I am calling this blog entry in as I drive back from the airport on Saturday night, January 26th, at almost midnight. What an interesting trip for all sorts of reasons!
This is my first speaking trip of the New Year, and I added it up and I have 15 speaking engagements in the next 12 weeks, which should be kind of interesting. Then the speaking slows down a little bit, but the next three months are going to be very busy. But a lot of great places, and Omaha was a really neat place to go as the first of the speaking trips of the year.
One of things that was great about it, it wasn’t just speaking to the Women’s Conference that I was at, but also because the folks at the Women’s Conference had arranged two businessman interviews for me.
These interviews have proven to be extremely valuable as I have traveled to different parts of the country. I have asked whoever is doing my events, if they could please set me up with some meetings with businessmen in the area that I can interview as part of the research for my next book, which is basically the abrogation for women only to the workplace, at the corporate version of understanding what’s going on inside the mind of a man. So I did two very high-level interviews in Omaha.
Omaha, as some of you probably know, is a huge financial center and has a lot of the top corporations in the country, and some of those most well-known corporations in the country headquartered there. Corporations like Gallup or ConAgra or obviously Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s organization, and I loved being able to interview men in that environment.
The event itself on Saturday went very well. It was a very active audience, and I was so pleased that they asked so many great questions about applications to their lives; both publicly in the bigger groups, and privately stopping me in the hallways.
I had an interesting flight home however. I was going home on a different airline to try to save the sponsor some money and had to make a connection in Chicago. When my plane landed in Chicago, the runway was closed and there were all these flashing lights waiting our arrival, with four ambulances and about a dozen police cars blocking off the entrances and exits, for apparently the arrival of our airplane.
Then when we landed and started taxing, all the ambulances followed us, and obviously the people on the plane got a clue that there was something going on. It turns out, the pilot hadn’t told us, but there was a failure of the hydraulics system while we were flying. I had noticed something kind of funny about the tippyness of the airplane, but I didn’t know what it was, and it turns out it was because the hydraulics had failed. Thankfully, they have backup systems or I presumably wouldn’t be reading you this blog entry right now. But thankfully we landed, thank God, and everything checked out, but we had to wait on the runway for almost an hour before somebody could come along and tow us into the gate.
So that was a bit of an adventure. I almost missed the last possible connecting flight to Atlanta, but I got here. It’s almost midnight, and I am very thankful to be going home to my family. I am home on Sunday with the kids and Jeff, and then off again on Monday to Oklahoma.