My focus in the tech world, and Sonic very much instilled this, is Onus. Making it your own. I remember asking the guy who trained me, Luke, one of the kindest most eager to help humans I’ve ever met, what he likes about working here, and he said “You get to make it your own.” And since stepping into this department, I see that with even more formidable force.

Creative… words… where I’m from, what I enjoy.  Wine, running… talking, connecting.  Everyday this week has been a progression to a finely tuned centeredness that I’ve before felt.

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3:59pm.

Final coffee for day.  Ideas still at pace, in fact more fervent and frenetic than yesterday.  Connecting to whatever I can, and more manuscript and momentum in blogs, blogging.  Shorter entries, much like this one.  Meta of meta, here.

Finding that business is not so much deliverable products, or even services, but reality, truth.  That need precede the profession and confession of what you court, which is business tied to your list.

Before the first coffee sip, I see my work.  All of it—the teaching, the tech, wine, running, music, poetry, writing and blogging and random notes compiled in something that resembles some order-less order, ordered.  And I keep moving….

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Number coincidences, with the times in the article, and the word count being 529.  Today is speaking to me, telling me to break from wine’s fuckwit industry and only be and write here.

3:26PM.  First deal closed, today!  I’m celebrating and rejoicing a bit, but I’m very much tempering it.  Have to “keep the party going”, as I said in an email.  Made a couple calls, now to make more.  Haven’t done much else but make sure everything is in order for this transaction.  Nothing on books tomorrow but a couple calls.  Will be on phones but the aim is creative… creative approaches to conversations and interactions, creative ways to prospect.  One guy I met said to write down as many people as you can, that you know closely and well and not so.  Don’t look at people as prospects, look at them as people, people you want to get to know.  The literary approach… get to know their story and narrative.  The literary approach I have with wine will even more prove useful and relevant in this business.  Writer in a tech office… of course, of course!

Eating PB&J wife made me, just now.  Tired a bit after workout, but not to a degree with impedes my motion’s place and application.  New ways to speak this company, what it does and what it means, more than the simple list of products and services.  That’s certainly part of it, but it’s NOT the entirety.  This sales teaches me that I need to even more break any mold or template.  Not that I’m sticking to one, but write more post-it’s that define Sonic, that speak and SHOW Sonic.  How can I catalog and list, or even post what I’m thinking right now, after this first sale and after a Senior Account Exec told me I NEED to be in front of people.  She called my speaking eloquent and strong, and being on the phones is absolutely NOT the only path to what I’m after.

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6:04.  Back from Field

and ready for home.  Rain in Berkeley, my sweater still a bit damp.  Office thinned, with people working.  Quiet, but not.  The Inside Sales team of course animated as always.  This place with it being a work spot of energy and technology, creative, never truly stops, or sleeps.  With me writing about it, I notice the difference between morning mood and atmosphere to now, 6pm and later.  There’s a contrast, but not.  Maybe it’s just a different collective character in the office.  I study the texture and language of this office, even when I should be clocking out, going home, getting running components ready for coming day.

Now, walk across floor, all the way to the other side of building to room where Field Sales is based.  Put tablet in safe, make sure closed, then more steps back to here.

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Clocked back in.  Two minutes early. 

On speaking, you should be to-the-point, but not depriving audience of anything.  Tell them what they want to hear.  Have the words be kind and heaping with life.  So… don’t just say ‘I’m here and this is what I’m doing and this is what I have…’ Rather, speak more to the point of YOU, the person in the audience.  Use ‘you’ in your language, loud amounts of it…  This is for YOU… this is YOURS.. I’m here to tell you this, or invite you to this, and this is why it’s incredible…  Sales entails sales techniques, but not sales voice, not repeated repeats of something not interesting.  Entertain your audience…  Don’t sell, ever.  Sales is not selling, it’s speaking, it’s sincerity, earnest echoes sung in impassioned fastidiousness.

Just noting ideas passing through head, for sales team and next semester’s course.

Office a bit quieter.  Think some took a late lunch.

In office, today.  Getting things done and thinking of new ways to approach what I do.  I’m overthinking.  This is consequence of the inspiration I attain from just walking around this office as well as going from idea to idea.  Today I focus on speaking Sonic.  The language of this place.  If this is a conduit or bridge for what I want in my story, then I need throw self into the singularity of this Sonic story.  The office has you going over idea and another idea… speak what we do in as few words as possible, I say to myself.  At my desk not bored in even a microscopic morsel but ever active, animated in the possible ways to adjust and shape this business and how I speak about it.

Encouraged, exhausted from my own passion in this office.  This place that’s more than a place—like a parallel and utter juxtaposition to everything that we’re used to.  I call it an antithetical workplace, but maybe that’s wrong.  Maybe this is what the work place should be.  It is.  It is, that I know wholly and wildly, now.  This is a place for creativity and whim, and lucrative lunacy and revolution, but… more.  Something beyond denotation and connotation.  Talk about deconstruction and examining dichotomies and dualities, this is its own plain.  A text, a subject, a set of vocals that not only persuade but impassion beyond normal human norm.

This isn’t an office.  It’s not a colony.  It’s a language.  Its own speak.

So then halfway through my Friday, in office, not with my sales team, I have time to collect for sakes of being with them tomorrow in San Francisco, to bring what’s here to the Sunset District’s upper-40 avenues tomorrow.  I’m enriched, today, again.  Supplemented, turned around made more a voice of this place and what it speaks.

Looking through to-do list.  Everything done.  I know so.  I do.  Been through list, each item, 3 times.  So I give myself new items.  Prep for tomorrow.  Timeline for tomorrow.  Keep busy.  This new coffee cup has me especially energized and alive, written fire and fire to be written.

3:10.  Feel self getting tired, even with the coffee.  Yawn…. Phone interview/screening to prep for.  At 4, and I’m more or less ready, so time for exploratory thinking, let mind wander to whatever and wherever what—

3:18.  Coffee not working.  All work done.  Now what.  Not panic I feel but something in the same flavor isle.

May need a break.  Air that is fresh.  Break from desk.  Talking around me and my head’s in the car, on Road, in classroom, possibilities compounding in delirium-inducing shapes and plateaus.  I don’t know what to do, now.  I’m going mad, but a forming form of mad.  Nothing hindering, nothing detrimental, not at all.  This is a profuse health contract.  I’m rebuilt in my readiness as a writer.  This time in my story, where everything around me is me, for me, telling me to write something to myself that would benefit readers, somehow.

3:32.  Student life.  I’m a student here, as I am everywhere.  There never a non-learning place.  Every scene instructs.  Not sure I’m providing or depriving audience, writing this.  Work all around me, people working on what they work on, telling something to someone, educating and educating themselves whilst doing so, and me learning about what I do, here at this desk at which I everyday sit.  Back from lunch two minutes early but now I reach a point in the day where time is a self-voiding send.  So… look at clock, then at phone with its black screen, pen between forearms on desk.  ‘Nother sip of coffee, or get more coffee?  Don’t know.  Don’t think, I tell myself.  Just move.  Thinking, becoming a bit of a foe, one formidable and crippling.

This office, Sonic, with all its sounds and quick movements and people writing notes to themselves and others and logging what someone says to reference in the future, notes on transactions and occurrences in their departments…  Mom was right, everything I need is right here.  As I’ve said in class but never myself appreciated adequately—Magic in the Meta.  I won’t lie… this place fascinates me.  On multiplying and befuddling levels.  Transfixed in my fixations on and in everything from the voices I hear, to my own desk.  From the conversations between people in the meeting room behind me when I can hear them, to the laughs that are distant, on the other side of the floor, in some distant department.

I pity my past self, honestly.  Working in a tasting room, or going from campus to campus to campus—a freeway falcon—as an adjunct, or even further back working at the store, or before that in the insurance office.  I’m not even “home” here I’m just me… how I wish be seen, a writer.

4:12.  Called, no answer for phone screening.  Now I close day, prep for tomorrow which I actually already did so now it’s just a countdown to my running life.  Wondering about ten miles.  If that’s even smart to do on a treadmill.  Maybe just do an hour, then an hour tomorrow, then longer one Sunday, then back to a shorter run on Monday.  Again, more thought than needed.  Just write, just run, do both, live madly… bottom from the bottomless, or bottomless from the bottom.  Can’t remember what Jack said.  I’m beatifically introspective at this desk, hearing everything, everyone celebrate their weekend, what they’re going to do, what wine they’re going to drink.

Me, to run.

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