I'm going to reinvent myself online. I'm going to call myself Edwina Emerson Kaldwell and I'm going to sign all of my posts eek! Won't that be fun?

Some days, I feel the urge to be someone new.

I know you're all out there, waiting with breathless anticipation for the Rest Of the Story on the rest of the conference. (Personally, I'm over it. That was then. This is now. eek! did not attend a conference, so she has nothing to say.)

Saturday was a pretty standard conference sort of day. 13 hours long and full of long, boring intervals. The high points, as always, were the food. I arrived in time for breakfast (eggs and bacon, hooray!), got a nice lunch (roasted pork with bbq sauce, mashed potatoes, and string beans, very nice), and was fed a good dinner (Chicken Wellington and chocolate-chocolate cake).

The two roundtables I thought I was attending as back-up and support turned out to be hours when I was supposed to be making a presentation. Possibly that information was conveyed to me, previously, and I just didn't understand it. All I know is that by the time I bothered to read the program around noon on Saturday, it was something of a shock to me to see my own name down as a presenter.

Fortunately I am not one of those 90 or whatever percentage of people who view "public speaking" as something more to dread than dying. Being on solid ground as to your subject matter helps, of course, but anyone who knows me knows that a monologue is my favorite kind of 'conversation' under most circumstances.

I was depressingly successful.* I was inundated with people wanting one-on-one chats after the first session--so many so that by the time I rid myself of all of them and headed toward the bathroom, I'd completely forgotten that there was a second group of 'Nuts, already gathered.

I am bitter to have to report that after the second, similarly successful presentation, MadBoy intercepted me and, in what I can only assume was a desperate desire to be part of the "in crowd" forced me to publicly shake hands, again, and accept his weasel-worded not-quite-an-apology for, you know, calling me an asshole, telling all the 'Nuts he could get to listen to him that I was grossly incompetent, mean, and spiteful.

Bleah.

But whatever. At least that got rid of him, freeing me to visit the ladies' room, right? And he's not a long-term part of my future.* *

I snuck outside for a moment of peace and a smoke. As I arrived back in the building, NewBoss Anais stopped me to say that while my back was turned, Jason had announced to the Assorted 'Nuts that he had been "watching" me and was impressed or something. Anyhow, that he intended to keep me on "indefinitely" anyhow. ( ! ! )

Which is, you know, very nice and all, but it hasn't stopped them from interviewing companies to replace me, so I strongly suspect that we're still looking at another 30 days for the timeline and that Jason is hoping that the new agency will be so popular that the 'Nuts will settle down and stop whining.* * *

But! In today's "pursuant" moment, pursuant to the aforementioned reinvention, I met with a potential client for lunch yesterday and since he's a former Argonut Café employee (laid-off last month), I'm doing him a small, freebie favor, setting up a small campaign for him. If it's successful, he's already told his new company that they have to hire Gidget's company and pay for our services in the future, as they roll out to twenty or thirty locations.

And! Gidget emailed this morning and one of the laid-off members of TeamChaos has a new job and they are going to need--wait for it--internet marketing!

My interval of unemployment might be much shorter than I had originally feared.

eek!

__________________

* At the first session, NewBoss Anais and I drew at least as many people as Jason's "informal chat with the CEO" did. At the second one, we were SRO and people were two deep around the table. ( ! ! )

* * Just in passing, I noticed as I was doing end-of-month stats that MadBoy's campaign has actually started to perform. Not amazingly well, but amazingly better than it was performing. Someone let slip today that MadBoy is "spending hours and hours a day" working on it. Heh. "Hours and hours."

* * * Which, for some reason, reminds me! There's a certain statistic Webstrainer offers, around the "share" you got of all the traffic available to your accounts. When discussing it, one WebstrainerPro said, very casually, "of course, you'll never get 100%, but you can work to improve your standing." For the record? Last month, three of my campaigns achieved 100% And seven of them were above 95%! (We should all be so incompetent.)