Current mood: accomplished
This past week the division that I’m a part of had a large conference that occurs every two years. The conference involves the president of the division and some of his key direct reports presenting information to the hierarchy of division heads above our division, including the CEO of the overall parent company. The person who generally works these conferences left on maternity leave exactly two weeks prior to the conference. I had been working with her for six weeks prior to her leaving so I was somewhat aware of the magnitude of work coming my way. The whole time I’ve been there, people have expressed concern about my ability to handle stress or pressure. At times it felt more like an indictment (we don’t think you CAN handle pressure) as opposed to a hypothetical question.
The week of the conference arrived and so did the presenters and attendees from the various parts of the country and world. There were people in from Texas, the Middle East, the Netherlands and the UK. Despite having not known them in advance, we were able to quickly build a working rapport that allowed them to feel comfortable with my ability to get them through the presentation dry-runs and the presentation itself. That is until I ran into a piece of career sabotage.
The conference room had a huge screen that could project two slides at once. For each screen, there was one copy of the presentation – a left copy and a right copy. For information projected on the left, we had to hide the evenly numbered slides and vice-versa for the right. There was another assistant who also was there and she copied and pasted the first three introductory pages of one person’s presentation deep into the body of the presentation. I caught what she had done before the group had gotten to that file and the A/V guy made the change to the presentation – or so I thought. I was called into the room where the presentations were being rehearsed so that I could make on the spot changes as they were rehearsing. That same error appeared on the screen despite the earlier correction. At that point, I didn’t know if she went back in to screw up the presentation or if the A/V guy didn’t save the changes he made. The information was on an accessible server so I made the decision to take my original copies and make a new folder in an obscure location and work from that. It worked like a charm. No other problems after that.
The day of the conference, I was up early (despite being up very late working on getting the books together) and in the conference room correcting one of the books. I also had the A/V equipment running in the event anyone wanted to practice or review one more time. I had the president’s presentation up and ready to go, then went to eat breakfast. When I came back, he was already in the midst of his presentation rehearsal. We were able to make one spot change, then everyone else worked through their presentations one last time as well. As the start time was getting closer, I left the room and went to play catch-up on the work I had ignored throughout the week.
Once the conference was over, everyone was smiles and happiness. I mainly thought of it as being relief that it was over. However, there was one aspect of the smiles of which I wasn’t immediately aware. I made my career with that day. I had been hired on a temp-to-perm basis which generally lasts ninety days. However, because of my ability to handle all of the crazy stress and loads of work, the president decided to offer me a permanent position before my ninety days were up. I’ve had this happen before and that was when I started working for my former boss that I worked with for six years almost.
Needless to say, this development has been a reaffirming moment for me at a time when life has definitely been not-so-affirming. When I found out, I gave myself a mental high-five.