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I did not post yesterday afternoon, because between 9 a.m. and about 3 p.m. we had our "Q1 All Merchandising Meeting," this being the annual "big one" in which each team presents the past year's successes and lessons learned, as well as opportunities for the new year, to the entire department. This was our first such meeting since moving to the new office space, and it was also our first time using the Rainier Tower Conference Center on the 12th floor of the tower on the south side of the block. I first toured that space with the Office Relocation Team
last May.
Accoding to Gabby, we are the only department utilizing that space, at least so far; things like regular Store Director meetings are being scheduled in the "Vineyard," the largest conference room we have in this office—which was listed as having a capacity of 18. I don't know how many people total sit in on an SD meeting, but presumably there would be at least one from each of our 16 stores, plus whoever from the office. It's worth noting that the Merchandising Department consists of 32 people; if I recall correctly there were only two missing yesterday (Robin was reportedly not feeling well, and Kevin connected via Teams, not sure why he didn't come in), so that must mean we had 30 people.
The Rainier Tower Conference Center consists of a
small waiting room area, a
full kitchen that's of fair size but cramped when accommodating the conference room capacity, and two
conference rooms. We used the north room, with slightly higher capacity; when I toured last May, there were 6 tables and 22 chairs in it. Yesterday, there were four rows of three tables, each with three chairs, set up; that gave the room a tight but workable capacity of 36.
Even though the tables were flush against the opposite wall and this meant everyone else in my row had to walk past me, I very deliberately sat on the north end of my row so I would be close to a window. This worked just fine for me.
I get a little anxious about these presentations, even though they are pretty informal and not a huge deal. The P3 team consists of 5 people and is thus the largest of any of the teams in Merhandising; we were also the only team with more than 2 people on it that had every member of the team go up to the front of the room and share different bullet points to talk about—in our case, on three slides. Gabby always insists we all share in this presentation, and I actually do appreciate where it's coming from—it's not at all about forcing any of us to do anything we don't want to do, but rather about having us all share in our success as a team.
Gabby put together three different slides, and on the first she separated by the three "Ps": Pricing (Cathryn and I tag teamed on these bullet points); Promotions (Amy did most of this); and Project Management (Brandy discussed all of this). The second slide listed "Learnings & Opportunities," only one of which did I speak to. And the third slide listed "Focus Areas" for 2026, which Gabby covered entirely. I loved her last bullet point on this one:
Stay Connected as a Team in our Hybrid Environment; weekly icebreakers, seasonal happy hours, P3 Teams chat. Apparently Dave had suggested maybe she not mention our happy hours, but Gabby was set on including it.
We had a lunch break catered by Chipotle, which was delicious and I ate way too much of. First I had two soft tacos, but then I went for seconds because I wanted some chips with some of the toppings on them. The lunch break was a solid hour, and at one point all five of us on the P3 team were gathered together around the kitchen island—a rare moment indeed, as usually not all five of us are in-office on the same day. (We haven't even managed to get all five of us together for our quarterly Happy Hour since
last May, when I suggested we invite Marie from IT along.) The idea suddenly came to me: "I have a weird idea," I said. It wasn't actually that weird. "Should we get a selfie, over there?" I pointed over to the window, which has a lovely 12th-floor view of downtown to the north, up 5th Avenue. "We're so rarely all together."
Everyone was down for it, and I'm glad someone, I think it was Cathryn, suggested we ask Eric (the Meat Merchandiser), who happened to be rinsing a dish at the sink nearby, to take a photo of us rather than doing a selfie. I think this made for an even better picture—a photo that we could not have hoped for better. He did this rapid-fire thing where he took five different shots, which is always a mixed bag because I then have to whittle down to the best one. I actually kept two; you see the best shot at the bottom of this very post.
The other one I kept because Cathryn's shit-eating grin cracks me up. I sent both shots to the P3 group chat on Teams shortly after we returned to the office.
I usually work in-office 7:30 to 4:30, so I had roughly two and a half hours of office work time yesterday. I headed upstairs at about 8:40, and was back to my desk at about 3:00. We all still took our laptops up to the meeting, where the RTCC provides wifi; I did very little actual work during the meeting, but did check my email and did run and send out my weekly Tuesday report of the week's discontinued items for all the POS admins.
Exactly where this Conference Center is located can be sort of confusing; some people clearly assume it's directly up Rainier Square Tower, the much newer, much taller (second-tallest in the city) building towering directly above our office space. But, to get to the Conference Center, you actually leave the office, go up to Level Two of the shared lobby space of the two towers on this block, and then to the elevator banks on the southeast corner of the block—which actually go up to older Rainier Tower, the one with the famous tapered base. The Conference Center is on level 12, which appears to be the lowest floor of the tower with windows, above the pedestal, which contains 11 floors of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems. It's pretty cool that even the "bottom floor" of the tower offers pretty decent views.
— पांच हजार नौ सौ छप्पन —
— पांच हजार नौ सौ छप्पन —
Anyway, since I didn't post yesterday, I wasn't able to tell you about Monday evening until now—which isn't much anyway. Shobhit now has access to a bunch of online screeners for Actor Awards nominees, and this included the Apple TV series
Pluribus, which I was very excited about: I finally get a chance to watch it, even though I'm not currently subscribing to Apple TV!
And the first episode of
Pluribus is
very exiting. Not exciting enough, however, to keep Shobhit awake: he was sound asleep on the couch and I had to stop the episode about 40 minutes in. I tried to wait for him, I really did, but I was far too eager to finish the episode and so I took the laptop (which I had been using to screencast the show to our smart TV) back to the bedroom and finished the episode there.
Shobhit still isn't quite reacclimated to sleep patterns of the Pacific Time Zone, after returning from India on Friday. I suspect he'd otherwise have been by now, except that he went to that all-night party on Saturday night, which I think put a moneky wrench into his reacclimation process. He keeps falling asleep rather early, and then waking up quite early. He slept later this morning than he has been, so that's something.
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After work yesterday, I met up with Laney for a movie at the AMC Pacific Place at 5:00:
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. It was pretty good, definitely better than I feared it would be, but in the end I thought it was the same solid-B level I found last year's
28 Years Later to be. As in, I liked it, but don't really get the kind of astounding amount of critical acclaim. Like: it's fine.
I rode the bus as far as Broadway with Laney afterward, then walked the rest of the way home. Shobhit was on the couch, watching an Actor Awards movie screener on his laptop:
Blue Moon. He was sound asleep well before it ended, though—he likes to blame how sleepy he gets after eating, but I'm certain it's still at least half because of jet lag. He came to bed while I was still finishing up my review, and I was like: I'm still going to watch episode 2 of
Pluribus. "That's okay," he said, and was snoring within seconds. I had barely an hour to spare and was too eager to watch, both because I couldn't wait to keep moving on the story, and because I wanted to be able to start listening to archived episodes of
The Prestige TV Podcast coverage of the show, and their first episode covered both the first two episodes of the show (which had been released on the same day, back in November). I listened while getting ready for bed, and finished the podcast episode while getting ready this morning.
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Shobhit has gotten involved in other extracurricular activities over the past few days as well: he volunteered stuffing Easter Eggs with Seattle Men in Leather on Monday; and yesterdy afternoon he actually went to the "Free America Walk-Out & March," which started at Seattle Central College and went down Pine Street to Downtown. He texted me that it seemed kind of small, and I noted that this was likely because it occurred on a weekday afternoon. I might have gone to it myself, for example, if I weren't working. (And while I think all protest is important, I'm not going to bail on the Q1 All-Merchandising Meeting for it.)
He's also starting to get info on the schedule and rehearsals for
The Foreigner, which he'll be performing in through the month of March in Olympia. How he'll handle the commute still hasn't been fully ironed out. He may simply wind up driving back and forth a lot, which is going to take a lot of gas. He may find a room somewhere, but I'm not sure what he can find if there is not much consistency to the schedule. There's a lot still to figure out, but it'll get done.
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[posted 12:32pm]
