Saturday, March 23, 2013

Has It Really Been 15 Years ?!

Today I celebrated my 15 year anniversary working at Progressive Insurance.  Of course I was on a family road trip driving cross country to Alabama, but in spirit I did think a little about my work journey over the past decade and a half.

It sure has flown by very, very quickly.

Me @ Progressive Field for
MLB Opening Day in 2012
(All expenses paid trip!)
*I was on the field for the
Opening Ceremonies
In March of 1998, when I first started work here, things were quite a bit different.  A few examples will highlight this pretty quickly:
- The Internet was pretty much brand-new still.  The dot-com craze had not yet begun, yet we had a Progressive.com website that already began to win awards.
- Progressive did not write auto insurance in all 50 states (NJ and MA were to litigious, and we had limited growth in FL and CA).
- Cell phones were just barely beginning to eliminate "pagers" as the popular hand-held device (PDAs were on the way ... what's a Smart Phone?)
- Popular advertising icons did not include Flo.  They were instead beer ads with frogs, horses, and silly frat-house humor.  In fact, you almost never saw an insurance commercial on TV.

My picture of most of my
Progessive gear (which
earned me the trip to
Opening Day 2012)

I actually only started with Progressive because I needed a more stable and steady income, since I was engaged to be married in May.  I only started in "Customer Service" because my other option was "AutoPro" and I thought that meant working on cars or something (it actually was the name of our sales department back then).  I could go on and on with stories, but they would have little meaning for anyone other than myself.  Suffice it to say, I am VERY happy that I applied and was hired all those years ago.  Thanks for 15 great years Progressive!  Here's to 15+ more!


Song Of The Day:
There are many different songs about time and how things change that could easily apply for this post ... but I've landed on "Time" by Hootie and the Blowfish for two reasons:
          1. I really dig the song.
          2. It's about time we have some Hootie in this blog!  :)

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