I suppose you may be wondering why this blog is named Traveling Dog Lady, when I rarely write about travel.
Originally, I had big dreams of traveling the U.S. in an RV with my dogs. I've tried to do that several times, but it never materializes.
But really, the name itself was sort of tongue-in-cheek. You see, I had worked in the group travel industry in an administrative role since the mid-1980s. The administrative role meant that I didn't get to travel much at all. I was "holding down the fort" at headquarters while my colleagues and our clients traveled on tours that we had organized for them over a several-month planning period that spanned sometimes up to a year or even two, depending on the size of the group and the length of the trip.
After running the computers and then taking over the billing department at the company where I worked, I started "bitching" to upper management about how I and my "girls" (as I called them at the time) did all the work, but reaped none of the travel-related benefits. We'd silently watch as our colleagues in the sales department and the travel operations department got two or three trips a year to Europe and elsewhere, while we languished in the office.
True, most of the women who worked in my department were young moms and it wasn't easy for them to pack up and travel without their kids and spouses as the mostly-single sales employees did. However, we spent most summers sitting in an empty office, playing crossword puzzles or computer solitaire just waiting for the phone to ring. We cleaned the office corner-to-corner. We had cookouts in the back parking lot. We watched TV. Meanwhile, everyone else got a trip in the summer.
So, I started to bitch. I showed them life through our eyeglasses. Slowly, little by little, I wore them down, until I scored and was able to get myself and one other person from my department onto a trip. Thereafter, we took turns. We didn't draw straws or anything like that, we just sort of said "Who would like to go this year?" and someone would say they wanted to go, and we made it happen. I and my assistant manager would take turns going along as the lead person for our department.
The years went by and it became the norm for EVERY department in the company to send one or two people on one or two trips a year. This took decades to accomplish, by the way. It didn't happen overnight. We were treated as though we were invisible. It's not that anyone thought we didn't deserve the perk. It was, I think, innocently assumed that we were too busy with our families, and that since we didn't sell the trips and didn't need to see the operation "on the ground" as someone in the travel department needed to, then there was no need to send us on a company trip.
But as upper management always said, "Everyone who works here is a sales person first and foremost, and always." Or words to that effect. My girls were the ones that the customers talked to most frequently, too. They were the ones who put out the fires. Who got screamed at when something went wrong. Who rarely ever got thanked when things went right. They were the ones who got the extra work when a member of upper management (a group that I dubbed The Boyz Club) came up with a new way of doing things, a new idea, a new thing to implement. We were the ones who got saddled with the work. My question to the Boyz became, "Who's gonna DO it!?" whenever they'd come up with one of their elaborate ideas, generally formulated during a three-hour, mostly liquid lunch.
So, that's where the "traveling" part of my name came from. It comes from my career background, rather than an actual travel-with-dogs platform. As much as I wanted to do a travel-with-dogs website (and sometimes still do) it just never transpired.
Instead, what's happened is mostly a pet memorial site because I've had so many pets, and of course the inevitable happens -- they die. I became a certified Pet Loss Grief Specialist. Not a counselor because you have to have a psych degree or an LICSW for that. But I did take the classes from two different schools, and I did get the certificates. Still, I didn't pursue this as a career, mostly because I am retired now.
I started out getting interested in pet loss grief due to my own experiences in losing many pets, sure, but also because for some strange reason (and this still happens -- it just happened the other day) I have always been the first person one of my friends or family calls when they've lost a beloved pet. This has happened ever since I can remember. So, I see it as somewhat of a calling or a purpose. But I don't want to go all-in on it as a career move or anything. It's like the person who turns their hobby into a career. It usually doesn't turn out that great. What once was being done for the sheer naturalness of it, then becomes something with an income attached to it -- an expectation. I didn't want that. So, my phone still rings when someone close to me loses a pet, and I listen, and I try to say something helpful, and I say lots of prayers.
So, this site isn't really about traveling anymore. Nor was it, ever, in fact. A post here and there, but that's about all.
