field trip day

I took a group of clients to the Rose Quarter Arena on a community business tour. We call it a “CBT” but it’s really a field trip which is great. Field trip days were always my favorite part of school and I figured most of our clients look at work the way I looked at school. It’s a place where you’re supposed to get something accomplished and supposed to be learning things but the socialization is the main reason for going.

When we choose place to go, I like to make sure we go somewhere nice and fun. I’m supposed to gear it towards their vocational goals but a lot of my clients don’t actually have vocational goals, other than to show up to work at the store and not get in trouble. Some of them don’t have any long term goals or ambition. It’s usually hard for me to get a good answer out of them when I tell them to think of a place they’d like to work and to tell me so we can go there. Most of the time, they repeat whatever I suggest. “We could go to someplace like a store, such as Bi-Mart…” “I want to go to Bi-Mart!” “Or a pet store…” “Let’s go to a pet store!” “Or maybe the fire station.” “Oh! The fire station!” They’re pretty open to any suggestion so I try to make suggestions based upon their interests. And a lot of them like sports.

One of my guys in particular loves wrestling and has a lot of Trailblazer pride. He also doesn’t have a lot of people in his life that socialize with him and he doesn’t go on group outing outside of work so I decided to make his annual tour better than a run to Bi-Mart. It was a lot of fun too. I took twelve clients and three other supervisors and they showed up the ground level and the locker rooms, the gym and the med room. It was something new anyway and for most of the clients it was probably their favorite part of work for the year.