Driving, Parking, Bookkeeping, and Facebooking

Don't let the pretty skyline fool you.
Denver=parking nightmare.

  What a week! I'm totally ready for a weekend, though a vacation would be nicer...
    The bf left for Europe this week, and I was the lucky one to drive him to the airport. Airport is a lot farther than I thought! I was in the car for about 3 hours straight, and it was right at the heat of the day. Miserable.
    Plus, I was low on gas so I didn't want to push my car harder by running the AC. It's September, Earth--you're supposed to start cooling down more in this hemisphere at about this time!
    Wednesday was by far the roughest day, though. I just discovered that the SBDC offers classes for small business people, many of them free, and decided to sign up for their Quickbooks seminar. I have been turned down for several jobs now for not having Quickbooks experience, so I wanted to take a class to at least get the basics.

    It was VERY basic, but it was only $35, so what could I really expect? On a sidenote, I'm talking to you, employers, if they're hiring an administrative assistant, you can't really expect them to also be the accountant/bookkeeper. Those are two separate positions and having one person do both can lead to doing one job better and the other worse. Overlapping positions can be really stressful for the employee. I know--I was the executive assistant/receptionist/content manager/editor/writer/technical support/sometime project coordinator/etc.
    Also, if Quickbooks is so important, don't say "helpful". "Helpful" makes it sound like you're willing to train. If you aren't, say "required". Then I won't bother applying. Except now I can, because I do have experience, albeit minimal.
    Anyway, that class set off a shitstorm for the rest of the day: they didn't give any info on parking, and parking in Denver is an effing nightmare. The class was supposed to be 3 hours, but all the parking lots/garages/meters only allow you to stay 2 hours, or the max you can pay for is 2 hours and then you have to pay for the whole day ($10). So, after searching for spaces for about 15 minutes (making me that late for the class), I finally parked and paid for the whole damn day.
    Turns out, there was a 20 minute break in the middle of the class, where I could have gone down and just paid for an extra hour or something. Furthermore, the class got out about 45 minutes early, meaning I probably could have gotten away with a 2 hour pass in the first place. In short, blarg.

If only I had Coca-Cola's resources,
maybe I could get some more attention
to the Facebook page I manage...

    I had also signed up for another class, FREE, up at the north SBDC later that evening to learn about Facebook fan pages, but my day was shot after I ended up getting an interview at 3:30. Still didn't stop for gas yet because I was so ticked off about the parking when I left Denver, I made it to the interview three hours later. The gas light came on just as I pulled up.
    The interview went all right, but when I went to gas up the car, I didn't have any King Soopers points and had to pay full-price. Then, I ran over a median, despite desperately trying to avoid it. Why are there so many medians? They seem to exist for no other purpose than to damage the undersides of cars whose drivers either didn't see them or have terrible depth and distance perception like me.
    The evening class was one of the only redeeming points in the whole day. I actually learned quite a bit, and felt more comfortable around some techie/internet people in a college campus classroom than a stuffy conference room in downtown Denver. There's a lot more to Facebook business/fan pages than I thought, and now that I know what else I can do to improve the page, I feel a little better about moving forward with it.
    So glad it's finally Friday. I got to visit my friend from my old job and work on the redesign of my other website (super-excited!). Plus we had totally awesome Indian buffet for lunch and free wifi at the public library. Today makes up for such an awful Wednesday, and semi-crappy Tuesday airport drive.
    It's nice that there are always good days to make you feel better about the bad ones.

It's the freakin' weekend!

LONG Day In Denver

  Today I attended (not by choice) a conference for administrative assistants at a Holiday Inn in Denver. It was the nicest Holiday Inn I've ever been in, that's for sure. It was supposed to help me be a better assistant and learn some more tools and skills I can apply to my job. It wasn't a total bust, I'll admit, though I had a less than sunny outlook on the whole thing at first. These workshop things where you're supposed to meet people and do workbook exercises and teambuild is absolutely not helpful to me more often than not because that's not how I learn. Plus, I don't really like the idea of meeting strange people who I'm supposed to befriend for a day and then never see again. (I'm trying something new where I have to say positive stuff if I'm going to say negative stuff. Something about a silver lining or whatever. Bear with me.)
    Again, the conference had its moments. The speaker I sat in with for the majority of the day (there was another one whom I wish I had sat in on her discussions more) was extremely bubbly and chatty. She had some helpful points, but she didn't really give as many examples of how to put those ideas into action. The other speaker had better real-life examples and her analogies made more sense to me--again, making me wish I'd sat in on her discussions (there were 5 from each speaker throughout the day) more than I did. But some of what they said was interesting--learning about how to communicate better with different personality types; how to solve problems in the workplace in a creative way, etc.
    However, it seemed very focused toward the corporate world, which doesn't really apply to me since I work at such a small company, and other times, it seemed focused toward a more traditional office environment, which mine most definitely is not. Technology seemed to get ignored completely, which was yet another downer because, um, that's kind of a big thing where I work--web design company and all. The speaker asked for suggestions or examples of how we communicate in our offices, and I said we use Skype to Instant Message each other, which we do. It's not awesome, but it's quite useful some of the time. The speaker seemed to write it off, saying IMs could get annoying because they flash at you when they come in before you look at them, and that can distract you from whatever other work you're doing. True, but that doesn't mean it's not faster and easier than email for short messages or questions, and much faster and easier than getting up and asking people something (depending on the complexity of the question).
    All in all, I felt like it was a little too old school for me. There were a few younger women there, but most were between about 30 and 60, so there was a lot of stuff about writing stuff down, rather than using some sort of electronic system for organization. I'm like, we don't have files. EVERYTHING is on my computer. The only stuff that is on paper is stuff I've printed out so I don't have to keep tracking down that one email or that one document for a particular current project I'm working on. But those get shredded or tossed pretty quickly--they don't get filed away somewhere, never to be seen again. (Of course, it's a lot easier to bitch about the things I didn't like about it and what I didn't find relevant than to explain what I did like and did find to be relevant, which is why I'm doing it.)
    I learned some good suggestions on how to approach communication with both my bosses and my coworkers, so that was helpful. Also, learned how to approach problems and how to come up with solutions first before going to the boss, if possible. I didn't learn too much about organization because I'm a little too set in my ways on how I keep on my tasks (basically I write them down on paper/sticky note/Outlook calendar in several places, several times, so the repetition gets the task stuck in my brain and much harder to be missed or forgotten) but I did think of something I maybe could implement as far as task management goes at work. I don't know if it'll be useful, as many of our spreadsheets and files tend to get used once and then forgotten about. We have a problem at my job of implementing a system, and then not actually sticking to it and utilizing it fully. It kind of falls to the wayside sooner or later.
    Aside from sitting in a really uncomfortable chair for the better part of 6 hours, which is longer than I sit at my desk at work because I'm constantly getting up and asking questions, getting feedback, checking on my coworkers and their tasks, etc., it wasn't as awful a day as I had imagined. I did remember about three things that need to be done at work, which probably aren't done, and won't be done by the end of tomorrow, but they're all things for other people to do, so maybe I won't take the heat for not getting them done...
    Somewhat off topic, for those non-Coloradans who have no idea what Denver is like, don't drive here. Get someone else to drive you. Getting to the hotel this morning was easy, relatively traffic-free. Getting home was another story, even though we ended about 15 or 20 minutes early. Rush hour starts at like 2pm so you're pretty much screwed no matter what. Then, after two or three weeks of 80-90+ degree weather, got POURED ON the entire way back too. I waited for the storm to clear in Denver and then as soon as I headed out, it was just dumping rain the entire drive back. Hydroplaning was imminent, but I survived this time. (Sidenote: You know you live in Colorado when: you get rained on across the entire drive along the Front Range. But this only happens like once a year so it's manageable in the grand scheme of things.)
   Overall, the conference would have been better if the whole thing had been more focused on one thing like project management or communicating with your bosses and coworkers rather than trying to squeeze it all in over the course of a day. Everything got skimmed over a lot, and there could have been more examples, more in-depth coverage of topics if it had not been so broad.
   One last little complaint: I had to bring my own lunch. WTF. Cold, leftover Chipotle for lunch at an all-day conference where you have to pay $200 to get in kind of sucks.

I guess there's no such thing as a free lunch. Except I had one yesterday. 

So, WTF again.

The Cars at the Fillmore

I saw the Cars in concert last night. It was freaking awesome. I'm going to post some videos (someone who was also there posted video!), but you shouldn't judge them on the live videos because they were recorded with a cell phone in all likelihood. Check out the other videos (at bottom) where the sound quality is better :)

Just What I Needed (Fillmore)

One of the ones off their new album (I think) (Fillmore)

Now for some of the classics, with better sound quality. 

LET'S GO (Not at the Fillmore)

My Best Friend's Girl (Not at the Fillmore)

If you don't love them already, I hope you love them now! 

Just a little bit, off the wall...