The office has been pretty quiet this week due to a lot of work travel for many people across teams. I’ll be away from the office Wednesday through Friday of this week for customer visits in Boston, and other colleagues are in San Francisco for everything from a major conference for a platform we use, to internal product training for the sales team.

One of the colleagues in my office who is on my team and I were talking about our colleagues in general and our general work environment, and we both agreed that for the first time in both of our careers, we actually liked the people in our office and would not mind and would even welcome spending time outside of work with almost everyone. It’s a rare instance to have that be the case, where you aren’t sick of work people where you’d like to see them in a more social, less professional environment. Sometimes, I even find myself missing some of my colleagues when I am away or they are away from the office. That is a very strange feeling for me because I’ve never quite had that before. Things certainly are not perfect here. But it helps when the colleagues you see regularly are supportive and multi-dimensional, and have lives outside of work that we can talk about and enjoy discussing.

It was almost like reverse empty-nest today: Chris’s parents left to continue onto the next segment of their trip. And our house was empty again. We did the laundry, ran the dishwasher, and tidied up the bedroom. It was quiet. And we caught up on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and Chris did his finances while I caught up on my book that I’ve been neglecting on my Kindle. And when we talked to each other, it’s almost like I could hear a slight echo of my voice in the living room. It seemed so strange.

I wonder if that is part of the feeling that “empty-nesters” get once their kids leave the house. There’s no noise. There’s no towels or clothes everywhere. There’s less to fuss over.

It’s been a cold, miserable winter here in New York. Even though it’s technically spring now, it still feels like winter. And Chris’s parents didn’t pack for a winter trip when they came to see us. So while Chris is trying to drag them around to see as much of the city as possible, both his parents have been resisting due to the cold temperatures and the frosty wind, which this weekend, seem to be quite harsh.

It’s funny to think of us dragging them around the city when it’s cold. I then started thinking about all the cold Thanksgiving trips we’ve taken together, and even when it’s been extremely cold as it has been in Switzerland or Germany, we still trekked out and maximized our time. It’s a bit different with Chris’s parents because they’ve visited New York so many times; not seeing a museum or eating at a restaurant wouldn’t be a big deal to them. But their motivation to get out and see things on their trips here is so much lower than when we travel to cold climate places. Sometimes, I kind of just wanted to be warm at home with them, too, instead of out. But Chris would never allow it. 🙂

Today, we hosted brunch for Chris’s parents, his mother’s cousin, and his family. His mother’s cousin’s mother was also in town visiting from India, so we had a pretty full house of eight people. Everything went pretty well from the food to the conversation. The one bit that I noticed was not normal was that no one took off their shoes when they came in.

We’re a very Asian household in that we always remove our shoes when we go into our apartment. I strongly dislike outside dirt in the house, and everyone knows how dirty the streets we walk on all day long are. We step on everything from dirt to spit to dog pee and poo, and I don’t want any of that inside my house. But then, there’s always the conflict of having people take off their shoes when either a) they’re too elderly to bend down and take them off like Chris’s mom’s cousin’s mother, or, well, if they’re just older and you feel awkward telling them what to do. I felt a need to clean the floors after everyone left, but then we ended up going out because Chris was in a rush to get us out to enjoy the daylight hours on a Saturday.

Coincidentally, there’s a thread I read on Facebook where someone asks the question: “If you are a shoes-off household, do you tell people who enter your house to take off their shoes? Why or why not?” And the responses varied wildly from “always, yes,” to “never, it’s their shoes and their feet,” all the way to “to some people of some ages, yes, and over a certain age, never.”

I still don’t like shoes in the house and even take my shoes off at houses where people don’t take off their shoes.

After a long hiatus due to scheduling conflicts, I met up with my mentee for tea during my lunch break. My work schedule has been pretty chaotic the last two months, so it’s been harder to meet her for a break during the day. She just had an anxiety attack last night, and so she really wanted to see me.

It’s her spring break period, but she hasn’t had any plans to do anything fun and has been wandering around the city on her own. Her foster mom randomly decided to take a two-weeks long trip to the Dominican Republic without telling her. She left her some money and prepared a bunch of food for her in the refrigerator and told her foster dad she would be taking a vacation. She also communicated that she’d be leaving to my mentee’s social worker. But she never told my mentee directly before she left. At the same time, her foster sister, who used to be her friend before she became a part of the foster system, is in Florida for the foreseeable future and is not on speaking terms with her. The only one left at home with her is her foster dad, who works all day long and doesn’t get back until she’s fast asleep at night. So she’s scared to be alone in the house. And she’s upset because she has nothing to do during the day.

I was sitting there listening to the situation, and I wasn’t sure what to say. I’m not even sure she wanted me to say anything because she seemed like she just needed someone to listen to her. I asked a few questions to follow up, asked her how she was feeling, what she thought she could be doing to make her time productive. She seemed much calmer at the end of our time together.

We hugged before we parted ways as I dropped her off at the youth center she goes to for therapy. “You’re so calm,” she said. “I need more people like you who are just chill.”

She thinks I’m calm? Really?

To have an early celebration for Chris’s dad’s birthday, we took his parents to an upscale Green restaurant in Midtown East. It was clearly a fancy restaurant, as most of the clientele  were wearing suits and ties. We sat down, and Chris ordered a bottle of wine. The usual thing that happens when you order a bottle of wine is that the server will open the bottle and give the head male (because we still live in a sexist world) a taste. If he likes the taste, then he will continue to pour for everyone. If he doesn’t, he needs to request a new bottle and have another taste, then pour for everyone. In this case, Chris had his taste and really did not like the wine, so he asked for another bottle. The server frowned and said that he cannot return the bottle after it had already been opened. Hmmmm, then why would you even bother offering a taste? We insisted that we didn’t want the wine, and he asked his manager, who then proceeded to suggest some other bottles. Chris chose another one, and we had that one.

Why would you have the whole motion of having a taste and approving or disapproving to then say that if you disapprove, you still cannot change the bottle? The pretentiousness of restaurants like this is ridiculous.

Tonight, we took Chris’s parents to see a presentation at the School of Visual Arts auditorium on “Projects in Planning: The New LaGuardia Airport.” The designers of the new airport, which is slated to fully be ready in 2021, presented on their design, the progress, and some photos representing what we can expect when the new version of LGA is opened. It was really exciting to see this, especially in light of the fact that I’ve always disliked this airport from the moment I entered it. It looks old and shabby, it has no proper public transportation to it the way EWR or JFK have, and it’s just a poor welcome to any tourist or visitor who comes to New York City. Plus, the airport is so crazy and paranoid about flights during even the slightest inclement weather, so you’re constantly prone to delays going through it. Anyone who has ever said s/he prefers flying out of LGA versus JFK or EWR has already lost some respect in my eyes.

The new LaGuardia has two new walking bridges where planes can actually go underneath; ample windows and thus natural lighting to enjoy in pretty much all parts of the airport, and concession stands everywhere. It’s actually an experience that people could enjoy instead of just view as a place to transit through to get them from point A to point B. I’m not sure if we will still be here in 2021 to enjoy it regularly, but I’m eager to experience it and see how it compares to the travel experience going through JFK or other more pleasant and aesthetically attractive airports in the world.

For the last ten years of my career in digital advertising and technology, I’ve always been in a post-sales role. I rather be in a role that nurtures and takes cares of existing customers than hunts and gathers brand new customers. There’s certainly a skill set that is unique to both, and in a pre-sales role, there’s a very fine line between being the cheap used car-type sales guy and actually being the sales person who properly identifies customer’s needs without making them feel like they are being “sold” to. No one likes “salesy” sales pitches, as ironic as that sounds. I’m terrible with being put on the spot with little preparation or anticipation of questions, and oftentimes, that’s the exact situation that sales people have to deal with all the time.

I traveled down to Orlando to visit a customer today with a sales person that I will say… oftentimes comes off as “too salesy.” He doesn’t always prepare properly for his meetings and has a reputation for using his sales engineers as a “crutch” because he doesn’t know our product very well. Given that the goal of the meeting today was a program review and a meet and greet, it was clearly a post-sales meeting, which means that I’m the owner of it. And I’m happy to say that it went extremely well; it was probably the best all-around customer meeting I’ve had since I’ve started here. And part of the reason it went well was because my colleague and I actually complemented each other well with the types of questions and points we raised. The conversation flowed. The best presentations I’ve participated in don’t really feel like presentations, but feel like conversations that have constant engagement and back and forth from both sides. And that’s what this was. And then it suddenly hit me: maybe my super salesy sales colleague would be better suited for a post-sales, account management role.

But…. you can’t really suggest that to someone who has to hit a quota and is locked into a role at your company, can you?