100 and Done! (Countries that is...)

Image
We are back! This last trip brought the total countries visited to 100! It is a crazy milestone. It is difficult, time-consuming and can be (IS) expensive. After I got back from Antarctica in 2007, I started thinking about it. After 2010 I was thinking about it more (as I moved from NY to Georgia) and in 2014 it had become a real goal. Between Angie and I we have been to 109 Countries. We are tied at 100 countries each. We have 9 countries different in our lists. For example, I have been to San Marino. She has not. She has been to Israel. I have not, yet. There has been some fun competition in this area. That's why we had to establish rules. 1.) Must be listed (as a country) with the US State Department 2.) Being in an airport doesn't count. You have to get through immigration somehow and not in a DMZ or a no-mans-land 3.) A passport stamp is not required. I have been to Canada, Paraguay, and Uruguay without getting my passport stamped. There are friendly borders in many places...

We received more facts about the Awards that Donna Cuyle, Dave Schriber, Susan Spear, Kim Bush and Joan Rifanburg won in the Society for Technical Communications Annual competition.

In addition to the Award of Excellence we were honored to receive a Distinguished Award from the Rochester chapter at the 43rd annual conference.

This is the first time we have been successful in obtaining that level of award. This is a difficult achievement to obtain and we have been working on this level of award by reviewing the comments (mostly from non-winning entrants) from judges over the past few years and identifying areas where we could be effective in making improvements.

Much to our delight, when we went to accept the awards in Rochester we learned that not only did we win one of the five distinguished awards, we also won “Overall Best of Show,” out of 38 submitted publications. Our publication was judged higher than publications from Eastman Kodak, Xerox and other companies.

If that wasn’t enough, we also learned that we also won a Distinguished Award at the next level of competition, which is the International Technical Publications Competition. Only distinguished award winners from regions can advance and be judged at the international level. There were a total of two recipients of Distinguished Awards from our region. There were a total of 14 Distinguished Awards announced for the international competition out of 86 entrants who made it to that level. Entries were from companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark, Apple, IBM, and other high profile companies.

There were 33 judges from around the US and Germany.

It feels good.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

100 and Done! (Countries that is...)