I Won Something

I don’t enter sweepstakes. I don’t play the lottery. I don’t win things.

Until this week.

This week I won something really big. Well, really big at least within the walls of my employing firm, Fleishman-Hillard.

So in this case you might be meh and I might be peeing my pants. But let me tell you why..

My third baby, the one I call FH Moms, the one I birthed at the office instead of the hospital and that requires food of the intellectual kind instead of the pureed – was named by firm leadership “Practice of the Year.”

Yes, that’s right. A little idea I had was just validated as a really really good idea by the crazysmart leaders of the 28 other global practice groups our firm maintains.

There I was, sitting in a staff meeting, listening to our regional president who was in town from Corporate to give a "State of the Firm" update (which it turns out was a guise to come to town to give me this award), and suddenly she was talking about me, about the practice I started, about the fact it was being bestowed a HUGE honor.

And I suddenly found myself in the mental states of “Oh dear God I did not wash my hair this morning” and “Did I just chew the skin off my bottom lip?” and “Speech! Speech on the spot! Quick! Be pithy!”

And then someone flung the black felt draping off the beautiful glass award and someone else wheeled in a cake and… "wait, I was just home sick with a stomach bug yesterday and uh-oh, now my colleagues are giving me congratulatory hugs and am I giving them flu germs? Shirt to shirt? Is that possible?"

I won something. For being smart and working hard.

Hey mom, I won!