corporate life and things...

I don't like intruding on people, which is why I really hate doing cold calls for things like company profiles...we run a bunch in each issue of the magazine and I'm the one in charge of finding dealers willing to give me interviews for them. The past couple weeks, I've been working from a list of 25 I HAVE to get profiles from for this panel thing my company will put on in the fall. And all of the contacts are, of course, the presidents and CEOs of the (mostly multi-million dollar) companies. Like they have time for some dumb chick who calls them out of the blue and wants to interview them. And that is only the first hurdle. It's especially hard now because it's the "busy season" where everyone and their dog wants to buy a new powersport vehicle...must be a combination of the nice weather and those sweet tax refunds. It's been my experience that CEOs and such are generally cranky. I'm sure that in their personal lives and such, they're great people, but when they're talking to me, they've always got something better to be doing, and, really, I don't blame them. So I want to get out of their hair as quickly as possible, while still getting all the information I need. And there's always the ones who want to read it before it's printed. This opens up whole cans of worms that I'd rather just not deal with, so I'd prefer that we didn't allow this, but, because a) we want to be factually accurate, and b) because we rely on their good graces to maintain our place at or near the top of our market, we do. I've actually had one or two people do a good job of this and actually only point out the factual errors and provide the correct information. Today, though, I probably had the worst case ever: one of these CEOs called me back and was like, you can't print this. Hello...we've practically gone to the presses. Suffice it to say I was upset, but managed to keep my head on straight enough to direct him to my editor, who should have to take the crap like this instead of me beause I wouldn'tve sent it to the guy in the first place if I were in charge. The whole thing makes me feel yucky inside.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I'm glad I'm one of the little people in a corporation, but all of this just reaffirms that I still don't like corporate America. It turns people into un-people. And everything is so politicked and people only want their best face forward and all that crap. We all sound dumb sometimes. It's all relative, though, really. Some of those guys need to get over themselves. Show love, let things go, don't rush through life...