Our Product of the Year Awards are always a great adventure for us. Every New Year the Editors at EN-Genius snuggle down with all the reviews that they have written in the past year and select the best products from among that already heady group. The criterion that is most important in the selection of a winning product is that it must be capable of making money.
We don’t ask vendors to write essays to tell us how important their products are; we don’t ask them to buy tables at a grand dinner; we just plain stick our necks out – as we do every week with our reviews.
For the past couple of years the Awards have been made of marble. (As one canny soul pointed out, EN-Genius has stopped cutting down trees – now they’re knocking down mountains!) They are very heavy… Each Award is individually engraved and it takes a while for them to be delivered. And then, brave souls that we are, we try to present as many of the Awards that we can in person.
That happened in the last couple of weeks and our travels took me to San José, Phoenix, Tucson, Boston and Los Angeles – with some other stops in between.
Our greetings were universal, our greeters were enthusiastic. Nobody stood up and said, “We didn’t deserve this,” or “We’ll only sell half-a-dozen.” At one stop, for example, we were greeted by a cake decorated with the EN-Genius Product of the Year logo! Design engineers were at most Awards; VPs and CEOs also showed up for nearly all; photographers were on hand.
It is a great feeling to be so wanted. But at what cost?
I traveled on seven airline flights over twelve days; drove a total of about six hundred miles; endured eighty-five degree weather in Phoenix, monsoon-like rains in St. Louis and snow in New Hampshire. And none of those seven flights was smooth. On two of them, both over two hours in the air, the seatbelt sign
never went out and there was no service at all. But I feel good about the fact that I only missed one flight (I can blame a single security line at Manchester, New Hampshire) and I didn’t get stuck anywhere in the midst of the crazy weather.
But, of course, I did come down sick. With all that stale air recycled again and again in airplanes, how could it have played out otherwise? Or it might have been caught from the crazy woman who grabbed my shoulder across the aisle on one flight yelling that we were all going to die – which set her family off as well! Or perhaps from the East Coast, where others were already sick.
At least, at every stop, my bag got lighter and lighter as yet another piece of marble was placed safely into the hands of winners. And my last stop was particularly pleasant as a kind VP picked me up at my hotel and chauffeured me to the airport afterwards. Jaguars may have become a bit like elegant Fords in recent years, but they are still good to ride in. With the
sale of Jaguar and Land-Rover to India’s Tata Motors will we start seeing temple architecture influences in the cabins, or maybe stretched Jaguars for Bollywood?
Now, that would make me sick as well.
