My Father's Day Gift to You: Hello from SHRM!

 

Do you recall where you were on Father's Day 2006? If you're a dad I'd venture to guess you were floating in a pool, barbecuing or watching the final day of the U.S Open golf championship.

For me, there was no pool, no steaks on a grill and seeing Geoff Ogilvy win his first and only major tournament wasn't on the radar. No, I spent my Father's Day 2006 in a makeshift newsroom at the Embassy Suites in Washington, D.C., with a dozen or so people I barely knew.

We were in the nation's capital to cover and publish a show daily around the annual Society for Human Resource Management conference. And guess what: Fast forward to 2016 and here I am again – Father's Day, Washington D.C. and the annual SHRM conference. I sense a pattern developing here.

There's no show daily with SHRM this year (we actually stopped doing it in 2007), there's just three of us here covering it and the makeshift newsroom this time is SHRM's formal press room. But I got a little nostalgic as I randomly passed by the Embassy Suites on my way to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center the day before the conference started.

I hadn't been to Washington since my eighth grade field trip, so 2006 was something of a treat for me. My former boss John Hollon had just brought me on staff, so the whole wide world of HR was new to me, as were my colleagues, who were spread across the country in various Crain Communications bureaus.

Jessica Marquez and Jeremy Smerd were in New York; Ed Frauenheim was in San Francisco; Gina Ruiz was in Los Angeles; Mark Schoeff Jr. was in Washington (he served as host, tour guide and occasional chauffeur). John, along with our other editors Carroll Lachnit, Bob Scally and Toby Hill, were based in Irvine. So this was one of the rare occasions that the entire staff came together.

I discovered quickly just how crazy good these people were as writers, reporters and editors. Filling 16 pages of a show daily for four straight days is a huge, draining undertaking. You can plan for some stories but there are still a lot of column inches to fill. Your spot news chops are put to a serious test.

And boy did they cover it – sessions, speakers, the parties, the race for swag (I think a bag on wheels was the biggest prize) and the box lunch scandal, where people got sick after eating the midday meal at the conference center. Yep, we were all over it.

The biggest news story in my fuzzy recollection was the weather. It was a daily and nightly downpour, and being from Southern California at the time, I never saw storms like that.

But to me, the bigger story was how people who were largely strangers bonded so quickly and produced such a stellar publication. Being together four straight days can do that – or it could go completely sideways and everyone just wants to get the hell away from each other.

From seven of us – or was it eight? – cramming into Schoeff's little compact car to go to dinner as a monsoon drenched us once we arrived at the restaurant to the writers playing quarters as the editors wrapped up the final edition, it was a connection unlike any other I've encountered my entire career.

This year's Father's Day/SHRM mash-up will offer its own distinct memories. As I stepped outside the convention center to take a Father's Day call from my daughter a woman with about 10 tins of popcorn and assorted goodies was standing next to me and also wished me happy Father's Day. So thanks for that, Kimberly Klytta, the corporate sales director for Garrett Popcorn Shops, who, as it turns out, also is from Chicago.

My #SHRM16 conference is off to a good and fortunately much drier start.

Tags: SHRM 2016

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