Head Tale

I was talking to a non-librarian who was in doing some training for a couple library staff members this morning.  We kept talking about our “Circ” department and she finally admitted, “Everytime you say that, I keep thinking of Cirque du Soleil!” 

(That naturally made me wonder what the effect on customer service would be if we had trampolines and (more) spotlights at our circ desks?  Of course, we'd probably turn people off when we said “That will be $250 for the show – thanks for coming!” like the other Cirque does! )

Oh, and another “Saskatchewan in so small” connection.  The external trainer comes in and goes “You look familiar” to me.  I don't recognize her right off but she looks familiar to me as well.  As the training's happening, I keep trying to place her – Undergrad?  Friend of a friend?  Summer camp (except I've never been to one.)  Then it hit me – she was the lead sales person for the other team one summer when I worked for Image Cable! 

If you click through to the Image Cable link, you'll see that I tell an anecdote about how we out-sold the other team quite badly over the summer.  I like to think it was all due to my great personal charm and winning personality.  But chatting about some of those old times with my former colleague today, I learned a couple things I didn't know about at the time (well, I sorta suspected but didn't know for sure) that helped explain why there was that huge discrepancy in how our two teams performed. 

Just goes to show you that you never know the whole story – no matter how much you think you do.  There's also a huge lesson in there about management that I won't get into here.  But yeah, everybody prefers to be managed in a different way and it's a delicate balance at the best of times – even for college kid door-to-door sales drones.