My Partner in Crime (and Sales)
Meet Caitlyn Holiday, part-time model, tutor and sales consultant at Vanilla. In all the business meetings, cold calling and coffee pitstops, Caitlyn is by my side — I like to think we make a pretty impressive sales team. Like me, she is ambitious, curious and ready to explore the wonderful world in which we find ourselves. We walk the streets and talk about everything from love to careers to spirituality. She's a pretty inspiring young woman: she wants to go into curriculum development, focusing on creative ways of teaching children, not only how to learn but also to be happy. She's also a great friend, always rational, but endlessly empathetic. For this reason she's had to help me with various heartbreaks and existential crises.
Caitlyn had planned to go away in June and work overseas. Learning my colleague and friend would be leaving and envisaging doing all our outings alone, brought on a mild state of melancholy. Yet I couldn't begrudge her this opportunity because with her questioning mind and desire to learn, Caitlyn would no doubt go out and change the world (no matter how small a part of it). So I resigned myself to the fact that I would just have to wait hopefully for her return.
Her decision coincided with the time of our three month review and Alan, being the generous man he is, decided to reward us with a small increase which meant we wouldn't have to work in promotions anymore and could dedicate more time to Vanilla. He also chatted to each of us about our opportunity to learn and grow within in the company (how I came to be writing this blog). Happily for us, last week Caitlyn told Alan she had in fact decided to stay. This was for various reasons, one of which being the opportunities afforded to us by working at Vanilla and a possible longterm future there. I guess this just reflects the kind of the place we are lucky enough to work at.