Day 12 - I feel like a steam engine that is out of coal, out of wood, and grasping at straws. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?)

No creepy dreams last night. Phew!

OK, this is my 12th day working at my new job as Director of Marketing. I still don't know much about the products that we sell (they are highly technical and geared toward small-business owners, which I am not), but I've got a bare-bones basic idea of what they are in the big-picture sense. So, using that, I'm sending out the first blast of our monthly e-mail campaign. The campaign is designed to assist in upselling our current clients and users. During an economic downturn, selling more to your existing clients in considered easier than finding new ones. Economic pressure breeds distrust in buyers, so you should theoretically go after the ones who already have some trust in you.

Also, I've developed one of two mailers for an upcoming convention in late April. The convention is for the constituents of an industry in which we have our biggest market share. So, we are sending out a preliminary mailer sometime in the next month or so (the one I have almost finished developing) and a flashier one about two or three weeks before the convention. I'm excited about the convention, but I don't even know if I will be sent to it. I hope I am, but I don't know that it would make much business sense considering my limited product knowledge.

In any case, that is all I have really accomplished so far, and I feel I am running out of productive things to do.

I guess I could develop an ad to place in some of the trade magazines for the previously-mentioned industry that we serve.

I apologize for the ambiguity, but I don't want to get in trouble if my boss happens to stumble across this blog. It's my hide, I have to worry about it.

In non-work-related news, I have become addicted to podcasts, audiobooks, and webcomics. Don't worry, this love for time-wasting entertainment has been developing for a long time. Webcomics entered my life due to ungodly amounts of boredom during my previous employment and my inherently nerdy side. Spoken word entertainment, on the other hand, was born of two loves: story-telling or reading, and public radio.

I got into listening to public radio due to my incredibly geeky love for all things educational (I record nearly everything on the History and Discovery channels) and my disturbing tendency to fall asleep at the wheel on long driving trips (that story is a rather large can of worms so I'll relate it some other time). I noticed that public radio kept me from falling asleep while driving and always sucked me in. This could be because the human brain is able to easily tune-out music, yet can consistently become absorbed in others' conversations. Scientists have theorized that this is why some children have trouble listening to their mothers, because their voices are too musical (don't ask me which scientists, and I could be wrong about the listening-impared (not hearing-impared) people being children, it is some group, I promise).

After becoming a dedicated fan of public radio, I realized that, like every other American consumer, I was a little frustrated at my lack of control over the content; for example, the ability to pause, rewind, skip ahead, change the schedule, etc... Thus: I turned to podcasts. Just about everything on NPR and other forms of public programming are available in podcast form. This was a bit of a Eureka! moment for me. Since then, I have become especially addicted to Stuff You Should Know by the wonderful folks at HowStuffWorks.com. I have grown fond of listening to the fasinating articles covered by Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant. I listen to them every morning on the way to work, on the way home for lunch, on the way back to work, and on the way back home in the evening. My only lament is that I will soon run out of my plentiful supply of 15-20 minute Stuff You Should Know podcasts because they don't release them anywhere near the rate that I consume them. Bummer. You should definitely check it out: Stuff You Should Know by HowStuffWorks.com.