a cluster

This week has been a cluster*ck. Pardon my french. I started my new job, which is great. But at the same time, blows. Not only do I have no idea what I'm doing, I can't really DO anything. And I hate sitting around doing nothing.

Basically, my job WILL be a few things.

1. Working with my specific clients (mine will be another division in our company - the division I actually came from!) on a product launch that they're partnering with us on. Another client of mine is called SFN (which is short for something that if I type it out will come up as a google alert and I don't want them finding this), and they are basically the overhead for all of our financial advisors. I am not sure how many there are in the country, I think I read something like 15,000 but it's a shit ton. I will work with our internal corporate divisions (communications, legal, actuary) to push out information to the advisors to in turn get them to sell our insurance products. And we're talking specifically life insurance. Specifically, 15 products.

2. Create content for our division's marketing materials (also related to #2 above).

3. Create marketing plans for the new products. We have four product launches per year, where a new product is introduced or an enhancement to an old product, or something exciting. Last year one of the enhancements was a mobile app. Big deal, right? Right. Haha.

And other than that, I'm not quite sure yet. It involves a lot (like 5 - 6 hrs a day) of meetings.... And this beginning part is the worst. Today I was able to take a training class and learn more about ALL of distribution channels (how our products get sold) so that helped. I have a list I'm keeping called, "WTF" in which I document all of the things I have questions on. They're mostly acronyms. Because the financial industry loves acronyms.

So that's that. I think I will miss a mindless job but I'm excited to learn and to be able to contribute. As much I love my current company (I really do), I wonder if I will do this job for at least two years then try to go work somewhere cool, like Target. Or somewhere that brochures/website copy doesn't take the legal team 4 weeks to above, file with FINRA, edit, do a bunch of other shit to, then 6 months later distribute. Gotta love highly-regulated industries.

In other news, John is still being backgrounded by a sheriff's office here (not local, though) and is in the 2nd round (top 12) for St. Louis Park PD this week! He's ecstatic about that because he fucking loves SLP. He lived there until he was 15 or so, and knows the weirdest shit. SO hopefully that goes well for him.