San Fran Sales Summit

Trips to the US have been getting a bit dull recently, mostly because our office is out of the centre of town, and so getting to see anything more exciting than a mall and a Trader Joe’s quickly becomes a feat too tedious to even consider.

            Thankfully our sales summit this year was held a one of the bigger hotels in the centre of the city, and so it made sense for all of the out of town teams to stay in San Francisco city rather than off on the outskirts.

            As such, whilst each and every day was spent behind closed doors in a slightly miserable conference room, the evenings were much more eventually, and we managed to line up some slightly more exciting dinners than the standard take out salads or burgers from the very few local options near the office.

One of the most memorable elements of the trip was our first flight out of Singapore on Sunday afternoon. I had not realised, but one of the girls in the office had been instrumental in recommending / suggesting / requesting a very specific flight time that would get us into San Francisco on the Sunday evening.  It was only when I arrived at check in and was handed a Hello Kitty branded ticket that I realised what she had done. We were on the Eva Air Hello Kitty flight. Eva Air is a brand with a reputation a bit like BA. They are a great, super efficient airline with a very positive image. However, they are Taiwanese, and apparently that means they think there is nothing weird about branding an entire plane and a specific boarding gate at their Taiwan airport, with anything and everything Hello Kitty themed - we're talking loo roll, knives and forks, cups, headphones. Everything. It could not have been more Asian, or more entertaining! I'm just pleased it was only the plane for the first four hours of our trip. I am not sure I would have trusted it to get us all the way over to the US. 

Whilst the trip started off on a fairly random footing, which me experiencing my first earthquake and witnessing a mugging on the street at very close quarters, by later in the week things were beginning to get back to normal a bit more, and so we managed to get nicely into the swing of things.

A couple of the highlights were probably a cocktail making session with the rest of my team, winning a food truck challenge where we had to plan, prepare and make the best meal out of 22 teams, and of course a visit to my beloved sea lions down at Fisherman’s Wharf.