Back in the Saddle, Baby!

A kitten walked into a deli and spotted an Extreme Arts consultant nursing an egg cream. Naturally, he was thrilled, and he hustled up to a waiter, crawled up his leg, and leapt onto the consultant’s table.

“Hey! What have you been up to? Is that pastrami?”

“Er, hi, little guy. Do I know you?”

“I read your blog. I’m Tangerine Sparkle Kitten on the forums.”

“Oh, wow, I thought you were made up by our web guy to make us feel like people are paying any attention.”

“No way! Lots of people are paying attention.”

“Wow, I’ll have to tell him to get back in the saddle.”

The kitten purred and lapped at the consultant’s egg cream. “Yeah,” he said, cleaning his whiskers, “I gotta say, it’s hard to know what you guys are up to if you don’t post.”

“Funny, that. Well, one of the things we’ve been doing a lot of is podcasting.”

“What are you talking about? That feed’s gone dead too.”

“We’ve been producing audio for internal communications in these troubled times. Telling company stories, sometimes talking about restructuring and layoffs, sometimes focusing on a company’s key metrics for winning.”

“So I don’t get to hear those?”

“Nope, but we also have some in the can for the feed. We’ll get some up posthaste.”

“Would you rub my belly?”

“Of course. And we’ve been preparing the site to handle curriculum products.”

“Like that poster?”

“Sort of. These products might include slides for classroom sessions, a facilitator’s guide, and participant handouts. But all of that would be packaged digitally, for download after purchase. It lets us be a little more agile in our delivery of key concepts for clients and training organizations.”

“That sounds really boring,” the kitten said, distractedly. “Hey, why’d you stop?”

The consultant regained control of his limbs, and continued to stroke the cat. “It’s not boring at all! The first one is going to deal with leading in rough economic times. It’s called ‘The Urgency to Innovate’ and it’s going to knock the socks off of people.”

“Yeah, cats don’t innovate. We’re perfect. But I haven’t seen anything like that on the site.”

The consultant sighed. “We ran into a spot of trouble with our old store. It was fine for shirts, but downloads turned out to be a real pain.”

“Ah, so new store, then?”

“Yup. It’s finally working the way we want it to, but we’re still doing some testing. Then we’ll be able to get to final on the curriculum itself.”

“Hmm,” murmured the kitten. “Well, I’m glad to hear it. I guess I’ll see you on the internet.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Thanks for stopping by.”

It wasn’t until the kitten’s tail had disappeared around the door that the consultant noticed that all of the lunch meat had disappeared from his sandwich.

“Perfect, indeed,” he muttered, flagging down the waiter.