Same story, another day

That is the theme for the day. I heard back from my big prospect in the U.K. that budget was not approved to purchase my product and "if business gets better" they will purchase in Q4 or Q1 '09.

The kicker is that these people have told us this pretty much every quarter for the past 2 years. Is it time to face reality and give up? As a salesperson, I am the eternal optimist. When someone says they will put it in the budget for the next year, I believe them. Silly me.

Luckily there are days when someone will call me and say, "guess what? we got approval to purchase ahead of schedule". Those days are pretty rare, but I guess it goes to show you that life as a salesperson is a bit like a roller-coaster ride.

On another note, my boss just fired our intern... so now he's interviewing a new lackey to handle our technology needs. I guess we all should have known when on his first day at the job, the kid blatantly played video games at his computer! It seems like our employees either last for years or for a very very short time.

Happy Hump Day!

The problem with blogging as an online diary

First off, this is a picture of me & my family celebrating a belated Father's Day. We feasted on homemade breadsticks, salad, grilled asparagus & cauliflower and baked pork tenderloins. Dessert was a refreshing, cool, smooth vanilla flavored panna cotta with fresh mint and raspberry puree as a sauce.

My mom is amazing. The reality is she could fry up some plastic forks and it would be delicious.

I forget how great my nephew is. I miss him and hope we can have him over for a long weekend sometime soon. He's 13 years old and just plain fun. We played "telephone" and his word/phrase was, "Mytosis Green" --- we all thought he said "my toes are green".

I was not very productive today. I'm still in weekend mode but I think it's more like NEXT weekend mode. Too bad I have a gazillion meetings this week to survive first. What's going on next weekend? WELL, it's the girl's (Ayelet & Jackie) bday celebration up at Healdsburg. We are staying at a fabulous 5 bedroom private home in Wine Country. There is a jacuzzi, deck, bbq, wifi, and all the amenities. http://www.vrbo.com/174516

It's been a while but here's my one thoughtful comment for the day... This is something that has actually been bugging me for a while. Okay, you probably recognize that I do love to blog, when I'm in town. For me, it's a rather therapeutic way to process the random thoughts that run through my haphazard mind. You'd agree that blogging is like an online diary. But what if you feel a STRONG need to blog (vent, gossip, criticize, talk smack about, etc) someone or some people that you know are regular readers of your blog? You just can't - unless you are willing to have your family disown you. Oops, did I give it away? Anyhoo, that is why I would really love to find a blog medium that allows you to create multi-tiered access levels: a ridiculously small set of friends or lovers would have access to everything, friends/FAMILY would have access to certain juicy posts, and the general public would have access to the most mundane and bland of the posts. I would feel a lot more free to speak my mind truly and freely (to the privileged few of course). I have yet to find such a tool. Hell, I might actually pay for such a product!

So... you software developers out there, get to work. And then when you are done, let me know, so I can sell your product to others. yeah, any chance to work it... I will!