Decisions, decisions, decisions. Work, Christmas and Car

I feel weird today, but what is new. It could be Christmas, the fact that I am not going back to London, the idea of not sacrificing $1,500 for this, even though every fiber in my body tells me it is worth it.

I can sort my car at lunch time, then that settles it, I can't go since I won't have the money. I'm trying to buy a silver Mustang convertible for $12,000. I had to get back to the idea of a Mustang since they are the cheapest convertibles you can buy in L.A.

Of course, I have spotted the car I would like, the new Nissan 350Z Roadster convertible, only because they look like the Smart Cars Roadsters that Mercedes sell only in Europe. However at $35,000 I don't think I could afford the payments.

I can't believe I am talking so much about cars, I have zero interest in these machines. It took me 28 years to have my first car despite my three driving licenses.

I first had the oldest car on the road, a Volvo, then a Renault 5, and now it could be a Mustang. If I can't get the finance, since I have no credit history here, then I'll have either an old banger in the New Year once I get paid, or I might just accept this offer of the Lincoln of my boss.

It is a SUV, the car everyone is disgusted about, and this SUV is probably the largest one of all. It is also a Ford. I dare not imagine how much it would cost to fix it once it breaks down. Like my friend's Dodge, probably $9,000.

However it is kind of luxurious, it is not very old, it works fine even if finding a parking space large enough for it is kind of difficult, and no need for credit history. I could also have it instantly, almost. Not sure if I would only get it in the New Year.

You know, when life throws at you something like a car, and it looks too easy, and you wonder why you should take it, if it is still $20,000 and you never really wanted a huge Ford SUV, still, you should take it. It is obvious that this is all that destiny was able to throw in your way, as it was before with my Renault 5. I practically inherited it as a result of a trade-in where Stephen works.

And I fought it, and I wasted many months without a car, and in the end, since I won't be able to get credit and that I don't want to end up with a very old banger which will need repair almost instantly, I will just take the offer. I should have seen before-hand that I would eventually own a Lincoln. However I checked the Kelly Blue Book, and it is still worth $30,000. At that price, I would prefer my Nissan 350Z. We’ll have to see.

I had a chance yesterday to speak for the first time to the real Management Consultant. The poor guy might have a lot of experience doing what he does, and he might have worked as he said for the three biggest companies around, doing what he intends to do here, but he has no clue about the conference world, which I am sure has nothing to do with any kind of company he laid his teeth into. So in the end I am not certain how he will be able to have such an input into making things better here, and prepare us for the big expansion that we were told would happen soon.

However I am sure that somehow he has learned a way to just gobble everything everyone has to say and propose solutions which I'm sure will make sense. Somehow he will succeed in presenting something, anything, and as a result, things might change. He must know what he is doing, I'm sure he costs a lot of money to the company.

The thing is, he is a very nice old man and he is obviously highly interested in everything I have to say, because I'm pretty sure he has no clue about how the main conference companies have evolved in time.

I told him I wrote many reports, of course he was highly interested. I told him he would need to ask my boss before I can give them to him, since perhaps they wanted a totally independent analysis from him, and see what he would come up with on his own.

So finally yesterday we sent him all my reports, and this is when I discovered that my main report about their main competitor, never reached the inbox of my boss. And the other main report I wrote which is about their second biggest competitor, she had received it but never opened it.

They were not joking when they sad they never had the time to go over them, and no wonder I never got any feedback. And no wonder the Director freaked out completely, since the first two days that I was supposed to work with him, from his perspective, I was writing reports which never reached my bosses.

So of course they never said to him to bear with me, since in my eyes I was working on something quite important, but they did not know about it. Important enough anyway that they are willing to hire an expensive professional to look into this.

I hope for the Management Consultant that he does not intend to do like me, write reports and send them to my bosses. Because then, he might never get any feedback, they might never read them, and the whole thing would have been expensive indeed.

So now I understand why my reports never had any impact. And I was so proud of myself for having written so much and to have been able to actually do it. And all I succeeded in doing at that time was to alienate them all.

Now I actually have the perfect person to be highly interested in all my reports, the real Management Consultant. Who must have been reading all this since yesterday, and hopefully realizes now, how much easier all of this will make his job.

With a bit of luck, he'll tell my bosses what an amazing amount of work that was, and how helpful it was to him. In the final analysis, whether someone tells your boss that you are worth something, or whether he or she finds out on his or her own, makes no difference. So all this work might finally pay off in the end, in the New Year.

If somehow I have a car at Christmas or the New Year, and that I am about to pass it alone for my three days off on each occasion, I will definitely just go and explore California at the very least.

Maybe it is time I went to visit that Grand Canyon. Or I won't plan anything, I'll just go and get lost in California. Find a desert somewhere, perhaps reach Nevada and Texas. I should be working on this conference now, I don't feel like it, but I will, as soon as I run out of inspiration here.

This morning I woke up and I thought, another one of these days. Sounded very much like, for the first time, I felt this whole thing was becoming routine. You know, when you reach a point when every day is so much the same that you cannot remember if something happened that Monday, Wednesday or last week. All those days look the same anyway and you are stuck in a time loop, repeating it over and over again.

However this is crazy that I could feel this is routine, so many things everyday is happening, I got my boss' car, yesterday I got my driving license, today I might buy a car, I never work on the same conference each week, and now the Management Consultant has brought a new dimension to all my work.

So I think that, what I really meant to say this morning when I woke up, was, oh no, not another one of these days from hell where I will be rushing around to accomplish huge tasks about setting myself up in L.A. Like buying a car, or finally buying a TV and DVD Recorder, etc. These things take time, requires a lot of energy, and I am running out of steam.

I am pretty sure now that the Black guy is reading this. I am not certain how he can figure out all my tricks about hiding this from him, or if he can just see the files that I delete or save at odd places, or if he only knows that I am writing but does not know what.

He asked me how I felt today, and you don't normally ask that kind of question unless you think something might be going wrong. And as far as he can tell, there is nothing that could be going wrong with me.

I'm not worried with the new Management Consultant, I look forward working with him and together perhaps we will get somewhere. He could have thought this could have affected me, however I don't think so. I had heated discussions with the Director this week, but only a sort of passion about work, getting somewhere with this event, we did not have any problem.

Remains only that he might have saw that I was writing (he certainly does watch over us), or does he knows for certain and reads this? Difficult to know.

If he reads what I am writing, I might as well, just in case, let him know something that obviously he could not know about all this. There is nothing to worry about me writing my thoughts down here.

People think all the time and I guess it is unfortunate for bosses to be unable yet to spy on our thoughts. What I think at the moment I write it, and I usually forget all about it five minutes later, and may even think something different not long after.

And despite everything I wrote that could be considered like complaints or worries about this new job, I have to say that what I have written in the past about my other jobs was much darker, and then I was not very nice in my description of who they were and what they were doing.

So at the moment everything here is pretty positive, I know so, compared with my previous jobs. And so, there is no need to worry about my babblings.