As I’m here in Chicago converting their radio stations to The Company’s software and being a good worker bee, many of my co-workers are in other cities doing the same thing — five stations in the New York, NY area are converting right now, as is Worcester, MA; as is Pueblo, CO; as is Des Moines, IA; as is Huntsville, AL. Ch-ch-changes!

Normally we go to each site with just our conversion team — the Traffic Conversion Specialist (me), the Data Conversion Coordinator (order entry person), and the Account Rep (Sales/Mgmt babysitter). This time around, though, my manager and the training team manager are “observing” the conversion process and are skipping from site to site to spend time at each of them. Ostensibly this is to better educate them on how we do the job we do, but I think it’s really just a big company-paid vacation/shopping expedition for them. I mean, I can understand my manager coming out; she can at least say she’s seeing how her staff works. But the training manager? What’s she observing? There ain’t no trainers here, they’re all back in Dallas at the training center.

But perhaps I’m just cynical. They’ve spent about an hour per day at each of the New York sites, their husbands flew out to join them over the weekend in Manhattan, they didn’t roll into the office here until 9:30 this morning after traveling Monday, one of them went to “lunch” 2 hours ago and hasn’t been seen since, and neither of them has done anything but check email and surf the web since they got here. I’m probably misinterpreting all this, I’m sure there’s damned hard work going on there … somewhere.

Hey, it’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.