Kathleen's Adventures

My week-long trip began with a two day offsite team building kickoff with the new Helsinki crew (around 30 people or so) as well as a handful from the Austin office.  The itinerary I received the week before included an ice sculpting competition, sauna time (bathing suit optional), and pigeon on the dinner menu.  Needless to say, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. The ice sculpting ended up being pretty fun  - my team made a boat with a Finnish flag on the back.  Granted towards the end it ended up looking more like a toilet bowl than a boat, but I didn't have the heart to tell my team of new Finnish acquaintances this.  Sauna time ended up being split - the men went to the "sauna by the sea" and the ladies stayed back at the one inside the hotel - ie completely uneventful...and not naked.  Dinner was seven courses and I bailed for bed after #5 - it was 11:15pm.  One of those I did stay awake for was the pigeon.  I was proud of myself...

In early January, my boss held a typical meeting of his direct-reports and mentioned the possibility of putting someone in Europe over the accounting for our subs (which is currently going through Singapore).  He asked what a few of us thought about it and I thought it was a great idea.  A bit later he said "who knows - it could be someone in this room."  I looked around the room and realized (for the umpteenth time in these meetings) that one of these is not like the others.  As in the others all have 10-20 years more experience than I do.  My position in Internal Audit is unique in that it reports to the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors and "administratively" to the CFO to maintain independence.  Anyways, I looked around the room and quickly wrote off the possibility of me taking a position like that due to lack of experience compared to the others.  But then a small part of me also realized I was the only one without a family with kids in m...