Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Every St. Patrick's Day, I am reminded of my favorite professional job. During the late 90's I was the Cash Manager for the Fado Irish Pub chain. In addition to working with a great group of people that made the job very fun, professionally, I was able to leave a very strong mark on the direction of the Company.

When I first came onboard, the Company had faced some challenging times in regards to having sufficient working capital to not only sustain operations of the current locations, but to expand, as had been the Company's original goal. I was able to identify and correct some inefficiencies in how the Company handled cash, in addition to developing a MS Excel-based model which very accurately forecasted our cash position. As a reward for solving this issue, I got plenty of free Harp to drink, many pats on the back, but the same mediocre salary, thus a time came when I decided to move on to higher paid/less rewarding and fun postions with other companies.

The other thing I recall when I think about that time in my life was how far my speech has come since then. Like most stutterers, I had serious issues with the telephone pre-therapy, but after going through therapy at the PFSP at the EVMS in Norfolk, VA, I became fairly comfortable making and receiving most phone calls. However, when I worked at Fado, I had a tremendous aversion to 2 things - calling pub managers and answering the main phone line for the corporate office (as everyone had to do in the small office setting). I don't know what it was about each situation, but I would do everything I could to avoid each one.

However, 6 years later, that seems so very strange to me that I would be in a postion that I would avoid such routine tasks. Hopefully, I can attribute this to the continued efforts that I have put into my speech therapy.