Oh, didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t I mention? The majority of our sales force consists of people of the Amish and Mennonite faiths. So the whole shindig is a sea of bonnets, suspenders, bowl cuts, and beards. Different communities, of course, so the attire varies\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand there comes a point in the week when you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re starting to get so tired that you find yourself trying to decide which attire you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d rather wear. For example, I find myself partial to these bonnets:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n . . . over these:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n . . . and definitely over this look:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n On the other hand, I have discovered that the latter headwear is often worn by women who have a little more latitude in their sartorial options; for example, this year, one such woman rocked a (long, loose-cut) green glitter dress, a cute cardigan, low heels, and light makeup to the big-deal formal banquet that wraps up the whole event. On the other hand, the women who get what in my opinion is the best headwear usually have the least-flattering dresses and shoes. So I wonder: can one mix and match? Because I would want to mix and match. Like maybe a long jean skirt (like some of the women wear) with a more \u00e2\u20ac\u0153old school\u00e2\u20ac\u009d bonnet . . .\u00c2\u00a0 SEE what I mean? You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not careful, you can lose yourself in these kinds of thoughts.<\/p>\n And in the babies. Ohhhh, the babies with their little bonnets and rounded collars and little pink cheeks! So stinkin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 cute. But I digress.<\/p>\n Point is, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a long, hard, crazy week, and every year, there is (emphasis on the capital S) Something.<\/p>\n The first year I went, I grabbed an Amish man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s b\u00e2\u20ac\u2122doobies2<\/sup>.<\/p>\n The second year I went, I captured a butt-load of conference attendee testimonials on video (a job I hated with the fire of a thousand fart-lighting Satans; contrary to what most people believe about me, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m an introvert, dammit, and the worst thing you can do to someone like me (besides POOFing me into a set of conjoined octuplets) is force me to spend an entire week chasing down people who would rather eat glass than talk on camera (WHICH I COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND) and trying to coax them into recording a video about why they love our company) . . .<\/p>\n . . . and over half of them wound up being unusable for one reason or another.<\/p>\n This year . . . nothing happened. Well, OK\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthat\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not to say that everything went perfectly; the first general session of the conference was a skin-of-our-teeth adventure in dancing disaster backstage3<\/sup> (although nobody on the flip side of the stage seemed any the wiser), and the Friday night entertainment was a ventriloquist who apparently didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t catch on to the caliber of his audience, and started telling some, er . . questionable jokes (meanwhile, there I was backstage, sitting right next to Howdy-Dirty\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wife, and hoping like hell that I had suddenly and miraculously developed a convincing poker face, or that she had suddenly and miraculously been stricken blind and deaf, because I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m pretty sure I gasped and clutched my pearls a couple of times).<\/p>\n And then there was the culminating event\u00e2\u20ac\u201da fancy-schmancy awards banquet that lasts four hours and parades more coin across the stage than Flava Flav rockin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 his priciest grill. Usually, corporate employees have a designated table at the event (some of us, anyway; others elect to ditch the hose and heels in favor of jeans and sweats and spend the evening packing everything up for the move back home); this year, however, because of a dramatic increase in conference attendance, the employee table was forfeited at the last minute, and we were told we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have to just mingle amongst the conference guests and find seats where we could.<\/p>\n What resulted from this occurrence will forever go down in my personal history as One of Those Moments When Dammit, I Should Have Followed My Instincts. Oh, it won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be alone in that particular kitty, that moment. Pretty much every damn day I have such a moment. But the moment that I (after learning that employees would have to share tables with conference guests) eschewed my original plan to just eat my dinner backstage with the production guys in favor of banding together with a handful of my coworkers and trying to find seats together amongst the conference attendees is not one I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m likely to forget, because Y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ALL. We wound up at a table with a man who had such shocking body odor it was damn near visible. As we all sat there blinking in the funk fog and trying to make polite conversation with our table mates for the evening (without opening our mouths too wide for fear we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d get a taste of that business), the coworker next to me fought valiantly to hold down her lunch. Eventually, I found saving grace in the fact that I was due backstage just as dessert was being served\u00e2\u20ac\u201dI grabbed my plate of exotic chocolate debauchery and hightailed it away from the Stanky Stud as fast as my four-inch heels could carry me.<\/p>\n And, finally, there was my roommate, who spent the week slowly dying in her hotel bed. On the drive to the convention, she and I were both complaining of sore throats. Because she had not been sick at all during the previous two years (for which she credits a daily\u00c2\u00a0regimen of apple cider vinegar shots), she tried in vain to convince herself that she was not *really* sick; instead, she explained, her obsessive worry about getting sick had caused her psyche to create symptoms of illness. But sick? No. Not her.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, InstaPrincess-cum-Insta-Drama-Queen woke up that same morning with a sore throat, and immediately commenced maudlin predictions of my imminent gloom, despair, and agony. I whined to anyone who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d listen that I was going down, and that nothing, but NOTHING (save the resurrection of Tupac) could prevent my impending death.<\/p>\n By two days later, however, I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t feeling sick at all, and my roommate spent every day dizzy with chills and exhaustion, every night hacking up a lung (which I guess means she has six of them), and every moment looking like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in one of those Faces of Meth billboard ad campaigns. It was painful to watch, so I can only imagine how much it sucked to live through.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.instaprincess.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/bonnet-1.jpg\" "\\"bonnet")
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