(once again) pretending to be a leader at a leadership conference
PART TWO of my stupendous time pretending to girlboss
Otters,
I was going to hand a paper in last night at the last minute but I knew it sucked and I wasn’t willing to get yet another D grade in this course so I’m going to finish it up today and hand it in and take the 5% late penalty, I don’t even care anymore.
Then I have another paper due tonight that I’m almost done anyway so I’m just gonna finish it up this afternoon and hand it in. Hopefully it doesn’t suck. My essays this semester have been super hit or miss. Then I can finally take a break and watch the Leafs-Oilers Matthews vs McDavid game tonight. SO hyped for that.
All this to say that it’s been a WEEK. Which I say every week. But still oh my god let me LIVE. I just had to get those complaints off my chest. But NOW we can talk about the conference again. (Sorry if I sound discombobulated today, I’ve had to speak in academia mumbo jumbo all week long.)
If you missed my last post from Tuesday, here it is. Read it before you read this. It’ll help you out. Hopefully I didn’t overhype this second part too much.
So! In between Coach Carey’s awesome opening spiel and that great panel of fancy accomplished women, there was an intermission where you could get up and go get coffee or whatever. Julia and I didn’t have anywhere to be since we had all our stuff with us, so we were just sitting there chatting it up.
At some point Julia notices that there was someone behind me. I turn around and there’s this blondish woman with glasses standing there who I’ve never seen in my life and who looks too old to be a UofT student and yet also too young to be a boomer lady.
“Hi!” she says, smiling. “I’m just going around introducing myself to all the attendees.”
My stupid brain’s first thought isn’t, oh, look, a lovely new person! It’s oh my god don’t be awkward don’t be awkward don’t be awkward.
“Hi!” I say, stretching out my hand for a shake. “My name’s Ottavia and this is Julia. And you are?”
“Oh, I’m [REDACTED],” she says. “I’m on the panel.”
“GET OUT.”
It was the weirdest thing, because not only had the folks running the conference sent these nice information packages to all the attendees that literally include the names and faces of all the speakers…they had also handed us brochures with the same information when we first walked in. Of course I had read everything. So why couldn’t I remember her? Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention or something. Or maybe I was just stressed and not processing anything. It was weird.
“Wait,” Julia steps in, “where do you work and stuff?”
“Oh, I do marketing and comms stuff for the NHL.”
DUDE.
THAT’S MY DREAM JOB.
WHAT.
I had honestly forgotten that was a thing you could do—you know, literally work for the NHL. Sometimes it feels as if everything they do just falls out of the sky, perfectly in place and yet also totally ripe for scrutiny. How does one get a job working for the NHL without being an ex-player, anyway, or better yet, without being the son of the fifth cousin twice removed of an ex-player?
So I asked her, and she laughed and explained her life story in about 30 seconds to us.
Basically, she grew up Saskatoon, which is the capital city of Saskatchewan, which is a province far away from here. But then she moved to Toronto to study public relations at Humber College (which isn’t too far from where I am), and then she got a job working for the Toronto Blue Jays (our MLB team, incredibly mid) which led to her doing corporate stuff for Canadian Tire (imagine Walmart and Home Depot had a baby who sold tires), and she’s also worked for a startup PR agency, but now she’s been doing stuff for the NHL for 8(!!!) years.
“It wasn’t a linear journey at all,” she says, and then, seeing that I look totally fascinated, asks me if I’m a Leafs fan, and I adlib an “unfortunately, yes I am,” and she almost buckles over with laughter, which loosens me up a little bit. So I say a few more goofy things that make her laugh and which I sadly can’t remember. We tell each other how great it was to meet and she leaves to do the panel.
“Dude,” Julia says, “you’re so good at talking.”
Never a thing I thought anyone would EVER say to me, but here we are. I’ve finally faked my way into coming off as an extrovert when I need to be.
During the networking portion at the end of the conference we looked for Mysterious NHL Lady again but she seemed to have left, so Julia’s like, “just connect with her on LinkedIn. There’s no way she won’t say yes. She liked you too much.”
The next week I reached out, thanking her for her kindness and time, and Otters…she got back to me in maybe 15 minutes. Accepted my request, said she would love to chat again around the end of April when she was most free, all of it. When I tell you I almost fell off my chair.
It was such a fun and exciting conference, but it also gave me pause—and I was telling Julia this—like, holy smokes, strangers sometimes like me, people who work at the NHL find me funny.
None of this friendliness stuff has ever come easy to me, I told her. It’s been years of work. It’s work that drains me. I still don’t feel fully confident in how I present myself to the world.
But I have still somehow managed to become almost everything my younger self wished so badly to be. Except rich. Still working on that part.