on friday, we had our department’s quarterly town hall meeting. normally for these town hall meetings, it’s about an hour and a half long, with a lot of financial talk and then different teams give out awards for stellar employee performance. this was the first time i can remember it being mandatory attendance, though… usually they keep some people on the phone queues or things like that, but i guess they switched those duties over to our office in alabama so everybody in the federal team here could attend.

our department’s vice president had the town hall meeting in a tent in the parking lot (yes, in summer, but the tent was air-conditioned), and the people on our marketing operations team were wearing shirts that said “lifeguard” and beach balls were being tossed around — our department’s vice president likes to keep things fresh and likes these events to be like a pep rally, haha. they only did financial stuff for about 30 minutes or so at the most, and then it got interesting…

the guy in charge of all the sales teams in my department was retiring (well, not retiring because of age, but because he started his own business about 15 years ago and has been wanting to get back into a business of his own since then), so we got to say goodbye to him.

then they played a video clip from our kickoff (at the beginning of every year, each department has a kickoff event that’s also like a big pep rally, and there are vendors and upper management comes to talk about goals for the year); one of the associate directors for our sales team is in the army reserve and was in iraq, and at the kickoff they tried to do streaming video with him but since that didn’t quite work out they played a prerecorded message from him. well, they played that prerecorded message again at the town hall meeting, and then he walked into the tent after being away for about 13 months or so. he presented our vice president with a flag flown in his honor over his fort in iraq.

then chris gardner gave a talk. i hear you saying “…who’s chris gardner?” well, maybe you remember this movie:

yes, chris gardner was the guy who “the pursuit of happyness” was about. he gave a really good talk for about 90 minutes about his experiences on the street, and we got autographed copies of his book “start where you are”. there’s more videos about him here and here.

me, to coworkers: “when did this stop being our town hall meeting and become an episode of oprah?”

i know he gave a talk at a government symposium we had about a month ago for customers, but it was a nice surprise that they got him to come talk to us as well.

there were some good quotes from chris gardner’s speech that were pretty chuckles, i have to paraphrase but you get the idea…

“my mom told me that i could grow up to be anybody i wanted to be, do anything i wanted to do. so i wanted to be miles davis. i practiced my trumpet for about 9 years, but i guess my mom got sick of me saying ‘i want to be miles davis’ one too many times so she sat me down at the kitchen table and said ‘baby, there’s only room for one miles davis in this world, and he’s already got that job.’ i guess she had a point… when miles davis was 18, he was playing clubs with quincy jones and john coltrane. at the same age, i was playing my trumpet with guys named ‘pookie’ and ‘ray-ray’.”

“i had to make 200 phone calls a day. on a rotary phone. look at my fingers.” (shows us how his index finger on one hand bends at a wider angle than the index finger of his other hand) “see, 200 phone calls a day on a rotary phone will do that.”

“my son and i had to move into a series of HO-tels. yes, i put the emphasis on that first syllable. i hope that doesn’t cause any HR issues.”

“on the street where we were staying, there were some ‘ladies of the night’ that would go on their rounds, and they’d see me pushing a stroller with my son in it and would try to give him candy and say how nice he was. ‘no, thank you,” i’d tell them, since i didn’t allow my son to have sugar until he was 4 years old.” (the difference between the movie and his real-life story was that the son in the movie was 5 years old for dialogue, while in real-life his son was 14 months old.) “but soon instead of candy, they’d give $5 bills as if to say ‘we see you struggling out here, we don’t know your situation, but we want to help, here’s some money for food.’ so i don’t have anything against the ladies of the night. hey, but even though i don’t have anything against them, that doesn’t mean i purchased their services!”

“i had only two suits: a blue suit, and a grey suit. folks would see me and say ‘oh, there’s chris gardner, reenacting the civil war all over again.”

i’ve only read through a little bit of the book so far, but it’s really good, and if it’s anything like the way he gave his speech i’m sure it’ll be an excellent read. but definitely, this was our most surprising town hall meeting i can remember. very wow!