What Just Happened?

I hope my job didn't just peak.

I've been struggling to pull a first post together for about the last week. There's a draft of what I've written over the course of a couple of days, but it's not quite where I want it and it needs some more edits. But then today dropped a fun story into my lap and now I have something pretty straight forward to write about!

So the one thing I am really liking about my new job is the fact that it is not entirely chained to a desk. This is not to say that I spend a whole lot of time out of the office, but in the month that I've worked there (wow, it really has been a month exactly today), I've gone out on 4 hotel site visits (3 of them were all in the span of a coupe of hours since they are properties owned by the same company), had several guests come into the office bearing gifts and looking to get our business (Godiva truffles!!), and been to one hotel grand opening: the one I went to tonight. Considering how anal and comfortable-in-my-bubble I can be sometimes, it's surprising to note that I really do not like routine; I can deal with it, it keeps me on schedule, but doing the same thing every day over and over again is such a BORE to me. It is related to how I despise spoilers (I'm looking at you, Tina), stare at the steady stream of mass emails I get in my inbox every day and wonder if I won't get a fun, personalized message for a change, and how I hate, hate, HATE running on straight flat surfaces because you can see the end of the line; if I know how far away it is and what it looks like, what's the point in going after it? I wonder if this is a folly of my youth: the desire to be surprised. 

Sitting in an office every day is the same deal; I know in my first jobs I developed a routine of rolling into the office at the same time every morning, checking e-mail, clearing my inbox, making copies, expecting a certain delivery every week, etc etc. I couldn't stand it. I needed something to shake things up. So at least for now, this is the decided upside of my job: I don't do the same damn thing every minute of every day. There's something to break the day up, and as I learned today, serve you up a BIG surprise.

Today was the grand opening of the Brooklyn Aloft, a Starwood property in the Boerum Hill (???? I'm going by Google Maps here for neighborhood names; I don't know a thing about Brooklyn other than there are more hipsters per capita than squirrels). We got an invitation a couple of weeks back for a joint party with the Brooklyn Sheraton (also owned by Starwood) and my boss asked if I could go with her. It's not like I was in a position to say no, and besides, it sounded fun and it got me out of the office after 3pm. But today my boss told me she was too swamped to leave the office in the middle of the afternoon. My company has been trying to transition from one hotel contract management system to another for several months now; I was told at the time of my interview that my start date pretty much coincided with the introduction of the new system, so it was perfect timing to get me trained. Buuuuut it's now the middle of September and it's still a mess. We're supposed to make the full transition over on October 1st, and a lot of people have been putting in long hours (and I mean loooooong hours... I've seen e-mail traffic with timestamps past 11:30pm) to make sure it actually happens. I'm pretty sure this happens every time a company wants to introduce new software: it explodes in everyone's faces.

Add to that another woman from our team being out today and it turns out I was going by myself. I'm aware that a catered grand opening is really just a dressed-up networking event, and it was plainly spelled out for me that I needed to talk to certain people and get my business card (yes! I have business cards! Ask for one next time you see me!!) out there. But networking is something that intimidates me. I mean, networking is a fancy way of saying "talking to people," and sometimes that is the absolute last thing I want to do. I've said before that I've done my best to grow out of being so antisocial, but it is - in the end - my natural tendency. If I don't push myself, I fall back into old patterns of standing quietly and smiling politely while inside I feel tied up in knots. Social anxiety is hard to describe unless it's something you experience for yourself, but it's a compounding problem: you aren't inclined to talk, but the less you talk, the more uptight you feel because you know you should say something, but then all the pressure that's building up clamps that seal down even tighter. You feel slightly nauseous and awkward, and you hate yourself for it.

I've been pretty good about it in recent years; it's been awhile in a casual situation where I've felt completely overwhelmed and unable to say anything. The kicker is that if you're hanging out with people you've just met and don't talk, there is always someone who will say to you, "not the talkative type, huh?" and basically draws attention to you when you're busy trying to blend into the upholstery. It only makes you retreat even further into yourself because you don't want to be awkward and you don't want people to think of you as awkward either; you want to be chatty and charming and charismatic just like everyone else, but you're afraid of looking just the opposite. So you end up saying nothing at all. For a much better description of this, please see the entirety of Of Human Bondage (which I happen to be reading again and it's actually holding up 3 years later).

So networking isn't my strong point. I realize it and I want to get better at it. I could feel that same iron grip at my chest a few times during the night, so I took a trip around the room to try and loosen myself up before the stiffness became permanent. Though of course today turned out to be the day NY has decided it's going to start being fall and it poured rain on me as I walked from the subway station to the hotel with no umbrella. I spent a good part of my time under a hand dryer before I actually went upstairs to meet and greet.

The party turned out to be much, much larger than I had expected. I thought there'd be cocktails, a couple of hors d'oeuvres, a manager to cut the ribbon and we could go on our merry way. But then I couldn't even find the General Manager of the hotel, and I had to enlist one of the many staff members to introduce me since my boss wasn't there to do some face-recognition. I kind of drifted around the party, not really knowing who anyone one was, but there were plenty of examples of what I didn't want to do, i.e. sitting in an eggchair listening to my iPod, standing in a dark corner, or leaning against the wall with my arms folded across my chest. So I walked around the room to try and find a suitable place to stand; hiding in plain sight, if you will. I bounced from a couple of spots, and eventually saw that I was standing in front of a podium with a giant camera facing it. I figured this was going to come into play whenever it was that the key people started delivering speeches, and I moved to a spot near a column to cool my heels and see what happened next.

I could tell by the way the other people were talking that this was no small deal, and I was also a bit confused by how many Chinese people were present. It turns out the Bank of East Asia is the biggest investor in the creation of the Aloft (a $150 million project as they constantly reminded us throughout the night), and they must have invited anyone and everyone related to their company in the New York City area because they all seemed to know each other. I was also wearing a pair of purple suede pumps (my feel were HURTING, let me tell you) that I wanted to contrast with the gray, neutral dress I was wearing and worried I looked a little tacky... then I saw a woman walking around in a suit with lace-up panels on the sleeves, pant hems, and at the back of her jacket, with glitter in her hair. Interesting. 

I did regret not having a coworker there with me to talk to since it usually goes that if you're talking to someone else, other people find themselves talking to you. A girl standing around fiddling with her champagne glass doesn't seem quite as engaging. I was thinking this throughout the night, and little did I know I was actually going to prove it to myself in the most surprising fashion ever. One of the VPs from the Bank of East Asia was standing near me and having nothing else to do, made eye contact with me and came over to introduce herself. We'd only just exchanged business cards when there was a bit of pushing behind us and when I turned around Michael Fucking Bloomberg was standing right in front of us. He shook the Veep's hand and turned around and shook mine. He came out of fucking nowhere. 

It was pure dumb luck I was standing where I was. He's about as short as you'd imagine, but he does have a pretty firm handshake. This I appreciate since one of my biggest pet peeves about being a woman in the working world is when a man you're meeting assumes your hand is made of tissue paper and lightly pinches both sides of your palm as some form of delicate handshake. Fuck you, buddy, I've spent years perfecting a firm handshake and damned if I'm going to let you treat me like I'm the type of woman who would tear at the first sign of mutual respect.

I had noticed walking from the Sheraton Brooklyn to the Aloft that there was a red carpet rolled out in front of the hotel and there was a fair amount of security milling about (but no one checking a guest list. Hm), but I figured that was just to make everyone who walked in feel important. There was also someone walking around with a tray of gold scissors presumably for handing out to important people when it came time to cut the ribbon, but again, I thought it was all fanfare. Bloomberg rolled in, took a ton of photo ops (if these get published on a local NYC blog somewhere, look out for the girl in the back who looks like she doesn't know what just hit her. That would be me), and went up and made a speech about the growth of Brooklyn and how important the tourism industry is, yadda yadda yadda. Jokes abound about how Brooklyn wants to cede from NYC and all that. 

There were a bunch of other speeches, including one by the mayor of Brooklyn (I don't think his actual title is "mayor" but I have no idea what to call him), but it was all standard stuff. There were some awkward speeches made by the heads of the Bank of East Asia since English is not their first language; you could tell where in their notes it said "hold for applause" since they held their silence until someone got the cue to start clapping. Eventually I got upstairs to see the terrace bar (really nice view), and some of the hotel rooms (I'll never afford it), and I'm pretty sure since I was put in a group of Chinese people, the guide assumed I too was Chinese and just kind of ignored me since the others were all speaking Chinese and she had as much idea of what they were saying as I did. Thanks, lady. I eventually hit her up to get the contact for the Director of Sales, so she eventually served her purpose. 

One last thing before I peace out because it's getting to be passed my bedtime (I hate being an adult). Since there were so many groups going around the hotel, eventually we all got mixed up and I lost track of my drunk Chinese group (ohhh they were pretty soused), and wound up with a husband and wife and their spoiled rotten daughters. I'm guessing the husband is either affiliated with the hotel or the bank, but they were clearly rather well off. Interestingly enough, though, I overhead a conversation between the mother and the one who appeared to be the oldest daughter. For whatever reason the mother asked her daughter how much she thought her father made a month, and the daughter said, "I dunno, $2,000?" 

"You really think daddy makes $2,000 a month?"

"I don't know. Maybe?"

And the mother started lecturing her daughter about how that means only $24,000/year in a really condescending tone (as if no one in the history of the world EVER has made ONLY $24,000 a year), and the daughter just seemed confused. Clearly the daughter has never had to look at a single one of her credit card statements to get an idea of how much money she spends on slutty, expensive fashions (thanks a lot, Kardashians) every week. I dunno, I didn't want to listen, but I couldn't not listen since I'm the type of person who kind of enjoys letting people piss me off.

And that was my night. I hope my couple of glasses of champagne carry me off to some caviar dreams...