Full Circle

One of my first duties in the new job will be to assist in putting together a big travel conference in Beaumont in April. It's for CVBs to network and exchange ideas with my agency and a couple of other travel and tourism organizations on promoting their destinations in particular, and Texas tourism in general.

More than likely I will run into some people I know at this conference. The evil destination marketing company I worked for in Corpus numbered at least four Texas CVBs among its clients, and at one time or another, I was an account manager on three of them.

I hope they know I wasn't to blame.

They probably do. I don't think a company with the kind of turnover my old employer had can maintain much of a reputation. I remember being embarrassed just putting together a conference call for a client, because most of the "experts" who had steered them in one direction or another were no longer around to answer questions about what to do next. And starting over with a brand-new account manager every six months had to get a little old. Even if they were all hot.

I'm also bemused that something resembling a career path seems to have emerged from this muddle, and at the circumstances that have led me from one place to another, stumbling aimlessly the whole way. I got a six-week temp stint at a semiconductor manufacturing firm seventeen years ago, doing an inventory of their technical documents; which led to me getting hired to fill client requests for those documents; which led to a familiarity with their tracking system and client database that got me a job maintaining that database, which was also used to track meeting registrations; which led to me getting transferred to and assisting the meeting planning staff; which led to me becoming a meeting planner. The evil destination marketing firm in Corpus hired me because they wanted an inside angle on attracting the meeting planner market; then a friend of mine who knew how miserable I was with Corpus and the hell company recruited me for my current job on the strength of my database experience; looking for other jobs inside the agency, I find myself selected for this one based on my meeting planning and tourism marketing background.

I always wanted to be an opera singer.

But I'm really looking forward to starting my new job in another week and a half, and I'm excited about the conference, too. I think bumping into people I used to work will be a lot of fun.

OR WILL IT?!?