I must have talked myself out in the last two weeks. I had very little left to say for most of today. Fortunately for me, there was plenty of opportunity for me to just shut up and listen. I actually learned quite a lot today. I had been waiting for "Rotary day out" when we split up into smaller groups and visited businesses around town. Sure, the sign up sheet to go to one of the breweries in town (of which there are several) got the most action. And there was a bistro down on Main Street that attracted a good crowd too. I decided that the financial planner wasn't the biggest draw for me. So option number four was a tour of one of the tech companies in town. I made the right choice in going there. It was fabulous.
Our tour guide was a man who seemed to know the history and goings-on of this company better than he knew his own family. He answered all of our group's questions thoroughly and managed to tell the tales in a way that everyone from our very tech-savvy club president to the non-tech business owners understood without getting lost. I was somewhere in the middle, and I stayed engaged and interested the whole time. It helped that our guide looked like the result of someone taking the Daily Show alums Ed Helms and Stephen Colbert, mashing them together to make one entertaining, intelligent, and very approachable gentleman. Perhaps I have been trained to pay attention to that facial type.
This part of the state has a lot of tech companies, the result of IBM moving here forty or fifty years ago, attracting people with the skill sets and education to grow dozens of offshoots as tech expanded. One of the things several companies have specialized in here is data storage. The company we toured today has a large market share in the storage world, second or third behind Samsung, they said. (I don't remember who the other company was that they were jockeying against for second place.) Even though I know the world has seen tech bubbles grow and burst over time, for some reason it makes me feel better about the economic prospects for our community to be the home for so many forward-looking businesses. I've lived in places that were dependent on industries that were either in decline or were never destined to bring in sufficient or stable revenue streams. It's much more fun to live in a town with the potential for growth and prosperity. (Not that my line of work is dependent on such a thing....oh, wait.) For the first time in weeks, today gave me a chance to think about a brighter future, one not dependent on my emotional or physical health, but one that will zoom along with or without me. It's a train I think I'd like to ride.
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