My name is Marion Vermazen. I am a traveler, hiker, reader, Sun alumnus, computer geek, YouTuber, Spanish and French language student, knitter, weaver and genealogist.
We are on vacation in Estes Park, Colorado. We flew in yesterday. By volunteering to take a later flight we got reimbursement from Southwest. Given that the tickets were free Rapid Rewards tickets that is very cool.
We are staying in a wonderful room at the Caste Mountain Lodge. It is 45 degrees here, windy and sunny. We are off to do some hiking. More later.
I started at Intuit just over a year ago. I came into my new job as the Customer Care manager for PortfolioMinder having been strongly influenced by my experience with blogging at Sun Microsystems. I really believed in the power of blogs and the Internet to break down the walls between big corporations and their customers and to allow a company like Intuit with a new product like PortfolioMinder to build a strong constructive relationship with customers. I love the image of the bazaar where the vendors know their customers and the business relationship is based on trust.
As a result my goal as the customer care manager of PortfolioMinder was to build strong 1 on1 relationships with our customers and to have a productive conversation with them. I strove to get to know our customers and I talked about PortfolioMinder and my role on the team in my blog. Unfortunately there is a down side of personally identifying yourself with your company and building relationships with your customers. Although I always try to speak for Intuit and act as though this was my company and my product it is not my company and I don’t control what happens to PortfolioMinder. PortfolioMinder belongs to Intuit and Intuit’s shareholders. So when a decision is made like was announced today then it hurts that I personally vouched for our commitment to the product. I now understand much better why people hesitate to blog about what they do at work. I understand why support people might choose to remain anonymous. I understand why employees are hesitant to truly engage with a company and care too much.
I have written a lot of blog entries in my head that have helped me deal with my anger and sorrow about the death of PortfolioMinder but I think that as an employee of Intuit I am better off following the principal that if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything.
On a personal note, I am looking for a job and deciding what I am going to do next. The about link on the right has my resume. If the right opportunity presents itself I will stay with Intuit. If not I am confident that things will work out. I have enormously enjoyed building the PortfolioMinder customer care team. The PortfolioMinder sales and support agents are an amazing group of financial planning professionals with whom it has been an honor to work. Thank you Dave, Don, Faruk, Fred, Gail, Keith, Sandy, Stan and Todd.
My daughter Shannon had her baby, my first grandchild on August 30 at 7:46 pm. Aidan William Henry Brown weighed 8 pounds 14 ounces and measured 21.5 inches. Shannon and Aidan are doing well. Not that I am biased, but he is about the cutest most wonderful baby in the world!!
Ronni Bennett in her Time Goes By Blog had a great post today titled The Art of Blogging . It resonated with me. One part I especially liked was about why she enjoys blogging:-
"I write to figure out what I think about things and it is astonishing how many times I start a blog post and wind up in an entirely different place at the end than I thought I intended. Writing is a joy for me because it organizes my thoughts, forces me toward clarity and often leads to discovering what I didn’t know before."
I find that a lot of times when I speak I am frustratingly inarticulate but when I write or at least when I focus on what I am writing I can work out my thoughts and what I mean and then communicate it. I love the idea of doing research and then reporting it here.
I don’t know if I will ever have a focused blog like Time Goes By but I aspire to post daily and to have as interesting a blog as Ronni does.
Any day now I will become a grandmother for the first time. My youngest daughter is expecting a baby boy literally any day now. Since I received the news last spring I have gone through an enormous range of emotions. Shannon will be a single mother. I know she will be a wonderful mother. Motherhood for me was more wonderful than I could ever have imagined and also more difficult than I could ever have imagined. I am worried for her. I am excited for her. I have confidence in her. And of course I am excited for me. My new grandson’s name will be Aiden and I can’t wait to meet him.
Marion's Blog 