friday evening would be delayed so they rebooked to an 11am flight. That meant leaving the hotel by 9am, missing virtually the entirety of the day's program. They blew off the entire day of participation to "safe" their travel. I don't know if they asked management for permission on that or simply told management. ...And this is one of the colleagues who was not fired last month when a more motivated and hard-working coworker of mine was fired in a performance cut.

Others were there physically but seemed mentally checked out. About a third of my colleagues were just sitting passively in collaboration and brainstorming sessions. They'd contribute only when the facilitator called them by name. And even then they'd give brief and slightly off the mark answers, like they were only half listening to the conversation.

I know I was feeling ragged.  I considered doing the passive-mode thing myself but it's just not my character not to participate. I mean, if the topic is at all relevant to me, I will be an active participant. I will be engaged. If the topic is so irrelevant to me that I don't have an interest in engaging then I don't have an interest in even being there. I'd leave.

And I did leave... for a bit. When it got to a point that the person at the front of the room seemed to be droning on, like all I could hear was "Wab-wah wab-wah" like Charlie Brown's teacher speaking via intercom, I excused myself to the hallway. But not simply to leave. Rather it was to do something more relevant than try to figure out what the droning was about. I had a prospective customer who was frustrated I wasn't doing enough for them while I was busy at an offsite all week. Out in the hallway I took about 30 minutes to consider my response to them and seek input from a manager they'd escalated to.

By the time I finished that, the droning had stopped and the crowd had split into groups to work on projects. It took me 5 minutes to figure out which group I should join. Basically I had to walk into each breakout room, listen to what they were talking about and observe who was there, and decide if that matched my needs and abilities. Wouldn't you know it, it was the fourth group (of 4) that was my match. But I quickly caught up on the topic and became an active participant again.

By mid-afternoon more people were starting to feel ragged. Our VP evidently could tell.. and maybe he was feeling ragged, too. He wrapped things up an hour early, letting us end on a relatively high note. ...Okay, it wasn't exactly a high note. A lot of people were disengaged, and even many of the more enthusiastic people were running out of steam. We didn't exactly end with a bang... but at least it wasn't a whimper.