Hi. I’m Shelly, the Office Manager at Matchmaker Logistics, and I’ve hijacked Mary’s Monday to share my story of surviving unarmed combat with your favorite logistics Jedi warrior:
As Office Manager, I am the go-to person at Matchmaker for accounting, HR and technology. When Mary has an issue (as she did last week with our cloud-based software) she asks me to “wave my magic wand” and get it fixed. I spend most of my time in the back office waving that wand, but I recently had the privilege of attending my first NASTC conference, which meant doing “battle” on the front lines with Mary.
Mary and I spent weeks preparing our Star Wars-themed booth, complete with life-sized figurines, costumes, and the Star Wars theme song. (See it all here).
As we made our grand plans, I quickly learned that we have a few traits in common: we’re both bossy and very particular! Consequently, we ended up in very serious discussions about important issues like: “Should we serve Chewbacca Chips or Edible Ewoks?” I was in favor of serving potato chips so that we’d have something savory at the table to offset all of the candy. But, Mary won the battle, and we served Teddy Grahams as Ewoks instead.
The next critical decision for our mission was: “Should we position the candy-holding figurines side-by-side or on opposite sides of the table?” I thought it may be nice to have all of the candy in one place for easier access. Mary preferred the symmetry of placing them on opposite corners of the table. Guess where they ended up? I should have brought that magic wand Mary always refers to, and then I might have gotten my way; my lightsaber just wasn’t cutting it!
As we set up for the conference, Mary constantly went back over my work, straightening, fixing, and rearranging. In the end, the booth looked great and we were a hit at the convention! It turns out that two bossy women are better than one, and our mutual desire to have everything “just right” worked in our favor. Not only did we emerge from “combat” alive, we’re now better friends and colleagues than ever.
Now that I’ve returned to the safe space of the back office, I will admit that it feels nice to be back in control. That said, I can’t wait until Mary and I go head-to-head again at next year’s conference! (I’ll definitely be bringing my magic wand…)